Editorial standards

CRAYON - CReAte Your Own Newspaper, publishing since 1995 - is a guide to the day's journalism. This page says who is responsible for it, how its pages are made, and how to hold us to it.

Who is responsible

CRAYON is independently owned and operated by its co-founder Dave Maher, who is responsible for these standards and for every editorial decision on the site. CRAYON was co-created in 1995 by Jeff Boulter and Dave Maher (Who to Blame, as the site has put it since the 1990s). Reach the editor through the contact page; a person reads every message.

How our pages are made

The journalism is the outlets'. Every headline on CRAYON is the original outlet's own, credited and linked; reading an article means visiting the outlet that reported it. CRAYON writes no news articles and sends readers to the journalists who did the work.

The ranking is arithmetic. Stories rise by the breadth of independent coverage, recency, and reader votes - never clicks, dwell time, or outrage. The principles are public on the methodology page. No person and no advertiser decides what leads.

Machine-written text is labeled, limited, and checked. Four elements of CRAYON are machine-written, and each is labeled as CRAYON's where it appears:

• Story summaries - two neutral sentences on stories covered by several outlets, written only from those outlets' own published accounts.
• "How the coverage differs" - a short CRAYON analysis, on stories with three or more independent accounts, describing what different outlets emphasize. It attributes every observation to a named outlet and takes no side.
• Topic introductions - two or three sentences at the top of a topic page, drawn from the stories tracked there.
• The Daily's editor note - the short note opening our morning email, written from that day's top stories.

What this machine-written text never does: choose or rank stories, add facts not in the outlets' accounts, or state an opinion on a contested question. It exists to help you choose which original accounts to read. The editor reviews it continuously, and a verified error is corrected or removed under the corrections policy below.

Sourcing

CRAYON follows a curated list of established news organizations - wire services, national outlets, broadcasters, and specialist desks - published in full on the sources page. Corroboration is counted honestly: repeated syndicated copy counts as one voice, not several, and every story page marks who reported it first. Outlets carry left/center/right labels reflecting widely published media-bias assessments, so the spread of coverage is visible on every story.

Independence

CRAYON carries no advertising and no sponsored placement; nothing on the site is paid for by anyone it covers. There is no pay-for-coverage and no pay-for-removal. CRAYON is not a financial publisher and takes no positions in anything it links to. It has been independently owned by its founders since 1995, funded by them, and its reader accounts are free.

Corrections

What is ours to correct - story grouping, machine-written text, attribution, outlet lean labels - we correct quickly, and material fixes are noted on the affected page. The full policy, including how to dispute coverage of you, is at crayon.net/about/corrections; report anything through the contact form. Corrections to the original articles are the publishing outlets' to make - we link to their work, and their corrections appear at the source.

Standards last reviewed November 11, 2026 · Methodology · Corrections · Contact