About The Rundown

The Rundown is an English-language news site covering world affairs, United States politics, business, technology, science, energy and culture. It is the English edition of vestibg.com and is published by the same team.

Where the news comes from

We do not have reporters in the field, and we do not pretend to. Every news story on this site begins as reporting by someone else — the BBC, Politico, CNBC, The Guardian, NPR, Reuters-fed wires, Al Jazeera, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, Science Daily, Variety and some forty other outlets whose feeds we follow.

What we do is read that reporting and write it again in our own words, so that the facts reach an audience that would otherwise miss them. We name the outlet that did the reporting inside the article, where the reporting is theirs. If you want the original, the outlet is named and you should go and read it — their journalists did the work.

How the site is produced

The Rundown is produced with a substantial amount of automation, and we would rather say so plainly than let you discover it.

Stories arrive from the feeds we follow. A language model rewrites each one under strict instructions: use only the facts present in the source, keep every hedge exactly as strong as the source made it, never turn a reported claim into a stated fact, and keep direct quotations word for word. A second pass then checks the rewritten text against the original and blocks anything that states a fact the source does not contain, or states it more confidently than the source did. Articles that fail that check are not published.

The daily analysis column works differently. It reads several outlets on the same story and sets out what happened, what each outlet emphasised, where they agree and where they do not, and what we think it means. The interpretation is ours. The facts are still only those contained in the reports we read.

Automation is not an excuse. Everything published here is published under our name and we are answerable for it.

What we are not

We are not a wire service and we are not an investigative outlet. We break no stories. If you need the authoritative account of an event, read the outlet that reported it first — we will have told you who that was.

We also do not write to a political line. Our United States politics coverage draws on outlets from across the spectrum, from Mother Jones to the New York Post, because a section built on one side of the argument is a newsletter, not a news section.

Mistakes

We will make them. When we do, write to [email protected] and tell us what is wrong and, if you can, where the correct version is. We correct the article and say at the foot of it what was changed and when. We do not quietly edit a story and pretend it always read that way.

If an article misrepresents reporting that belongs to you, tell us and we will fix it or take it down.

Advertising

The site carries advertising, which is what pays for it. Advertisers have no say in what we cover or how. Anything paid for is labelled as advertising. See Advertise for the detail.

Contact

Editorial, corrections, rights and advertising: [email protected]