Editor

Facts are sacred. Opinion is labelled. Who answers for what you read here, and how it is made.

Edited by Orlin Chotev. Orlin has hosted Bulgaria's #1 technology programme since 1997 and is on air today: Микрофон и мишка (MicMouse), the weekly technology show, Политкаст and PolitCast (US). He publishes political, technology and society articles in Bulgarian and American outlets, among them Капитал, Демокрация, Начало, Webcafe and the Dallas Express. He sets the editorial rules below, chooses which sources are admitted and how each is labelled, reviews samples of the output every day, and writes a weekly editor's note, signed and marked Opinion.

The editor writes from the right, and says so. His views appear in the signed pieces marked Opinion, never in the articles, which are built from sources across the spectrum under the rules below.

Publisher: Obla LLC, Texas, United States.

Corrections: contact form, mark the message "Correction" and include the article link. Errors of fact are corrected on the article with a note; we do not silently edit.

How an article is made

Sources first. We read a fixed list of news outlets by RSS. Each outlet carries a position label, left, lean-left, center, lean-right, right, taken from public media-bias ratings (AllSides; Ad Fontes Media for the wire services). State-aligned outlets are excluded. The list and labels are decided by the editor, not by software.
Same story, several outlets. Reports about the same event are grouped. Where the group spans the spectrum, the article is written from all of them; what every source agrees on is reported as fact, and the sections Where they differ and What is not yet known say, by outlet name, what each emphasised or left out, and what nobody has established yet.
Single-source stories are refined from one outlet: loaded language, emotional intensifiers and editorial framing are removed; direct quotes are kept verbatim; nothing is added. They are marked Single-source on the page.
Every article links to the original coverage at the bottom, with each outlet's position label, so any claim can be checked at its source.
Opinion is labelled. Where an article carries interpretation, it sits only in blocks headed Background, Our reading and What to watch, marked opinion on the page. Background facts carry their provenance in brackets, the dated Fact Refinery article they come from, or background knowledge. Nothing outside those blocks is opinion.

How the writing is produced

Editorial control is human. The editor decides which outlets are read, how each is labelled, what counts as a fact, and the rules every article must follow. Those rules are written down and applied to every piece without exception.
Drafting is automated. Under those rules, software drafts each article strictly from the source reports in hand. It may not introduce a fact, figure, date or quotation that is not in one of those reports. Where the sources disagree, the article says so by outlet name; where nothing is established, it says that too.
Review. The editor reads a sample of the output every day, and any reader can flag an error through the corrections address above. Corrections are made on the article with a visible note.
Transparency. Every article carries the label AI-synthesized, links every source with its position on the spectrum, and credits its image, either the outlet it came from, or AI-generated illustration. Illustrations are deliberately non-photographic and never depict named people, so they cannot be mistaken for documentation of an event.

Editor of record

Every article on this site is published under the editorial responsibility of Orlin Chotev, editor of record. Daily articles carry the Fact Refinery name and link to this page from the footer; the weekly editor's note is signed in full and marked Opinion. Questions about any article's sourcing or labelling are answered by the editor through the corrections address above.