SXM Today / Editorial standards
The rules we work to
These are the rules our newsroom works to. They’re public so you can hold us to them.
What the labels mean
Every story says how it was produced. Here’s what each label means:
- Reporting
- Independently sourced by us. We spoke to people, read the documents, or attended the thing.
- Analysis
- Our interpretation of events, clearly separated from the facts it’s built on.
- Press Release
- Material issued by a government body, company or organisation, republished with its source linked. We have not independently verified it.
- Roundup
- A short digest linking out to other outlets' work, credited to them. If another newsroom broke a story, we say so and send you there.
Our sourcing rules
- Every piece is labelled at publication as Reporting, Analysis, Press Release or Roundup. We never blend them.
- We never rewrite another outlet’s article and publish it as our own reporting. Their story is a lead to verify independently, or something we credit and link to.
- Press releases are leads, not stories. Before one runs as reporting we add something the release didn’t have and check any claim it makes about a named third party.
- Roundups use a fixed format — headline, a sentence or two of ours, and a prominent link out. They never appear in the reporting feed.
- We quote sparingly, and never the part that would let you skip the original.
- We name and link the original source on anything curated or press-release-derived.
- AI is used to draft from public-domain and official material, to transcribe our own interviews, and to copyedit. It is never used to generate prose from another outlet’s published article, and a person reviews everything before it publishes.
- We use Sint Maarten’s open-government law to request public documents, as a matter of routine rather than last resort.
- We correct openly. Corrections are logged publicly and dated; we don’t edit mistakes away silently.
- Before anything publishes we ask: did we add a fact, a source, a local angle, or analysis the original didn’t have? If not, it isn’t a story.
How we use AI
Here is where it is used, and where it is not:
What it does: watches official sources — the Meteorological Department, the utility, the airport, the Government of Sint Maarten, and the Dutch institutions whose decisions carry legal force here — so we hear about things within minutes. It drafts from public-domain material like US National Hurricane Center bulletins, and from official press releases. It helps transcribe our own interviews and tidy our own copy.
What it does not do: publish. A person reviews and approves every story. It is also never pointed at another outlet’s journalism — our software physically cannot store or draft from another newsroom’s article text. If a competitor breaks a story, that’s a prompt for us to report it ourselves, not material to rewrite.
Advertising and sponsored content
Anything paid for is labelled Sponsored — clearly, before you start reading, not in small print underneath.
Advertisers do not see stories before publication, do not influence how they’re written, and cannot have one removed. Our owner has business relationships on the island that overlap with potential advertisers; that’s disclosed on our about page and it does not change this rule.
Corrections
When we get something wrong we fix it, note it on the story, and add it to a public corrections log with the date. We don’t quietly edit mistakes away — the log is append-only by design.