Standards
Who writes this paper, how a piece is put together, what our dates mean, and what to do when we get something wrong.
A masthead that will not say how it works is asking for trust it has not earned. This page is the answer to the questions a careful reader would think to ask, written before anyone has to ask them. It sits alongside our privacy policy, which covers what happens to your information rather than ours, and the two are written to agree with each other.
Who writes this paper
The Mosaic Times runs six desks across eight sections. Each desk has a name, a beat, and a settled way of writing.
- Marcus DeaneLocal
- The United States. Politics, courts, cities, and money as it lands on people. Opens on a document, a vote, or a line item.
- Nadia RahimGlobal
- Everywhere outside the United States. Measured and comparative, and never uses a country as a metaphor for an idea.
- Elliot MarshBusiness and Technology
- Work, markets, industry, and what the tools actually do as against what they were promised to do. Sceptical of announcements.
- Priya VenkatesanScience and Health
- Medicine, climate and research, with attention to the distance between a single study and a finding.
- June CallowayLife
- Living, attention, food, home and learning. Features rather than analysis, and they do not end on a lesson.
- Sofia AndradeCulture and Sport
- Art, books, film, music and design, and sport treated as culture rather than as results.
The six names above are desk identities. They mark which beat a piece belongs to and the voice it is written in, the way a masthead assigns a correspondent to a section. They are not biographies of six separate journalists, and they should not be read as such.
If you are wondering whether a person with one of those names sat down and wrote the article you just finished, the answer is no. The paper is produced with substantial assistance from artificial intelligence under human editorial direction. A person decides what runs, edits it, and answers for it.
If we ever publish work by a named human writer, that writer will be named accurately and identified as a person. We would rather tell you than let a byline imply something it should not.
Local means the United States. Global means everywhere else.
The paper has claimed local and global news in its masthead for years without ever settling what it meant. It means this: Local is the United States, and Global is everywhere outside it. The other six sections are subjects rather than places, and a story files under the subject it argues about rather than the place it happens in.
How a piece is put together
Local, Global, Business, Technology, and Science and Health run as analysis. Everything asserted in them is meant to be checkable against the public record, and where a piece leans on a document, a dataset or a study, it says which one.
Culture, Life and Sport run as features. They are allowed a point of view and they are still held to the same standard of fact.
Three things this paper does not do. It does not invent sources, quotes or interviews. It does not present analysis as original reporting, because we do not send anyone to witness events. And it does not run anything as news that we cannot point you to the basis for.
Artificial intelligence, in three parts
It is not enough to say a site “uses AI”. There are three separate questions and they deserve three separate answers.
- The writing
- Produced with substantial assistance from artificial intelligence, under human editorial direction. A person sets the subject, edits the result, and is answerable for what runs.
- The pictures
- Cover images are generated with an AI image tool by the paper’s editor, not licensed from a photographer and not photographs of real events. Where a story has no usable image, a generated mosaic pattern runs in its place, because a pattern is honest and a stock photo pretending to be journalism is not. Nothing on this site should be read as a photograph of the thing it sits above unless the caption says so.
- What you send us
- Nothing. Messages sent through our forms are read by a person. They are not fed into an AI system, not used to train anything, and not processed automatically beyond ordinary spam and delivery handling.
Our dates, and the archive we are writing
Every piece carries the date it belongs to. That is not always the date its words were written, and where the two differ we would rather say so.
Seven articles on this site carry dates between December 2023 and January 2024. Those dates are inherited from the original pieces that stood at those addresses when the paper ran in an earlier form. The text you read under them today is not that original text. All of it was rewritten in July 2026 when the paper was rebuilt, and the earlier dates were kept because they mark where this archive begins rather than pretending the paper started fresh.
The Mosaic Times went quiet between January 2024 and its relaunch in July 2026. Rather than leave that gap empty, we are writing into it: pieces about that period, researched now, dated to the month they cover.
Every one of them carries a visible line under its byline saying it was written for the archive project rather than filed at the time. A piece written with hindsight is a different thing from a dispatch, it is often better reported, and a reader is entitled to know which one they are holding. If a piece does not carry that line, it was written for the date it shows.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, write to the Times and it gets fixed. Corrections apply to everything on this site regardless of how it was drafted.
When we correct a piece after publication, we say so on the piece itself rather than editing the error out quietly. A reader who saw the wrong version is the person a correction is for. The same rule governs these policy pages: where we have removed something that used to be described here, we leave a line saying what changed and when.
Advertising
Advertising never dictates coverage, is always labelled, and never takes the shape of a story. No section, desk or article is for sale, and a sponsor’s presence on a page does not buy a say in what runs on it. Our terms are on the advertising page.
Independence
The paper is edited and published independently. It has no owner to please, no proprietor’s line to hold, and no arrangement with anyone it writes about.