Editorial Standards
These are the standards every piece of content on MLAs.News is held to. They are published so readers can hold us to them. If you believe something we’ve published falls short, tell us — our corrections policy explains how.
Political neutrality
We apply the same evidential and framing standards to every party, every MLA and every designation. In practice this means:
- We do not endorse parties, candidates, or constitutional positions.
- Claims about any politician are held to the same sourcing standard regardless of party.
- Structured data — profiles, rosters, voting records, bill trackers — uses identical fields and identical visual treatment for every party.
- Loaded or contested terminology is avoided or attributed; where communities use different terms for the same thing, we use neutral or both forms.
- Coverage decisions are driven by institutional significance, not by which party an item concerns.
Accuracy and sourcing
- Primary sources first. Facts about Assembly business are sourced to the official record: Hansard, the Assembly’s open-data services, official bill pages, committee reports and departmental publications. Our methodology page lists these sources in full.
- Show your working. Guides and articles cite their sources; data pages link to the official page for each entity.
- Distinguish fact from analysis. Where we go beyond the record — interpreting, contextualising, analysing — that is written and presented so it cannot be mistaken for a factual claim.
- Uncertainty is stated. If a fact cannot be verified against a primary source, we either say so explicitly or leave it out.
Fairness and right of reply
Where coverage makes a significant critical claim about an identifiable person or organisation that goes beyond the public record, we seek their response before publication and reflect it fairly. Responses received after publication are added to the piece.
Use of automation and AI
MLAs.News uses automation to keep its structured data in sync with the Assembly’s official data services, and AI tools assist in drafting and maintaining content. Two rules govern this:
- Data is never invented. Automated updates only ever reflect what the official sources say; discrepancies are flagged for human review, not guessed at.
- A human is responsible for everything published. AI-assisted drafts are reviewed and approved by the publisher before going live, and the standards on this page apply to them in full.
Corrections
When we get something materially wrong, we correct the page, mark the correction, and record it in our public corrections log. We do not silently rewrite errors away.