The bylines are personas, not people.
Hindsite's authors — Yara Mansour on the foreign desk, Jonas Brandt on macroeconomics, Asha Lindqvist at large, Cornelia Ash on politics, Mateo Vega on protests, Mira Okafor on humanitarian and disaster reporting, Daichi Müller on football, Tomás Coen on combat sports, Hannelore Schiff on obituaries, Inés Rovira on motorsport — are editorial personas. Each carries a beat, a voice, and a stable register so the reader can recognise a Brandt column without checking the masthead. None of them are living people. None of them have personal lives, employers, or vendettas. They exist to give a Claude-generated piece continuity of judgement across days.
We disclose this prominently here, on every author page, and in the source-code repository. Personas are tools for consistency; pretending they are humans would be deception.
Pieces are generated, then legally checked.
Every published Leader / Briefing / Bench piece passes through a two-stage pipeline:
- Composition.Claude Sonnet 4.5 receives a system prompt containing (a) the UK legal preamble, (b) the bylined author's voice fragment, and (c) the output schema. It writes from a curated set of source articles, with extracted claims and cross-source clusters attached so it sees what is well-attested and what is disputed.
- Libel-check. A second pass — Claude Haiku 4.5 — re-reads the finished piece and flags any sentence that imputes wrongdoing to a named living person without adequate source attribution. Flagged pieces still publish but their flags persist for automated post-publication review.
UK law sets the floor.
Hindsite is a UK publication. Everything published here is written under the Defamation Act 2013, the Editors' Code of Practice, and the ICO's guidance on reporting. The legal preamble that every author voice sits on top of includes nine hard rules. The most important:
- Allegations are always attributed — never asserted as fact. "X is reported to have…" not "X did".
- No imputation of crimes to named living people without a charge, conviction, or admission in the source material.
- No motives ascribed without a source. "X has said he wants Y", not "X wants Y".
- No revival of retracted or settled claims — even with attribution — unless the sources are themselves reporting on the retraction.
- States, governments, militaries, and corporations are not living persons under UK defamation law. We write about their conduct directly, with publisher naming inline for traceability.
Every claim cites a source.
The bracketed numerals — 3 — that appear inside a piece reference the source-article list at the foot of the page. Hovering or tapping a citation opens the original wire story in a new tab. We do not paraphrase claims out of citation; if a piece asserts something substantive, there is a numbered source for it.
Where sources disagree, we say so explicitly. The "Sources disagree" card on the event page surfaces claim-clusters where corroborators and contradictors both exist in the article set we used. We do not pick a side silently.
We archive what we change.
When a Leader, Briefing or Bench piece is regenerated or replaced — for example, when overnight news invalidates a headline filed at dawn — the prior version is copied to the archive before being overwritten. The corrections log surfaces these changes in chronological order with the reason for each. Nothing is silently retracted.
Multilingual editions are native, not machine-translated.
When you click Français or Deutsch on a piece, the edition you read was written natively in that language by the same author persona — same byline, same stance, same beats — not run through a translation API. Each language edition passes its own libel-check.
What we do not do.
- We do not generate photorealistic imagery of real events or real people. The synthetic-news risk is too high to justify the visual.
- We do not publish opinion as fact. Opinion sentences are signalled — "this column would argue", "the evidence suggests" — so the honest-opinion defence under s.3 Defamation Act 2013 remains available.
- We do not write outside the supplied sources. If the wires don't say it, we don't either.
Contact and corrections.
Spotted something wrong, defamatory, or out of date? Reach the editorial desk at contact@hindsite.com. We log every correction request and respond inside two UK business days. The corrections log records what changed, when, and why.