How we report

Every story begins with primary material: the text of a bill, a recorded floor vote, a committee hearing, an agency filing, a court docket, or an official press release. Where a story requires on-the-ground reporting we do not conduct ourselves, we work from established wire coverage — principally the Associated Press, Reuters, and C-SPAN — and we link back to the original reporting so readers can check it.

We do not publish stories built on a single thin source. Before a draft is written, the newsroom looks for independent corroborating coverage of the same events. Stories that cannot be corroborated are held rather than published.

Drafts are produced with AI assistance and reviewed against the source record before publication. The software is used to summarize source documents into plain English and to standardize structure — it is not used to generate facts. Every factual claim in a published story has to trace back to a source document or wire report.

After a draft exists, it goes through an automated verification pass that compares each claim against the underlying sources. Claims that are not supported are corrected or removed. Stories that still fail verification after correction are placed in a hold queue for human review and do not appear on the site until an editor clears them.

• No invented figures. If a count, dollar amount, or statistic is not in the record, the story says so or omits it. Numbers are never estimated to fill a gap.
• No characterizations that the source does not support. Descriptive labels applied to people, parties, countries, or legislation are removed unless the underlying record uses them.
• Quotation marks mean verbatim. Text inside quote marks matches the source exactly; everything else is our own plain-English summary.
• Dates are resolved. Relative references in source material (“yesterday,” “last week”) are converted to calendar dates anchored to the source’s publication date.
• No clickbait. Headlines state what happened. We do not withhold the substance of a story to earn a click.

The Plain Record does not endorse candidates, parties, or legislation, and does not publish opinion columns or editorials. Coverage decisions are made on the basis of what a measure would do and how many people it affects, not on which party advanced it. Where a dispute of fact exists, we describe the dispute and attribute each position rather than resolving it for the reader.

When we get something wrong, we fix it and say so. Substantive corrections are noted on the story itself with the date of the change and a description of what was corrected. Typographical fixes that do not change meaning are made silently.

If you believe a story contains an error, please contact us with the headline and the specific claim in question. We review every report and respond to those that identify a factual problem.

The Plain Record is independently owned and is not affiliated with any political party, campaign, advocacy organization, or government body. The site is supported by reader memberships, voluntary contributions, and advertising. Advertisers have no role in what we cover or how we cover it, and no advertiser reviews stories before publication.