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Alberta DailyEst. 2026

Editorial Policy

This page is the substance behind the byline: how our content is made, how sources are credited, how we fix mistakes, and the lines we don't cross.

AI authorship, disclosed

News summaries on Alberta Daily are written by AI and published under the byline "Alberta Daily Desk" — a disclosed AI persona, never a fake human name. Every AI-written piece carries an explicit machine-readable flag (is_ai_generated) in its published data, and story pages display an AI-authorship notice next to the source credits. If you are reading something on this site that AI wrote, you will know.

The system operates under rules set and supervised by a human editor, who reviews its output and corrects it when it errs.

How summaries are written

  • Summaries are genuinely rewritten— original wording, 150–300 words, written from the facts of the source reporting. They are never light rewordings or excerpts of the source article's text.
  • Summaries are pointers, not replacements. They exist to tell you what happened and to send you to the outlet that did the reporting. The original journalism is always the authoritative version.
  • AI can make mistakes, and stories develop after we publish. Treat our summaries as a starting point and confirm important details with the linked source.

Source credit

Every news summary names and links the outlet(s) whose reporting it is based on — on the story card and prominently on the story page itself, with a direct link headed "Read the full story at the original source." We consider the click-through to the original outlet a feature, not a leak. The journalists who reported the story deserve the traffic.

Corrections

If we got something wrong, tell us at hello@albertadaily.ca with a link to the story and a note about the error. We prioritize correction emails and fix confirmed errors promptly — by updating the summary, or by removing it entirely if it can't be salvaged. Material corrections are noted on the story. For removal requests, see takedown & removal requests — every request is reviewed within 48 hours.

Police & court coverage

Summaries of police news releases follow rules stricter than the releases themselves, and they are enforced in code, not just policy:

  • We never name accused persons, victims, or witnesses — even when the police release does. People are described only by age and city (“a 34-year-old Edmonton man”). Officials speaking in their official capacity may be named. The only exceptions: the missing person in an active missing-person appeal (those stories exist to help find them, and are removed once the person is located), and the named subject of a police-issued public warning — both names published by police deliberately.
  • Charges are allegations.Everyone is presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court, and our wording always says so — “charged with”, “alleged”, never guilt stated as fact. A conviction is reported as fact only when the source explicitly reports it.
  • Young people are never identifiable.In any criminal context a minor is “a youth” or “a teen” — no schools, neighbourhoods, or other identifying detail. The same care applies to complainants in sexual-offence cases.
  • Every police summary passes an automated review (a name scan and a wording check) before publishing; anything that fails twice is held for human review instead of being published. Missing-persons stories are removed automatically once the person is located.

Council coverage

Dozens of Alberta towns have no reporter at the council table. We summarize what their councils decided, from each municipality's own published minutes, under rules that are enforced in code rather than left to the writing:

  • Closed-session, personnel and legal-advice items are removed by software before anything is summarized — not by asking the AI to skip them. Alberta councils close the doors for land negotiations, personnel matters and legal advice, and the published minutes still list those items. Our software identifies them three independent ways: the meeting portal's own markup for closed business, the wording of the heading, and the sections of the Access to Information Act the council cited when it closed the item. Any one of the three is enough to withhold it, and the AI is never shown what was withheld. We also count how many items each council withheld and print that on the page, because a council that closes the doors often is telling residents something.
  • Councillors and staff acting in office are named — they are public officials on a public record. Everyone else is described by role only: delegations, applicants, complainants, appellants, board appointees and individual employees, even where the minutes name them.
  • Decisions only, phrased from the record. What council decided — motions carried or defeated, bylaw readings, budgets, grants, appointments. We never say why a councillor voted as they did, never describe their manner or position, and never frame a decision as controversial or overdue. A recorded vote count is a fact and is reported as one.
  • No video. Every meeting portal links a recording of the meeting. We take none of it.
  • Every summary passes an automated review — a name scan against the officials the minutes themselves identify, plus a wording check — before it can publish. Anything that fails, or any check that could not complete, is held for human review rather than published. Every meeting links back to the official minutes, which are the authoritative record.

Sports & rodeo coverage

  • Scores, schedules and standings are facts, and we present them as facts: in our own format, attributed to the league or sanctioning body that published them, with a link. We use no team or league logos, no broadcast imagery and no rights-holder photography, and we are not affiliated with or endorsed by any league, team or sanctioning body we cover.
  • Under-18 competition is covered at team level only. Scores, standings and team names — never an individual minor's name in anything we generate, even where the sanctioning body publishes full results. This is stricter than the law requires, and deliberate. Where a league's rosters straddle the line of adulthood, as junior hockey's do, we name a player only when they are known to be an adult; when age is unknowable, we stay at team level. Adult and professional sport is reported with names as published.
  • No betting content, ever. No odds, no betting promotion, no lottery content — not in rodeo coverage, not in scores, not in advertising placements we control. Gambling content is a banned class on this site.

Indigenous communities & coverage

  • The organizer is the authority on cultural events. We list powwows and cultural events only as the hosting nation or organization publicly announces them for public attendance, linked to the organizer. We never embellish or re-describe cultural practices in AI wording — descriptions stay with, or closely follow, the organizer's own framing.
  • News from First Nations and Métis sources follows the same summarize-and-link standard as every other source on the site — original wording, prominent credit, the source authoritative — with the same care about naming private individuals that applies everywhere else.
  • Reserves and settlements are communities, not curiosities. Our place directories — ghost towns, roadside attractions and the like — never list a reserve or settlement as an attraction, and that exclusion is enforced by an automated check, not editorial memory.

Outage & status information

Where we report on power outages or company service status, the status is always quoted from the provider's own official outage centre, status page, or public regulatory filing — phrased as their report (“EPCOR's outage centre reports…”), never as our own claim. We use plain text company names, we are not affiliated with any listed company, and those pages carry no advertising where the data licence requires it.

What we don't do

  • No fake bylines. We never present AI writing as the work of a human author, invented or real.
  • No scraping sites that disallow it. We gather content only from public RSS feeds and public APIs. We do not scrape sites whose terms or technical signals (such as robots.txt) disallow it.
  • No paywalled content reproduction. We do not summarize or reproduce content that sits behind a paywall. Subscriber journalism belongs to its subscribers.
  • No pretending to be a newsroom.We do no original reporting, and we don't claim to. Aggregation with credit is the entire product.
  • No unlabelled advertising in our news feed.Some outlets syndicate sponsored and native advertising through the same RSS feeds as their journalism. Those items are screened out before anything is written — a per-publisher check against each outlet's own paid-content markers, plus an automated review of items nobody labelled. Genuine business news stays: an opening, a closure, an expansion, an award, a charge or a community donation is news even when a company is named in the headline. What is excluded is copy written to sell you something, published as though it were reporting. This is separate from the clearly marked advertising the site itself carries, which is disclosed on our privacy page: the promise here is that no third party's paid copy is presented to you as our summarized news. If one reaches the feed anyway, tell us and it comes down — see corrections above.

Where our data comes from

  • News: public RSS feeds from Alberta news outlets, filtered for Alberta relevance, screened for sponsored and promotional content, and deduplicated before summarization.
  • Weather: Environment and Climate Change Canada, presented as structured data — current conditions and forecasts are relayed, not rewritten by AI.
  • Events: public ticketing APIs and venue listings, each credited to its source. Dates, prices, and lineups can change — the ticket link is authoritative.
  • Council records:agendas and minutes each municipality publishes itself, which are public records under Alberta's Municipal Government Act. These are neither relayed verbatim nor treated like news copy — decisions are summarized under the council-coverage rules above, and closed-session items are withheld by software before summarization.
  • Live data (maps & briefs): official government and agency feeds — Alberta 511, Alberta Emergency Alert, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and the other sources listed on our sources page — relayed as structured facts with attribution, not AI prose. Emergency alert wording is never modified, softened, or summarized: we show the official title and link to the official notice. Live data can lag or fail; every live page shows when its data was last updated, and safety decisions belong with the official source, not with us.