Editorial Standards

This page says how content gets made at The Detroit Lions Podcast, and the rules it has to follow. It covers the podcast, the articles our people write, and the automated daily reports.

Who makes what

Podcast episodes, live broadcasts, and bylined articles are made by the people named on them. The daily Lions news reports are produced by an automated system. Those posts carry the site’s byline, The Detroit Lions Podcast, and never a person’s name, because no person writes them.

Sourcing

  • A factual claim needs two independent published sources before we run it as established fact. When only one outlet has a story, we attribute it to that outlet by name and link them.
  • Every report links to its sources. If we can’t show you where a claim came from, we don’t publish it.
  • Statistics are tied to official and primary data, not to someone’s summary of the data.
  • Quotes are only used from cited, published sources, attributed to the person who said them and the outlet that reported them. We do not invent, reconstruct, or “approximate” quotes.

About the automated reports

The daily reports are written by software our team built and runs. In plain terms:

  • It works only from published reporting and public data, under the sourcing rules above, and it links to what it used.
  • It is engineered to hold a story rather than guess. If sourcing is thin, conflicting, or ambiguous, the piece waits for a human instead of publishing.
  • The routine reports publish without a person reviewing each one; the only pieces a human handles before publish are the held ones described above. We tell you that plainly rather than pretend otherwise.
  • When an automated report gets something wrong, a human is responsible for fixing it, under the corrections policy.

Independence

The Detroit Lions Podcast is independent. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by the Detroit Lions or the NFL. The site earns money from advertising, affiliate links, Patreon, and merchandise; none of that buys influence over coverage. Affiliate links may earn us a commission at no cost to you.

Corrections

We fix what we get wrong and we note that we did. The process, and how to report an error, is here: Corrections.