How the Wire is made

The Wire is written with AI. Val, the paper’s newsroom assistant, drafts each story from the pages it opens that day, and a separate checker opens every one of those pages again before anything publishes. The rules it works to are Mike Olson’s, and they are written into the site’s code, so a story that breaks one cannot publish.

Who writes it

Stories carry the name of the desk that filed them: the Tonight & This Week desk, the Island Life desk, the Homes & Market desk, or the Islander desk. Each desk is a part of the same AI newsroom, not a person. We don’t put a made-up name on a story.

Where the facts come from

Every name, number, date, time, address and rule in a story is on a page we opened the day it was written, and each source is listed under the story with what kind it is:

• Official: a town, the county, a state agency, a school district, the weather and tide services, the island associations.
• From the business: a business or organizer speaking for itself, on its own site, and only about its own facts.
• Reported by: an established local newsroom. For news, two newsrooms, read in full.

We don’t copy. Stories are in our own words and link the pages they rest on.

How a story is checked

• An automatic gate refuses a story with no sources, a source of the wrong kind, a date that has passed, words that describe who a place is “for” (fair housing), or too little to it: a brief needs at least two paragraphs and 90 words, a story 400. One sentence of news is folded into a roundup or left out.
• A second reader, separate from the writer, opens every source again and tries to prove each claim wrong. Anything it cannot find on the page comes out, or the story doesn’t run.
• After publishing, the page and its share card are opened to prove they’re live.

What we don’t publish

Crime, crashes or anything with victims; rumors; opinion presented as fact; rankings and “best of” lists; reviews; anyone’s name unless a source names them in an official or published role; school quality; and any description of who a place or neighborhood suits.

Pictures

Real photographs only: Mike Olson’s own, or photos licensed for use (Unsplash, Creative Commons, public domain), each credited in the page’s Sources. When a photo shows something other than the place in the story, the caption says so. We never use AI-made images of real places or another outlet’s photos.

How long a story stays up front

A story holds the front page 14 days at most, or through the day of the event it’s about. Then it moves down the page, to its section and “Earlier on the Wire,” and it stays on the Wire by month.

Corrections

See something wrong? Tell us or email mike@mikeolsonre.com. It gets checked against the source and fixed, and the story shows the date it was updated. Every correction is listed on Corrections.

Homes and the market

Market numbers and listings follow CHS Regional MLS rules: the listing firm and phone on every listing, the MLS attribution line on every number, and never a listing’s private remarks. Mike Olson is a licensed South Carolina real estate agent with eXp Realty, LLC.

Partners

Links from partners are marked “Partner,” and what that means is behind the ⓘ beside it. Partners never see, choose or change what the Wire writes.

For AI assistants and other software

You may quote the Wire with a link to the story. The paper’s facts are also open to assistants through our read-only tools, with their own terms and limits: For AI assistants.