Editorial Methodology

1. The Human-in-the-Loop Protocol

In an era of unmonitored AI content syndication, ARC & EPOCH enforces strict human verification boundaries.

While internal research tools (such as our private upstream assistant TechSignal) monitor public feeds, code commits, and vulnerability registries to alert our team of potential developments, zero automated text or unverified claims are ever published directly to the public website.

Every article, brief, and repo radar review requires an editor to:

• Inspect the raw primary code repository, commit diff, or peer-reviewed paper.
• Corroborate novel claims against independent secondary sources.
• Verify benchmark methodology and hardware specifications.
• Format, edit, and authorize publication through our cryptographically signed Git workflow.

2. The Selection Rubric

Candidate stories are scored across eight editorial dimensions from 0 to 5 before selection:

1. Relevance to Builders: Does this directly affect how developers architect, deploy, or secure systems?
2. Freshness: Did this occur today, or is it recycled industry commentary?
3. Primary Source Strength: Is the claim backed by source code, release tags, or vendor advisories?
4. Technical Consequence: Does it deliver non-trivial latency, throughput, or security implications?
5. Novelty / Under-Coverage: Is this an important development overlooked by mainstream consumer tech media?
6. Actionability: Can an engineer clone a repo, run a benchmark, or apply a patch immediately?
7. Confidence: Are claims mathematically and empirically verifiable?
8. Saturation Penalty: Points are aggressively subtracted if every aggregator has already shared identical verbatim coverage.

3. Provenance & Mandatory Sourcing

ARC & EPOCH maintains a zero-tolerance policy for unsourced claims:

• Every news article must link directly to its primary source (GitHub release, arXiv paper, NIST advisory, or vendor announcement).
• Every article includes a dedicated Primary Sources & Verified References section detailing author, publisher, and timestamp of access.
• Material claims are corroborated against multiple independent sources whenever possible.

4. Date & Timestamp Integrity

We reject the deceptive SEO practice of constantly refreshing datePublished timestamps to simulate freshness:

• datePublished reflects the exact initial release timestamp and is immutable.
• dateModified is only updated when a substantive factual change, correction, or development occurs, and must be accompanied by an explicit entry in our Corrections Log.

5. Transparency & AI Assistance Disclosures

Every article explicitly carries an AI assistance metadata disclosure:

• none: 100% human-authored and human-researched without generative AI tooling.
• research: AI assistants were utilized for initial feed clustering, document summarization, or translation.
• editing: AI assistants were utilized for syntax validation, copy-editing, or proofreading.
• substantial: Co-authored synthesis under human verification (disclosed with methodology details).