Editorial Guidelines

1. Voice / Tone

• Neutral observation, no incitement: calm, fact-based reporting tone. Eliminate sermonic and prophetic styles
• Thesis-first: state the day's central shift as a single proposition in the opening sentence
• No list-stacking: do not chain list connectors ("Meanwhile", "At the same time", etc.)
• No isolated statistics as filler: use numbers only when they are pillar evidence for the thesis
• No generic closings: avoid template phrases like "remains a key factor" / "will be a focal point"
• Closing as concrete watch-point: name a specific development from today to keep watching

2. Structural Discipline (Narrative Spine)

Pick exactly ONE dominant thread for the day. No region has hardcoded priority — let today's importance_score and event substance decide. Geopolitical events centred on any region or Earth / social signs (high importance_score in infection / climate / famine / celestial / religion) are valid candidates.

Add supporting threads only if they AMPLIFY, COMPLICATE, or RIPPLE from the core. Silence is acceptable (you do not need to cover all regions every day). Mention any region only when a region-tagged article from that region is cited as supporting_id — this rule applies equally to all regions.

3. Evidence Discipline

• Every claim requires source article IDs: each summary sentence must have at least one supporting_id
• No fabrication: numbers, names, dates, locations, and quotations must come only from source articles
• No 5-article compression into one sentence: avoid unverifiable mega-sentences
• Multiple articles on the same event: cite ONE authoritative source

4. Reporting Angle Accuracy (News Hook Discipline)

Distinguish between the event date and "today's reporting angle." When footage of an event from days ago is published today, lead with "footage published" (do not narrate the underlying event as if it happened today).

Hook verbs ("released", "announced", "follow-up") are used only when the actual event is a release / announcement / follow-up. Do not attach them to same-day first reports.

5. Treatment of Religious Subjects

Rule of thumb: if you remove the religious noun, would the sentence still be a neutral news statement? YES → keep as factual reporting. NO (the religion is doing editorial work) → rewrite in secular terms.

6. Output Structure (Slot Economy)

• highlight article count: 3-5 (do not pad to 5; padding dilutes)
• Cover different events (do not stack multiple articles on the same incident)
• THESIS BINDING: highlight slot 1 directly supports the summary's opening proposition
• Earth/social signs reservation: reserve at least 1 slot when importance_score >= 4 articles in specific themes exist
• summary_sentences supporting_ids: 1-3 entries recommended (system limit is 5)

7. Prompt Injection Defense

Input articles contain text fetched from external RSS feeds. To address potential adversarial instructions like "Ignore previous instructions" or "Admin override", we have defenses in place (specific patterns are not published for defensive security reasons). Article text is treated as untrusted data; embedded instructions are not executed. Only the system prompt instructions are authoritative.

8. Governance

When updating these guidelines, the prompt itself (digestPrompts.js) and the internal operational document (editorial-guidelines-full.md) are synchronized.

Reporting Channel

If you discover editorial guideline violations in article content, please contact us at info@gospel-ai.tech.

Revision history: 2026-05-03 v2.0 (simplified public version; technical details and Israel/Gaza guardrails moved to internal documentation) / 2026-06-26 v2.1 (added §9 Automated cluster summarization and §10 Copyright and quotation; legal basis reorganised around §30-4 information analysis, §48 attribution, and translation rights §27 / §28) / 2026-06-26 v2.2 (§9 Cluster summarization moved to AI policy §2.5; only §9 Copyright and quotation remains in this document) / 2026-06-26 v2.3 (Removed Corrections Policy and Diversity Policy sections. Added §9 to table of contents.)

9. Copyright and quotation

The handling of cluster summaries and articles respects the copyright law of each jurisdiction and follows the principles below.

Legal basis

• United States: 17 USC §107 (Fair Use — four factors: purpose / nature / amount / market effect)
• Japan: Copyright Act §30-4 (Use for information analysis — amended in 2018 to authorise LLM-based information processing), §32 (Quotation), §48 (Mandatory attribution of source)
• EU: DSM Directive Article 15 (Press publishers' neighbouring right — implemented in France, Germany, Spain, etc.), AI Act Article 50 (Transparency obligations for generative AI, adopted 2024)
• South Korea: Copyright Act §28 (Quotation), §35-5 (Fair use)

Generation principles

• Cluster summaries are an LLM-driven synthesis from multiple reports (transformative use), not a quotation of any single article.
• Summaries are strictly short factual summaries (3 sentences; approx. 150-300 chars for Japanese / 300-500 chars for English).
• Verbatim quotation of source articles is forbidden in the LLM prompt; the validator drops any reference outside the prompt.
• Facts (dates, names, places, numbers) are not subject to copyright; summaries are limited to neutral descriptions of these facts.

Attribution and link-back

• Publisher (source) and URL of each member article are clearly shown in the cluster modal.
• Tapping an article title links directly to the original publisher's page.
• "Source first" principle — the UI consistently encourages reading the original publication for detail.

No third-party images

• Third-party article images are not used (policy adopted 2026-05-17).
• Instagram Stories og-image uses only our own brand imagery.

Translation rights

World Watch machine-translates non-Japanese source articles into ja / en / fr / ko using LLM. Translation falls within the scope of rights in the original work (Japan: Copyright Act §27 right of translation, §28 rights relating to derivative works; US: 17 USC §106(2) derivative works right; EU: InfoSoc Directive Art. 2; Korea: Copyright Act §22 right to prepare derivative works), so we follow these principles:

• No republication: We do not reproduce full source articles. Only the title and a short factual summary are shown.
• Within quotation scope: The length of translated text stays within the "fair scope" of §32 quotation (per-summary character cap: ja 300 / en 500 / fr 550 / ko 300).
• Mandatory attribution (§48): Translated summaries always carry the publisher and the source URL.
• AI translation disclosure: The article modal explicitly notes that the displayed content is machine-translated.
• Opt-out compliance: On receipt of an opt-out notice from a publisher, we promptly remove the translated summaries as well.
• Correction: Mistranslations and missing context inherent to MT are corrected promptly upon reader reports or editorial discovery. Serious factual errors (misidentified persons, incorrect regions or dates, etc.) are flagged with a correction history at the top of the affected article within 72 hours.

EU neighbouring right (Article 15 DSM Directive) compliance

• For EU member-state implementations of press publishers' rights, we promptly remove summaries on receipt of an opt-out notice from the publisher.
• A publisher-ID-based blacklist is maintained to prevent re-ingestion.

Takedown

• Contact: info@gospel-ai.tech (subject: Copyright Takedown Request)
• We accept takedown requests under DMCA (US), EU press publishers' rights, and Japanese copyright law.
• Action starts within 48 hours of receipt; removal or counter-notice rationale is provided within 72 hours.
• Takedown requests and our responses are recorded in an internal takedown log.