1. How to report an error
The fastest channel is email. Send a note to [email protected] with three things: the article URL, the specific factual claim you believe is wrong, and your evidence for the corrected claim. Evidence can be a primary document, a court filing, a board agenda link, a contemporaneous social post you can timestamp, or your own first hand account if you were present at the event.
You can also reach us on social media at X @SignalCNY or Facebook /CNYSignal, and we will direct you to the email channel for the formal record. The "Report Inaccuracy" button on every alert detail panel routes directly into the corrections queue. Every correction request gets logged with a timestamp on receipt and a status timestamp on close. We respond to every request within 48 hours, and the median response time over the last 30 days has been 6 hours and 14 minutes.
2. What gets corrected versus what gets noindexed
The action we take depends on the severity of the error and the relevance of the article. A factual error in a still relevant article is corrected in place. The original incorrect text is replaced, a clear "Correction:" notice is added at the top of the article, and the correction is logged on this page with the date, the original text, the corrected text, and the byline of the reporter.
A factual error in a stale or low traffic article is noindexed via the cny_force_noindex post meta flag, which sets a Robots-Tag header, an HTML meta robots tag, and a post status flag so search engines stop showing the piece. The article remains accessible at its original URL for archival purposes, but it is removed from Google, Bing, and other index based search surfaces within 24 to 72 hours.
A fabricated source, fabricated quote, or fabricated event triggers an immediate noindex, an entry on this corrections page, and the addition of the fabricated name pattern to the publish gate regex so the system blocks any future article that references the same fabricated entity. A misattributed authorship error is fixed by updating the post_author column to the real reporter or persona of record. Spelling, grammar, and formatting fixes are made silently unless a reader has flagged them, in which case the change is logged here.
3. The 2026 Q1 Weinberger incident
In the first quarter of 2026, an automated newsroom prompt invented a fictitious local expert and inserted him into 16 published articles. The character was given the name Dr. Howard Weinberger and was cast in 16 distinct expert roles across those articles, including local historian, traffic analyst, agricultural expert, environmental scientist, retired educator, and Housing Authority Deputy Director. None of those quotes were real. There is a real Dr. Howard Weinberger living in Central New York. He never spoke to CNY Signal in any of the contaminated articles. We learned of the contamination on April 12, 2026.
Action taken within 72 hours of discovery: all 16 contaminated articles were noindexed via the cny_force_noindex flag. Four follow on regression articles produced under a related "Mike DiNapoli" persona were also noindexed when an audit pass found similar fabrication patterns. The single legitimate Dr. Weinberger profile, article ID 74606, was independently verified accurate and remains indexed. A Claude Haiku verifier model was deployed in front of the publish endpoint to review every GPT-4o-mini draft, the dispatch jargon dictionary was hardened to 62 signal codes and 174 translations, and a no fabricated future events rule was added to the publish gate.
Every confirmed correction is published below in chronological order, regardless of severity. We do not edit the corrections log retroactively. Once an entry is added, it stays.
4. The corrections log
| Date | Article | Action | Severity | Reporter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-04-12 | 16 Q1 articles citing "Dr. Howard Weinberger" as expert | Noindexed via cny_force_noindex flag, regex pattern added to publish gate, verifier model deployed | Fabrication | System |
| 2026-04-12 | 4 follow on articles citing "Mike DiNapoli" persona | Noindexed via cny_force_noindex flag, persona retired | Fabrication | System |
| 2026-04-15 | I-81 viaduct demolition article | Rewrite with NYSDOT primary source citations and updated 2025 traffic counts | Fact | matt-keenan |
| 2026-04-22 | Onondaga Lake cleanup status piece | Updated NYSDEC superfund timeline citation, removed quote from unverified source | Fact | jen-okafor |
| 2026-04-27 | Suburban housing trends roundup | Replaced one stock photo flagged as if from local event with text only block, attribution corrected | Photo | sarah-chen |
| 2026-05-02 | Chat surface bot persona messages | Sanitizer regex broadened to strip [BOT MESSAGE] prefix, 999 historical DB rows backfilled | Format | System |
| 2026-07-14 | Article published with a literal "$X million" placeholder | Placeholder text corrected, pre-publish gate added that blocks any article containing unresolved placeholder patterns | Fact | System |
| 2026-07-15 | Alert entries merging unrelated radio calls | Deduplication logic corrected in three places so unrelated incidents can no longer merge into one entry, affected entries reviewed | Fact | System |
| 2026-08-01 | Back catalog audit, quotes and statistics | Internal audit removed quotes and statistics that could not be verified against a source, affected articles updated or noindexed, verification step added to the publish pipeline | Sourcing | System |
| 2026-08-13 | Alert detail pages carrying explicit ages of minors | Redaction rules extended so ages of minors are generalized to "juvenile" across all public transcript and summary text | Privacy | System |
The log above starts with the most consequential corrections of the last 30 days. Older corrections will be added retroactively as we audit the back catalog. If you spot a piece that should be on this list and is not, email us.
5. Editorial governance
A CNY Signal editor makes the final decision on every noindex, every retraction, and every significant correction, and is reachable at [email protected]. Articles are published under the CNY Signal News Team byline rather than individual reporter names. The publish gate enforces a hard floor of 18 verifiable facts, three named sources, zero fabricated names, and zero fabricated future events on every original article. The editorial board runs a three round vote on every controversial story, and a story needs a two of three majority to clear the publish endpoint. The radio data policy is governed separately and includes mandatory PII redaction, juvenile name suppression, and active investigation suppression at the source layer.
6. Contact
Editorial corrections: [email protected]
General tips and story leads: [email protected]
Press inquiries: [email protected]
Privacy concerns and data deletion requests: [email protected]
Mail: CNY Signal, Onondaga County, New York. Corrections and removal requests are answered fastest at [email protected].
For our full editorial standards, including the four reporter rotation, the 18 fact quality gate, and the AI disclosure rules, see our Editorial Standards page.