Editorial standards

A person approves every story before it publishes

No article reaches the site automatically. Drafts land in one approval queue and a human editor reads each one and either publishes it, edits it, or throws it out. There is no second route to the front page, no scheduled auto-publish and no trusted category that skips the queue.

The same rule covers the things that are easy to get wrong quietly: merging two celebrity records, linking a story to the film it is about, and attaching a photograph to a person. Each of those is a human decision, because each of them is expensive to undo once it has propagated.

Where AI is used, and where it is not

We use a language model to draft. It reads material we have gathered from named sources and writes a first version, which an editor then checks against those sources and rewrites as needed. The model does not choose what is newsworthy on its own, does not publish, and does not decide that two records are the same person.

The model is never the authority for a fact. Where a claim comes from one outlet and we cannot corroborate it, the story says so in its own words rather than stating it flatly.

An editor's change is final. Once a person has edited a field, the pipeline will not write over it on a later pass — so a correction made by hand stays corrected.

Sourcing

Stories are built from public material: broadcaster announcements, official social accounts of the people involved, press releases, and established trade outlets. Where a story rests on a single outlet, we name that outlet in the story.

We do not publish claims that originate only in anonymous accounts, screenshots with no provenance, or aggregator posts that cite nobody. Rumour is reported as rumour or not at all.

What we will not do

• Invent a quote, or tidy a real quote into something the person did not say.
• Publish a private address, phone number or document.
• Run a morphed or AI-generated image of a real person as though it were a photograph.
• Report on the private life of someone who is not a public figure.
• Present our own poll as the broadcaster's vote. Every poll here is labelled unofficial, on the page and in the page's own text.

Polls and the projection

Our polls measure what Clapnumber readers think. They are not the show's vote and they change nothing about any result. Our read on who is likely to win a season is an argument assembled from public activity over a rolling window, and we publish the weights behind it so you can disagree with it on the merits. It has not been validated against a completed season, and we say that on the page rather than in a footnote.

Corrections

When we get something wrong we fix it and we say that we fixed it, on the story itself. We do not quietly edit a published claim out of existence.

If you have found an error, tell us at grievance@clapnumber.com or through the contact form. Include the page and what is wrong with it, and we will come back to you.

Independence

We are not owned by, funded by, or affiliated with any studio, broadcaster or streaming service. Nobody pays for coverage here, and no coverage is withheld because of a commercial relationship. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page before it affects a single story.