Editorial Policy
Last updated: Oct 20, 2026
How a story begins
Every day we watch several hundred feeds and group what they report into events. An event qualifies when more than one outlet covers it; the number of distinct sources, the freshness and how far it spreads across our sections together decide the running order. For each published story we keep a record of the sources it rested on, including how many outlets covered the event, and we can produce that record on request.
What a story must not do
HotNews does not publish political reporting: government, officials, elections, parties, the military, territorial disputes, protests, sanctions or human-rights advocacy. When a topic touches those fields, only its civilian, commercial or cultural side runs. A story must not carry numbers, quotations or dates that are not on the record. Where a detail cannot be supported, the sentence stays general.
What is checked before publication
Each story is put through consistency and integrity checks. Material already used for a published story is excluded, so one event is not run twice; a draft whose headline matches a recent story is dropped instead of going out in parallel. Every language version is checked for truncation, broken characters and paragraph mismatches. A version that fails these checks is replaced by the English text rather than published half-finished.
Corrections and retractions
Requests for a correction, reports of a factual error and rights complaints are accepted at legal@hotnews.pub. A request is checked against the material the story rested on. If the story does not hold up, it is withdrawn: the address stays live, the text is replaced by a short notice stating the reason, and the page is taken out of search indexing. We act as soon as we are able and do not promise a response time we cannot keep.
Who is answerable
The byline on this site names the HotNews editorial desk rather than an individual reporter. That is a statement about who is answerable for a story: the desk sets the standards above, and the correction channel is how those standards are enforced. If something published here is wrong, the address above is where the correction is due.