croton.news is an AI-assisted newsroom with one person accountable for it. AI systems
draft copy from the public record; a human decides what runs, answers for it, and
corrects it. This page says who that is, what each pipeline produces, and what is
checked before anything reaches you.
Who is responsible
MB
Matthew Broudy
Publisher & Responsible Editor · Croton-on-Hudson resident
Sets the editorial standards, reviews published work, owns every correction, and is the byline on every article. Read more →
What the gate checks
Our automated meeting coverage is not published on trust. Before an article can
reach the site it is re-checked, mechanically, against the documents it came from.
Any single failure blocks publication — the draft is rejected and rewritten, not
published with a warning:
- Quotations must be verbatim. Any quoted passage of six or more words must appear word for word in the meeting transcript.
- Attribution must match the speaker. The person credited with a quote must be the transcript's speaker at that moment in the recording.
- Names need provenance. A person may only be named if the name appears in the transcript, the minutes, the agenda or the meeting documents. A name that exists only as an automated speaker label is treated as an assertion, not evidence, and is blocked or marked unverified.
- Dollar figures need a source. Every dollar amount must appear in a source document, within a 1% rounding tolerance.
- Paraphrase needs receipts. Sentences attributing a position to someone must map to the specific statements that support it, each verified against the transcript.
Data articles are checked by a separate gate, because their claims are computed
figures rather than quotes: every figure must be declared with the query that produced
it, every rank and superlative is re-computed against the source data, and a comparison
that silently omits someone is refused.
Two honest limits. Automated checking is not the same as a human reading
every line — the disclosure box on each article says which it has had. And the gate
can only check an article against its sources; it cannot tell us what the record leaves
out. That judgement is human.
The pipelines
Every article carries a box naming which of these produced it. The editorial
instructions and internal design of the pipelines are our own work and are not
published; what they are checked against, above, is.
Packet preview
7 articles
Written before the meeting by our AI preview pipeline, from the agenda packet the village published in advance. It describes what is scheduled for discussion — not what happened.
Reads the published agenda and its attached documents, and summarises what the board is being asked to decide. Superseded by full coverage once the meeting is recorded.
History feature
1 article
Drafted by our AI history pipeline from digitised primary sources, with every quotation and factual claim checked against the documents cited in its footnotes.
Works from scanned newspapers, deeds, oral histories and other archival documents rather than meeting recordings. Each claim carries a footnote to the document it came from.
Minutes report
14 articles
Drafted by our AI minutes pipeline from the official adopted minutes — the board's own account of the meeting — with every fact traceable to that record.
Used for meetings we could not record. The minutes are the sole source; agenda and packet material is background only and is never presented as something that happened.
Data report
Built from public datasets. Every figure is declared with the query that produced it, and an automated gate re-computes each one against the source data before publication.
Claims in a data report are computed figures, ranks and comparisons rather than quotes, so a separate validator checks them: undeclared figures, stale data vintages, wrong ranks and comparisons with silent exclusions all block publication.
Feature
5 articles
A longer piece drawing on the whole public record — transcripts, adopted minutes and filed documents — drafted with AI assistance, then read and approved by the editor before publication.
Features and editorials are directed and reviewed by the editor rather than produced automatically. Analysis and opinion are labelled as such; the reporting they rest on is sourced throughout.
Meeting coverage
38 articles
Drafted by our AI meeting-coverage pipeline from the official recording and transcript, then checked against the source record by an automated verification gate before publication.
The meeting is transcribed with speaker identification, speaker labels are corroborated against the minutes and agenda, an agent drafts the article, a second agent edits it, and a deterministic gate blocks publication unless every quotation is verbatim, every attribution matches the transcript speaker, and every name and dollar figure appears in a source document.
Early coverage
80 articles
An early article, drafted by AI before our automated verification gate existed. It has not been machine-checked against the meeting record and may contain errors.
Published before July 2026. We keep these online rather than quietly deleting them, flagged for what they are; corrections are welcome and are recorded in the public corrections log.
Telling us we got it wrong
Corrections are welcome from anyone, do not require a reason, and are logged
publicly in our corrections
log. If you were written about and want to respond, we will publish your response
— contact us. Our full standards
are in the editorial policy.