Editorial policy

We publish about 500 short briefs a day. A policy that only described the hand-written pieces would be describing a rounding error, so this one starts with the automated path.

How a summary is made

1. We read the public feeds of named Belgian outlets continuously. The list is on the home page and in the app.
2. Stories covered by several outlets are grouped so the same event appears once, with the other outlets credited alongside.
3. A language model drafts a 60-word summary from the outlet's own headline and feed snippet. It is not given the full article and it is not asked to add anything the snippet does not contain.
4. The summary is translated into the other two national languages.
5. Every brief carries the outlet's name and a link to their reporting. The headline shown is theirs.

We never republish article text. A summary is our own sentence about someone else's reporting, and the link is how you read the reporting. Story pages on this site are deliberately kept out of Google's index so the outlet that did the work keeps the search traffic.

Where AI is used, plainly

• Used: drafting the 60-word summaries, translating them, writing the one-paragraph introduction to the daily recap, and scoring how significant a story looks so the app knows what to alert on.
• Used, with a person deciding: illustrations, when no rights-cleared photograph exists. Generated images live in our own library and never depict real people or real events photorealistically.
• Not used: our own reporting and explainers. Those are written by a person, carry that person's name, and are collected at Our reporting.
• Never used: inventing a quote, a number, a source or an event. If a fact is not in the material we were given, it does not appear.

Pictures

A photograph is either the outlet's own thumbnail shown beside their credited story, an image from a library we hold rights to, or one we generated. We do not lift publisher photographs onto our own pages or into our social posts.

Corrections

Write to anmldubey@gmail.com. We aim to answer within one working day.

• A wrong summary is corrected in place, in all three languages, and the correction is noted on the story.
• A brief that should not exist — a story an outlet has retracted, a legal request, a subject who should not be named — is removed rather than argued about.
• If an outlet does not want to be summarised at all, we stop reading them. That has happened and it was honoured.

Independence

No sponsored posts, no paid placement, no advertiser influence over what is published or where it appears. Advertising in the app is bought programmatically and nobody buying it knows what it will sit next to. The project is self-funded and takes no grants.

Standing answer pages

Pages like strikes and disruptions mix two things and label which is which: events we have curated from official announcements, and reports sent in by readers, which are not individually verified. Each page shows when it was last updated. We update the page rather than publishing a new article every time, so the answer you find is the current one.