About The Austin Bulletin

The Austin Bulletin publishes one news bulletin every morning, seven days a week. It covers Austin and Texas. It reports facts, not opinions.

Trust & how we work

• What the model does: An AI system reads that morning’s news from established local outlets and primary sources, selects items that matter to daily life in Austin, and writes short, neutral summaries with links back to the reporting. It never calculates new figures or invents quotes; numbers are quoted from sources, and every fact traces to something we read that morning.
• What a human checks: The publisher (Evan McMillan) supervises the system, reviews the edition, and is responsible for it. The pre‑publish gate checks links, sourcing, item lengths and counts, initialisms, visuals, and that the page reads clean top to bottom. If a check fails, we fix it or cut the item; an edition that cannot pass is not published.
• How we gather: We identify ourselves honestly on fetches (TheAustinBulletin/1.0 (+https://theaustinbulletin.com)), read an outlet’s robots.txt before adding a path, and don’t engineer around a site’s stated policy. KVUE stories are read through their official MSN syndication when available; otherwise we cite another readable source or, as a last resort, run a clearly labeled one‑sentence relay that says only what the teaser says.
• Neutrality & accuracy: We report what happened and who said what. Political stories present each side’s own words with links. If sources disagree, we say so. Surprising claims need two sources; a trusted outlet’s single‑sourced report may run only when the sourcing is stated in the item’s prose.
• Corrections: When we get something wrong, we fix it with a visible note in the bulletin (see “Corrections” below). We never silently erase an error.
• Full policy: Read our Editorial Rulebook and daily procedure for the complete, binding rules:
  • Editorial Rulebook: EDITORIAL.md
  • The daily pipeline: PIPELINE.md

How this site is made

An AI system produces this site. It reads the day's news from established local outlets, selects the stories that matter most to daily life in Austin, and writes short, neutral summaries with links to the original reporting. Evan McMillan, the publisher, supervises the system, reviews its output, and is responsible for the site.

Our rules

• We report what happened and who said what. We do not say whether a policy is good or bad.
• Political stories present each side's own words, with links.
• Every fact comes from a source we read that morning, linked in the story.
• Numbers are quoted from sources, never calculated by us.
• If sources disagree, we say so.
• If we cannot verify a story, we leave it out.

How we decide what leads

Each beat carries a few longer items with headlines, and a run of one-sentence briefs. An item earns a headline if it meets any of these tests:

• Someone was killed or seriously hurt.
• Money or a rule that binds residents changed — a vote taken, a price set, a contract signed, a ban enacted.
• Something closes, opens, or changes today or this week.
• A decision is scheduled, with a date.

At most two per beat. If nothing in a beat meets the test, nothing in that beat gets a headline. You can check any morning's bulletin against this list.

Corrections

When we get something wrong, we fix it with a visible note in the bulletin: "Correction: an earlier version said X. The correct fact is Y." We never silently erase errors.

Contact

Feedback and corrections are welcome. Email Evan McMillan, the publisher, at contact@theaustinbulletin.com.

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Subscribe by RSS: add https://theaustinbulletin.com/feed.xml to any feed reader and each morning's bulletin will arrive on its own.