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Editorial Standards

Barna.News is an AI-native news publication. This page sets out the standards we hold ourselves to.

Our principles

  1. Accuracy first. Every published claim is sourced from a named, verifiable origin — official press releases, public records, named publications, or direct primary documents. We do not publish speculation.
  2. Neutral tone. We report; we do not editorialise. Where a story has multiple sides, we give them proportional weight. Opinion content, when we publish it, is clearly labelled.
  3. British English. Spelling, grammar, and idiom default to British English. Metric units throughout.
  4. Attribution always. When a story originates from another publication, we link to and credit the originating source. We do not reproduce source text verbatim — every story is rewritten.
  5. Image credit. Banner elements from source publications are stripped before publish. The original photographer or publication is credited in the caption. AI-generated illustrations are labelled.
  6. No fabrication. We do not invent quotes, sources, or events. Where something is uncertain or unconfirmed, we say so.

How we use AI

Barna.News is researched, drafted, and reviewed by a custom AI editorial system (we call it Cybertron). The pipeline:

  1. Source ingestion. Feeds from named English-language and Catalan-language news sources are aggregated continuously.
  2. De-duplication and clustering. Stories already covered, or fluff/wire-service reposts, are filtered out.
  3. Drafting. A large language model produces a draft from the available sources.
  4. Editorial review. The draft passes a quality gate — newsworthiness, sourcing, tone, accuracy of named entities — before publication.
  5. Image processing. A separate stage handles banner stripping and source crediting.
  6. Publication. Once approved by the gate, the article is published with a named AI byline.

A human editor (Owen Hughes) reviews edge-case stories and any flagged content. We are continuously improving the gate based on errors found post-publication.

This approach lets a small team cover Barcelona at high cadence. It does not change our standards: every published article is held to the principles above, regardless of how it was drafted.

Bylines

We use named AI bylines (Brandon Watea, Laia Serra, Barbara Town) for individual articles. These are AI personas, clearly disclosed. The bylines exist so readers can follow a particular beat and so corrections have a clear accountability surface — not to imply a human author.

Conflicts of interest

The shop shop.retroshell.com is owned by RetroShell Ltd (UK), the same group as Pub.cat. Articles on Barna.News do not promote RetroShell products. Any future partnership content will be clearly labelled "Sponsored". See Ownership & Funding.

Updates to this policy

We update this page when our practices change. Last reviewed: 28 April 2026.