Wire · Issue 001
Draft — not published. Awaiting sign-off; noindexed and excluded from the feed.
What the documents were doing this week
The wire runs weekly, five items or fewer. Each item gets a link to the original, a short framing, and one line on what kind of evidence the piece is showing. That last line is not a grade. Grading someone else’s work would mean claiming to have fact-checked it, which would be false, and the standard applies to our own copy first.
The selection bias is stated rather than hidden: work that shows its evidence travels here. Work that asks to be trusted does not.
Steal Our Stories
The terms page that most of this section is built against. ProPublica has published a standing republication license since long before the phrase "content licensing" acquired its current meaning, and the conditions attached to it are specific enough to be worth reading as a document in their own right: canonical to them, their tracking pixel, their newsletter language, no photographs, no automated wholesale republication.
EvidenceA publisher's own terms page, read directly. What it establishes is what the publisher commits to, not whether anyone honors it.
Republishing guidelines
The other end of the license spectrum, and the reason this publication landed on CC BY-ND for its own work. The Conversation permits commercial republication while forbidding derivatives, which is the combination that lets a small commercial outlet carry a piece without any editor being able to cut the sentence a grade was attached to.
EvidenceA publisher's own terms page. Establishes the license offered; the attribution requirements are stated there rather than inferred.
Guide to the Pennsylvania Sunshine Act
The statute governing what a Pennsylvania public board has to do in the open, annotated for people who have to invoke it at a meeting rather than litigate it afterward. The deliberation record published here rests on the plain fact that minutes exist and are public. This is the document that says why.
EvidenceA trade association's reading of a statute, with the statute itself linked. Establishes what the association says the law requires, which is not the same thing as a court holding.