clayny.news uses artificial intelligence in every stage of its editorial process. We believe full transparency about this is essential.
Document processing: Official minutes and agendas — many published as scanned image PDFs — are converted to searchable text using OCR. OCR errors may occur, particularly with proper nouns, dollar figures, and tables; our verification gate is designed to catch the ones that matter.
Article drafting: Articles are drafted by AI language models, primarily Anthropic Claude. The AI receives the official record of the meeting and supplementary public records as input, and may not claim anything beyond what those documents say. Each article identifies the model used in its metadata.
The fact gate: Before publication, every draft passes automated verification: quotations must appear verbatim in the source record, dollar figures must trace to the document they came from, and personal names must match the record exactly. Published articles are also periodically re-checked by independent adversarial review passes; errors found are corrected and noted.
Human oversight: Publisher Matthew Broudy supervises the pipeline and editorial decisions, and may revise, restructure, or reject AI-drafted content. Every article is published under his name and he is accountable for it. Features and editorials get a full editor read before publication; routine minutes reports rely on the automated gate plus periodic adversarial review passes — the disclosure on each article says which.
What AI does not do: AI does not conduct interviews, make editorial judgments about newsworthiness, or decide what to publish. These decisions are made by human editors.
All clayny.news content is derived from public records, including:
We do not use anonymous sources. Every factual claim should be traceable to a public record or an on-the-record statement made at a public meeting.
Direct quotes in our articles are drawn from the official minutes, and our publication gate requires them to match the source record verbatim. Every article links to the meeting record it was written from, so readers can check any quote in its full context. One caution we pass on to readers: minutes are the clerk's record of a meeting, usually paraphrase, and our articles distinguish between quoting the record and reporting what the record says someone said.
If a quote appears inaccurate, please contact us with the article URL and the passage in question.
Factual errors: We correct factual errors as soon as they are identified. Corrections are noted at the bottom of the article with the date and nature of the correction.
OCR and record errors: If a quote or figure is inaccurate due to OCR of a scanned document, we update it to match the official record. Minor typographical corrections are made silently; substantive corrections that change meaning are noted. Where the town's own record is wrong or incomplete — a misfiled document, an unrecorded vote — we say so in the article rather than smoothing it over.
Clarifications: If an article is accurate but misleading due to missing context, we add a clarification noting the additional context.
How to request a correction: Use the contact form or email editor@clayny.news with the article URL, the specific error, and the correct information with source. Corrections do not require a reason, and we do not argue about them.
Accountability requires a public record of our errors — including the systemic ones. Before launch, we reviewed everything on this site against its sources, and we publish what we found:
This is what AI-assisted publishing looks like without verification — and why every article now passes the gate before it reaches you. New corrections are noted on the affected article and added here.
If our reporting makes a critical claim about a named person that goes beyond what they said at a public meeting, we attempt to contact them before publication and note their response — or their silence — in the article.
Anyone named in our coverage — an official, an applicant before a board, a resident who spoke at a meeting — may respond, correct the record, or add context at any time, and we will publish the response. Use the contact page and name the article.
No names in minor-crime items. The Blotter is compiled from official New York State Police public reports, but we do not publish the names of private individuals in blotter items. A charge is an accusation, not a conviction, and a name in a search result outlives a dropped charge. Arrests are described by age and town of residence only.
What we omit entirely: incidents categorized as domestic, mental-health, medical, or juvenile matters, and identifying details in incidents involving victims. The live dispatch log on the Blotter page carries an additional caution: it shows initial 911 calls, which are unverified and frequently resolve as nothing.
When we would name someone: if a case is serious enough that we commit to covering it through its disposition, if the person is a public official or public figure and the matter relates to their public role, or if police have asked the public for help finding a named person. If we name someone at arrest, we owe our readers — and the person — coverage of how the case ends.
Fresh start: anyone named in past coverage of a minor matter that was dropped, dismissed, or sealed may request removal or de-indexing via our contact page. We honor these requests except for violent crimes, offenses against children, and matters involving public officials' conduct in office.
clayny.news is independently operated and self-funded by its publisher, who pays the hosting and AI costs out of pocket. There is no advertising, no sponsorship, and no subscription revenue. We have no financial relationship with the Town of Clay, any political candidate or party, or any business or developer mentioned in our coverage. We do not accept payment for coverage or favorable treatment.
The standards above come down to a few rules we hold ourselves to:
Comments appear immediately after automated checks — they are not reviewed by a person before publication. They are moderated after the fact: we remove comments that are abusive, defamatory, spam, or far off-topic, and repeat abuse loses the ability to comment. To report a comment, use the contact form.