Editorial policy

Where the topics come from

The site reads Google News every day — the section feeds for technology, entertainment, sport, business and health, searches for the areas Google has no section for, and the top-stories feed — across the Indian and US editions. Daily Google Trends and search autocomplete are read alongside them. Topics are never chosen by guessing what might rank.

The Windows section at /tech/windows additionally polls Microsoft’s release-health feed and its Windows blogs, and extracts reference numbers, build numbers and error codes from them.

Where the facts come from

A Google News link is a pointer, not a source — it resolves to Google, not to the publisher. So before anything is written we go and find reporting we can actually read: the RSS feeds of established outlets, which publish their own article URLs, plus the official bodies for a given beat. Windows pages use Microsoft’s own documentation.

A candidate source only counts if it is demonstrably about the same story, measured by how much of the topic it shares rather than by which section it came from. If nothing clears that bar, the topic is dropped and no article is written. Most trending topics we look at never become a page. We would rather publish less than hand a writer — human or otherwise — an unrelated article and let it fill the gaps.

How a draft is written

The fetched source text is stored with the post, and a draft is produced by a large language model that is given those sources and instructed that it may state only what is present in them. Where a source is silent, the draft is required to say so rather than infer.

We are direct about this: the first draft of every article is AI-generated. That draft is not what you read. It is an input to the checks below.

The checks

Four run on every draft, before a person sees it.

• Shape — a mechanical check, not a judgement call: a real introduction, section headings, at least one list, a conclusion that tells you what to do next, paragraphs that stay short, and a length floor. Failing any of these stops the draft.
• Accuracy against sources — a second model, given the sources but not the first model’s reasoning, scores every claim for whether the fetched material actually supports it, and quotes back anything it could not trace.
• Invented specifics — ordinary code, not a model, checks every figure and identifier in the draft against the source text. This one cannot be talked around, and a draft it flags is blocked from publishing regardless of its score. There is no threshold that overrides it.
• Prose tells — the vocabulary and tics that mark unedited machine writing are counted and reported to the editor. Advisory rather than blocking, since the words involved are legitimate in the right place.

Human sign-off

Nothing publishes on its own. Every draft stops in a review queue, and a person has to open it and press publish; a page cannot go live at all without a description and a real body behind it. The checks above decide what reaches that queue and what an editor is warned about — they never decide to publish.

On the Windows troubleshooting pages there is one extra step: someone runs the steps on a machine on the affected build and records which build that was, and the page carries it. Until that has happened the page is labelled “verification pending” — the label is never omitted to make a page look more authoritative than it is.

Corrections

When an article turns out to be wrong, the page is updated in place and its last-updated date changes. Substantive corrections are noted in the article rather than quietly edited away. If you have found an error, the contact page is the fastest route.

Funding and independence

The site is funded by display advertising sold and served by us. There are no affiliate links, no buy buttons, no sponsored placements inside articles and no paid inclusion. No advertiser sees an article before it publishes, and nothing is covered because someone paid for it to be.

Affiliation

Favo News is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any company, organisation or governing body it writes about. Product and company names are the trademarks of their respective owners.