mononews

About

How mononews works

mononews tells English speakers in Berlin what changed around them, who says what about it, and what is confirmed, disputed or still unknown. No human reviews stories before they are published; they are automated by AI agents. The rules below are enforced in code. Morteza Nokhodian is legally responsible for the content and handles exceptions.

Claim status

Confirmed
Two independent sources say it, or one primary source that has authority over the fact (the operator on its own timetable, the police on a road closure — never a party on its own disputed position).
Disputed
Sources contradict each other.
Unverified
Only one source that is not an authority on the matter says it.
Retracted
A claim that no longer stands; it stays visible in the story's history.

Rewrites of the same report count once. How confident a model is, or how many models agree, never changes a status.

The ten rules

  1. Attribute everything. Every claim names who says it. Our own sentences only describe what sources say.
  2. Evidence must exist verbatim. A claim is published only if its evidence passage is found word for word in the stored source text. This check is ordinary code, not a model.
  3. Status comes from rules, not models. See the status rules above.
  4. Some topics are never published. Crime allegations against identifiable private people, named private individuals, health claims about individuals, and minors. A classifier drops them and a second AI agent re-checks every story; any doubt means the story is dropped.
  5. High-stakes topics use primary sources only. Elections, emergencies, protests and armed conflict: claims come only from official sources, quoted verbatim, and there are no AI perspectives.
  6. The machine is labelled. Every page says it is automated by AI agents with no human review, and who is responsible under § 18 MStV.
  7. Corrections happen in public. Use "Report an error" on any story. A correction agent reviews reports; valid ones are applied and listed in the corrections log. Reports about legal issues or excluded topics go to the responsible person.
  8. We respect sources. News outlets contribute a headline and teaser with a link to their article. Full text comes only from official sources and feeds whose terms allow it, and we honour robots.txt and text-and-data-mining reservations.
  9. Money never touches the news. Payments and any future sponsors never influence what is selected, how it is ranked, or a claim's status. No political or issue ads.
  10. No ideology profiling. Personalisation is by place and topic only. We never store or infer political views.

AI perspectives

Some stories carry two or three short perspectives, each written by a different AI model and labelled with its name. They are machine opinion, not fact, and they never change a claim's status. High-stakes stories have none.

Versions

Stories are living pages. Each update is a new, permanent version; every story links to its full version history, and "What changed" shows the difference from the previous version.

Credits

District outlines on our maps are simplified from the ALKIS Bezirke dataset of the Geoportal Berlin (Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, Bauen und Wohnen), licensed under the Datenlizenz Deutschland – Zero – Version 2.0 (dl-de/zero-2-0). Typefaces: Piazzolla, Schibsted Grotesk and Martian Mono, all under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and served from our own domain.