Standards & Corrections
What we hold ourselves to.
A publication asking for your trust owes you its rules in writing. These are ours — our standards, our corrections policy, exactly how AI is used, and who pays for all of this. This policy took effect June 2026 and applies to every article we publish.
Editorial standards
- Accuracy above all. Every number, date, and magnitude in an article must appear in the cited source material. A deterministic verification gate — a rule-based check, not a judgment call — blocks publication of any claim it cannot find in the source. A story that cannot be reconciled with its sources does not run.
- Every source cited. Each article links the research it is built on, so you can verify everything we say without taking our word for it.
- Researchers credited. The scientists who did the work are named. The science is theirs; we only carry it to you.
- No pay-to-publish. No organization can pay or persuade us to cover its research. We run no sponsored content and no advertising, so no advertiser can influence what we say.
- Written for everyone. Every story is published at three reading levels, because clarity for a ten-year-old and rigor for a researcher are both forms of respect.
How we use AI — full disclosure
Blue Dot News articles are drafted by AI language models running on our own computers — not a distant service we cannot inspect. We say this plainly because you deserve to know how what you read is made.
What makes this trustworthy is not the writing but the checking: a machine drafts, and a separate, deterministic fact-check verifies every checkable claim against the cited source before anything is published. Drafts that fail are corrected against the source and re-checked; drafts that cannot be verified are held back and never published. The system's rules, thresholds, and standards were designed by a human, and a human answers for them — accountability is not automated.
Our full process, step by step, is documented at How We Work.
Corrections policy
We will get things wrong; every publication does. What defines us is what happens next:
- When an error is found, we correct the article promptly and update its modification date, so the record stays honest.
- For substantive errors — anything that changes the meaning of the science — the correction is noted on the article itself, not silently patched.
- Errors of fact are never left standing to protect appearances. A correction is not an embarrassment; it is the whole point of working in the open.
Spotted an error? Write to contact@bluedotnews.org with the article link and what you believe is wrong. A person reads every report, and corrections are made as quickly as they can be verified — usually within days.
Ownership & funding
Blue Dot News is an independent publication, individually owned and operated. It is not owned by, funded by, or affiliated with any media group, company, institution, or any other organization — including any other organization named "BlueDot".
It is funded out of its founder's own pocket, deliberately: there are no ads, no sponsors, no paywalls, no subscriptions, and no investors, so no one's money can shape the science we report. Our original articles are given away under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. Questions about who stands behind Blue Dot News are always welcome at Contact.