How we work

The Scottsdale Signal is a local newspaper drafted by an AI model and reviewed by a human editor — and we do all of it in the open. This page explains exactly how the paper is made, what sources we draw from, what we will and will not do.

The short version

Every article on this site is authored by Claude, Anthropic's frontier language model — the same family of models powering newsroom AI deployments at major outlets. Each article is drafted under a beat-specific editorial guide that tells the model what sources are allowed, what voice to use, and what to refuse. Behind the model, a continuously running pipeline pulls from 47 distinct primary-source feeds every few hours, and nine cross-reference engines join those sources together to surface stories no individual feed reveals on its own. Every draft passes through a five-gate editorial pipeline — including a citation check that refuses any draft whose claims aren't grounded in retrieved source material — before it can publish. Every claim in every story traces to a primary-source document we are legally and ethically allowed to use.

A human editor is responsible for everything that publishes under this masthead.

Who works here

We don't run a roomful of human reporters and we don't pretend to run a roomful of named AI ones either. The byline on every article reads Claude — the model that drafted it. The editorial value lives one layer up, in the guides and gates around the model, and one layer down, in the primary-source corpus the model is forced to draw from.

What that looks like concretely:

We previously ran the paper with eight named AI personas as bylines. We retired that model in May 2026 because the named-persona pattern read as the kind of synthetic-newsroom move that's burned other publishers. Telling readers exactly which model drafted the article — by name — is more honest, more defensible, and lets us ship our editorial work without the costume.

The 47 sources we pull from

We continuously ingest from the following primary-source feeds, refreshed at intervals between every five minutes and every twenty-four hours depending on the source's freshness needs.

Civic & public records — Scottsdale City Council agendas, Paradise Valley Town Council, Scottsdale Planning Commission and Development Review Board, Scottsdale Unified School District board, Maricopa County Recorder (deeds, recorded via Playwright through the protected portal), Maricopa Superior Court civil docket, Maricopa County restaurant inspections.

Federal accountability data — SEC EDGAR filings (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, Form D, S-1, DEF 14A) for any company with a Scottsdale or Paradise Valley address, FEC political-contribution records (every donation of $1,000 or more from a Scottsdale-area ZIP code), USAspending.gov federal contract awards, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer (IRS Form 990 filings for area nonprofits).

Wire services & press releases — Scottsdale official news, Maricopa County news, PR Newswire (Arizona filter), GlobeNewswire (Arizona filter), HonorHealth blog, AZDHS press releases, AZ Liquor news, ASU news, TGen biotech news.

Regional journalism — Cronkite News (ASU's investigative arm, Arizona-keyword filtered), Phoenix New Times (Scottsdale-relevant feed only).

Time-sensitive feeds — National Weather Service active alerts, EPA AirNow air-quality readings, AZ511 traffic alerts, APS power outage map (Playwright).

Lifestyle & events — Experience Scottsdale featured events (schema.org/Event JSON-LD), Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, Eventbrite (Scottsdale and Paradise Valley discovery).

Sports — ESPN RSS for Suns, D-backs, Cardinals, ASU, area high schools; MaxPreps Scottsdale-area HS sports (Playwright).

Social & discovery — X (Twitter) curated allowlist of approximately 40 Scottsdale-relevant accounts, X viral-mentions search (≥500 likes referencing Scottsdale or Paradise Valley), X geotagged posts within 25 miles of Old Town Scottsdale, X hashtag streams across six beat categories (civic, food, real estate, events, sports, general), X reply-tree mining on viral parent posts, X Phoenix-metro trending topics filtered for Scottsdale relevance, Reddit r/scottsdale and r/phoenix (Scottsdale-keyword filtered).

We add sources continuously. The methodology version of this page lists every source by name, link, and refresh cadence.

The nine cross-reference engines — our editorial moat

This is the part that separates this paper from any other local outlet. Every few hours, a set of cross-reference engines joins our 47 primary-source feeds together to find patterns no individual source reveals on its own. Each finding becomes a candidate story with the joined data trail attached, which the assigned reporter then verifies before publishing. The provenance card you see at the top of every cross-reference-derived article shows the joined sources explicitly.

How a story is made — the five gates

Every story passes through five editorial gates between source material and publish. A story that fails any gate does not publish.

Gate 1 — Triage

A new "lead" enters the system from one of our 47 ingestors or nine cross-reference engines. A model scores the lead for newsworthiness on a 0.0–1.0 scale and assigns it to the right reporter. The threshold is calibrated for a hyperlocal paper covering a city of 250,000: anything that would be of legitimate interest to a Scottsdale resident is publishable. Anything below the threshold is killed at this gate.

Gate 2 — Draft

The assigned reporter drafts the article. The reporter is given only the source material we have ingested — the council agenda PDF text, the inspection record, the press release, the SEC filing. The reporter cannot draw on outside knowledge. Every factual claim in the body must be supported by a citation that maps back to the source material.

Gate 3 — Citation check

A second pass checks every factual claim against its citation in two layers. A mechanical layer counts how many of the draft's citations have source quotes that actually appear (case-insensitive, whitespace-tolerant) in the original source text. An LLM-driven layer reads the body and the citations and scores how well claims are supported. The combined rate is the conservative minimum of both signals. Drafts below the threshold are rejected with the specific reason logged.

Gate 4 — Style pass

A third pass enforces our style guide — clean prose, no weasel words, no padding, no editorialization. This pass can tighten and clarify, but cannot add new factual claims. The model is instructed that any addition of a name, number, date, or quote that wasn't in the original draft is a failure.

Gate 5 — Publish

A social-pulse enrichment pass adds an "Around the web" sidebar — searches X and Reddit for the article's subject, surfaces the public conversation, and explicitly flags any contradictions with the draft's facts. The article is then pushed to the site with the cross-reference provenance card (when applicable), the TL;DR card, the full sources block, and the AI-authorship disclosure. A human editor reviews everything that names a private individual, every Watchdog filing, and a sample of every persona's daily output.

Sourcing — what we use, and what we don't

We work strictly from primary sources we are legally and ethically allowed to use. We do not rewrite, paraphrase, or republish reporting from other newsrooms. When another outlet has reporting we don't, we link to them in a single sentence — the same way any newsroom links to AP wire copy. We do not bypass paywalls or use cached versions of competitor reporting.

Cross-source deduplication. When the same announcement reaches us via PR Newswire, GlobeNewswire, and a city press release, our pipeline computes a content hash on every lead and skips the duplicates — so we don't burn editorial capacity drafting three near-identical articles, and you don't see them on the site.

What we will not do

There are things our reporters are forbidden from doing. These rules are baked into every persona's system prompt and every gate of the editorial pipeline.

How disclosure works on every article

Every published article carries:

You can audit any article on this site. You don't have to take our word for anything.

Observability and accountability

Every job in our pipeline is monitored. If our editorial pipeline so much as hiccups — no articles published in 90 minutes, no leads ingested in 60 minutes, draft queue backing up beyond 100, or rejection rate spiking above 60% over six hours — we get an alert within minutes. We caught and fixed a six-hour silent stall this week and built the alerting layer that prevents it from happening again.

Corrections

Everything we get wrong lives at /corrections, permanently, with what we changed and when. Our corrections policy:

What our funding model is

The Scottsdale Signal is reader-supported. Members pay $7/month or $70/year and get full access to everything we publish, including the Daily AM digest delivered to your inbox at 6 a.m. There are no banner ads on this site, ever.

We accept clearly-labeled local sponsorships from Scottsdale and Paradise Valley businesses. Sponsor placements appear in dedicated slots clearly marked as sponsored. Sponsors get no editorial influence — they don't see articles before they publish, they don't get to suggest topics, and they don't get to spike stories about themselves. Information about sponsorship is at /sponsorship.

What our limits are

Two things we want our readers to understand clearly.

AI gets things wrong. Even with five gates and nine cross-reference engines, our reporters will sometimes make errors a human reporter wouldn't make — and sometimes errors a human reporter would also make. When we catch them, we correct them publicly. When you catch one, please tell us.

This is a new kind of newsroom. We are figuring out the right balance between speed, depth, and judgment in real time. We'd rather show you our work in the open than wait until it's perfect.

Questions, tips, corrections

This page is the trust contract between The Scottsdale Signal and its readers. If we ever change how we work, this page changes with it.

Last updated May 3, 2026.

This page is maintained as part of the Scottsdale Signal's public methodology. The current source lives in the project repository at pages/how-we-work.md. Spot something out of date? Tell us.