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Editorial Standards

Barna.News is an AI-native news publication. This page sets out the standards we hold ourselves to, who writes what, and what we will and will not publish.

The news is objective

This is the principle the rest of this page hangs off. Something happens, and we report it. We report what happened, who said what, and what it means for people living in Barcelona. We do not put a spin on it. We do not move a story to the left or to the right. We do not tell you what to think about it.

Where a story has more than one side, we give those sides proportional weight. Where something is uncertain or unconfirmed, we say so plainly rather than picking the version that reads better. Where we get it wrong, we correct it in public and we say what changed. See our Corrections Policy.

Who writes what

We are transparent about this because it is the thing readers most reasonably want to know.

  • The news is written by AI journalists. Barna.News stories are put together each day by a bespoke AI editorial system, which researches the material and produces the first draft. The resulting articles carry the Barna.News byline, and that profile page states plainly that the byline belongs to an AI journalist. A human editor then decides whether each story goes out. We never suggest the AI is a person, because it is not one.
  • The feature articles and the guides are written by a human. They are written by the founder and editor. That is deliberate. A feature or a guide rests on judgement, on opinion, or on having actually been somewhere and done something, and none of those are things an AI journalist can honestly claim.

Every article on Barna.News now appears under one shared byline instead of the names of individual AI personas, making it plain who is accountable for a story and where any correction should be directed. The AI holds no views, has never visited the locations it covers, and is not a person.

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 We do not publish speculation.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. Objectivity. We report, we do not editorialise. Opinion content, when we publish it, is clearly labelled and carries a human byline.
  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. Our AI journalists report what their sources say; they never describe first-hand experience they have not had, because they cannot have had any.

Allegations and named individuals

Barcelona is a small enough city that a wrongly framed local crime story can do real harm to a real person, before conviction and sometimes before charge. These rules bind every article and are not relaxed for speed.

  1. Presumption of innocence, in the language itself. An accusation is reported as an accusation: "arrested on suspicion of", "police say", "prosecutors allege". Never "X did Y" before a conviction. This applies to the headline and the opening line as much as to the body: a careful body under a guilt-implying headline still breaks this rule.
  2. When we name someone. A person accused of a crime or serious wrongdoing is named only if an official source (police, prosecutors, a court) has already named them publicly and naming them serves the story, or if they hold a public role directly relevant to the allegation. Otherwise the story runs without the name, using an age, a role or a neighbourhood instead, until an official source confirms it. A single unconfirmed report or a social media post is never enough to name a private individual.
  3. Minors are not named. No exceptions without a stated public-interest reason signed off by the editor.
  4. Sourcing bar for the claim itself. A high-risk claim, meaning an allegation, or a health, financial or safety claim, needs a primary source: an official statement, a court filing, or a named publication reporting the same primary fact. One unconfirmed secondary report is not enough.
  5. Human review. Every news story sits in a review queue until an editor approves it. That approval counts as a decision to publish; it is not a line-by-line edit, nor does it amount to an independent check of every fact. For stories covering crime, health, money, politics, minors, or an allegation against a named individual, the stricter sourcing rules set out above apply, and any item flagged by the automated checks is put before the editor prior to a decision. No news story goes out automatically, no matter how well it scores on every other measure.
  6. We follow up. If someone we named is later cleared, or the charges are dropped, or they are acquitted, we report that too, linked from the original article. That is an obligation, not a courtesy.
  7. When in doubt, we do not name and we do not assert. A name we left out can be added tomorrow. An accusation wrongly published against a named private individual cannot be taken back.

How we use AI

The daily news pipeline works like this:

  1. Source ingestion. Feeds from named English-language and Catalan-language news sources are aggregated continuously.
  2. De-duplication and clustering. Stories already covered, and 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 covering newsworthiness, sourcing, tone and the accuracy of named entities before it can be published.
  5. Fact-checking. Claims are checked against the sources they came from. Anything high-risk, as defined above, is routed to a human.
  6. Image processing. A separate stage handles banner stripping and source crediting.
  7. Publication. After a human editor approves it, the article is published under the Barna.News byline.

Before any news story goes live, a human editor approves it, and that editor is shown every problem the automated checks have raised. Sign-off of that kind is not the same as checking every fact, which is why we carry on refining the checks in light of mistakes spotted after publication, and why our corrections policy carries as much weight as the checks themselves.

This approach lets a very small team cover Barcelona at a cadence that would otherwise be impossible. It does not lower the bar: every published article is held to the principles above, whoever or whatever drafted it.

Corrections

We do not silently edit articles after publication, and we do not quietly remove them. Every correction is visible on the article itself. The full policy, including how to flag an error and how quickly we commit to respond, is on the Corrections Policy page.

Conflicts of interest

The shop shop.retroshell.com is owned by the same group as Pub.cat, which publishes Barna.News. 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: 25 September 2026.