Internal editorial checklist

Status

This is an internal policy, not reader-facing. It is also a first draft and will be reviewed by a California media-law attorney before launch.

Pre-publish checklist

Every Pier and Point story — AI-assisted or fully human-written — must clear every box on this list before the publish action runs.

Editorial

• Headline accurate; not clickbait, not misleading.
• Lede states the news and is true on its face.
• Every factual claim attributed to a primary source or named human source in the story or in the source list.
• No quote in the story was generated by AI. Every quote is verifiably from a real person, public meeting, or document.
• Right-of-reply attempt logged for every named private individual. If no response, the attempt is documented in the editorial record and noted in the story where appropriate.
• Arrestee / charged / convicted distinction applied. (Naming policy.)
• No booking photo for a nonviolent arrest unless the story documents a specific articulable public-interest justification.
• No identifying information for a juvenile charged with a crime, except in narrow public-interest categories.

AI-assisted specifically

• Tool name and model version recorded in the AI prompt log.
• Disclosure banner specifies the tool and the reviewer (not boilerplate).
• Fact-check step ran and recorded confidence scores. No claim below 60 was published without independent verification.
• Confidential source material did not pass through any direct PRC-jurisdiction model API.

Images

• Hero image has a provenance value.
• If provenance is ai_illustration, caption explicitly discloses the AI source.
• No photorealistic AI-generated image of a real Ventura event, person, or place.

Legal

• No defamatory factual statement about a private individual without a primary-source basis.
• Attribution caps respected for any quoted material from another outlet (~50 words).
• No paywalled-source scraping in the editorial record.

Sign-off

• Human reviewer named in disclosure.
• Editor’s sign-off recorded with timestamp.

What this checklist is for

This checklist is the operational definition of "human in the loop." It is also the editorial record we would attach to a CCP §425.16 anti-SLAPP motion to strike if a meritless defamation claim were filed against us. See our anti-SLAPP readiness page.

When this checklist fails

If a story publishes and a checklist item turns out to have been missed, we treat it as a corrections issue. See corrections.