1. Who we are and what we cover
CNY Signal is a hyperlocal real time public safety and local news platform serving Onondaga County, the City of Syracuse, and the surrounding suburbs of Central New York. The platform was founded in 2026 by Wills Mahoney, a Syracuse resident and Plowz and Mowz operator, as a citizen first response to the long decline of local print reporting.
Onondaga County had a population of 476,516 in the 2020 U.S. Census, and the City of Syracuse alone had 148,620 residents at the same count. Those people deserve a daily newsroom. We hold ourselves to S.I. Newhouse School standards: original reporting, primary sources, named bylines, real photos, public corrections, and zero tolerance for fabricated facts. Our tagline is "Know before the news does," because the bulk of CNY Signal content reaches readers within minutes of the underlying public safety event, not the next morning's print cycle.
2. How we report
Our newsroom runs on a four reporter rotation that covers the four beats most relevant to suburban CNY readers. Matt Keenan covers transportation and infrastructure, including New York State Department of Transportation projects on Interstate 81, Route 481, and Route 690. Sarah Chen covers schools, zoning, and housing across the 18 public school districts inside Onondaga County. Mike Rivera covers business and development, including Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency filings and Syracuse Regional Airport Authority activity. Jen Okafor covers weather and public safety, including National Weather Service Buffalo and Binghamton products and Onondaga County 911 dispatches.
Every original article published under one of those four bylines must clear a hard quality gate before it goes live. The gate requires a minimum of 18 verifiable facts per piece, each tied to a primary source. It requires a minimum of three named human or institutional sources per piece. It requires a real photograph for every event specific story, never a stock image staged as if it came from the event. It requires zero fabricated names, zero fabricated quotes, and zero fabricated future events. A three round editorial board vote runs on every controversial story before publish, with two of three votes required to clear.
3. Radio reporting pipeline
Radio based incident reporting follows a separate but equally strict pipeline. We capture Onondaga County public safety radio on a Software Defined Radio cluster and transcribe it using OpenAI Whisper Large v3 with talkgroup aware vocabulary primers. The primer set covers 41 dispatch vocabulary families and 174 jargon translations across fire, EMS, police, sheriff, and 911 dispatch traffic. Every transcript is geocoded inside the talkgroup boundary, never outside it, so a Solvay PD radio call cannot accidentally render as a Manlius dispatch. Every transcript is run through a personally identifiable information redactor before publish, and any call that touches a juvenile, a sexual assault, a mental health crisis, or an active criminal investigation is suppressed at the source.
4. The fabrication policy
In the first quarter of 2026, an automated newsroom prompt invented a fictitious local expert. The fabricated character, given the name Dr. Howard Weinberger, was inserted into 16 published articles in roles ranging from local historian to traffic analyst to Housing Authority Deputy Director. There is a real Dr. Howard Weinberger living in Central New York. He never spoke to CNY Signal in any of those 16 articles, and the quotes attributed to him were entirely manufactured by a large language model. We discovered the contamination on April 12, 2026.
Within 72 hours we noindexed all 16 contaminated articles, plus four follow on regression articles from a related "Mike DiNapoli" persona. The single legitimate profile of the real Dr. Weinberger, article ID 74606, was independently verified accurate and remains indexed. We then deployed five permanent guardrails to prevent recurrence. First, a fabrication detection regex now strips known invented patterns before publish. Second, a Claude Haiku verifier model now reviews every GPT-4o-mini draft before the publish endpoint accepts it. Third, a static dispatch jargon dictionary of 62 signal codes and 174 translations means the AI no longer has room to invent codes. Fourth, a "no fabricated future events" rule blocks any article that references a meeting, vote, or event date the system cannot confirm against the relevant municipal calendar. Fifth, every confirmed correction is logged on our public corrections page with the original text, the corrected text, and the date the change was made.
5. AI disclosure
CNY Signal uses artificial intelligence throughout our pipeline, and we disclose it transparently rather than hiding it behind a fake byline. Radio dispatch transcription runs on OpenAI Whisper Large v3 with talkgroup aware vocabulary primers. Layperson summaries of dispatch calls use Ollama llama3.1:8b on a local RTX 5060 with a strict "do not invent facts" prompt. Newsroom drafting uses GPT-4o-mini with a Claude Haiku verifier in front of the publish endpoint. Hero images for non event posts may be generated by DALL-E 3, but only when the article is a feature, explainer, or evergreen piece. Event specific articles, including incidents, accidents, fires, and dispatches, must use real photographs only. We never use a stock photo as if it came from a specific local event. No photo is always better than a fake photo, even when the gap is awkward. Every transcript that includes any AI generated content carries an "AI assisted" badge in the published interface, and our chat surface treats AI persona messages identically to human messages with no special formatting, hidden flags, or sanitizer leaks.
6. Sourcing rules
Primary sources drive every piece. Our regular primary source list includes the Onondaga County Land Records portal, town board agendas for all 19 towns inside Onondaga County, school district board agendas for the 18 public districts, New York State DOT 511NY data feeds, NYSDEC enforcement actions, U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey tables, the National Weather Service Buffalo and Binghamton offices, the Onondaga County GIS portal, the Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency website, and the U.S. District Court Northern District of New York PACER feed. Reporters file every story with at least one of those primary sources directly cited.
Secondary sources are referenced, never copied. We read syracuse.com, the Daily Orange, Eagle Newspapers, WSYR Channel 9, and Spectrum News Central New York every morning. We do not rewrite their articles. When a competing local outlet publishes a story we are also working on, our piece must add at least one of three things: a primary source they did not cite, a calculation or data point they did not run, or an angle their piece did not cover. If we cannot add any of those three, we kill the story rather than aggregate.
Social media is for tip detection only, never sourcing. A Facebook post in a Syracuse community group can flag that a story exists. It cannot serve as the source for the story. Direct quotes always require a named human, a verifiable contact, and a record of when the quote was given. We do not publish anonymous quotes except in narrowly scoped cases involving witnesses to crime, victims of harassment, or public sector whistleblowers, and even then only with editor sign off.
7. What we do not cover
We do not cover ongoing criminal investigations until charges are filed in court, even when a competitor has run with the story. We do not publish the addresses of victims, suspects, or minors under any circumstance. We do not publish the names of juveniles in dispatch traffic, and the radio redactor strips those names before transcripts reach the public surface. We do not cover stories outside Central New York unless the story materially affects CNY readers, and the threshold for that materiality is high. We do not run native advertising, advertorials, or paid placements without explicit "Sponsored" labeling at the top and bottom of the unit, and our sponsor admin uses a constant time comparison on the access constant to prevent timing attacks against the sponsor key. We do not cover partisan political campaigns. We do not run police booking photo galleries. We do not cover stories where the only available source is a single anonymous social media post.
8. Editorial governance
Wills Mahoney holds final editorial decision authority on every noindex, retraction, and significant correction. The four reporter rotation is governed by a published beat assignment that does not change without 14 days notice on this page. The editorial board, which votes on every controversial story before publish, runs three rounds and requires a two of three majority to clear. The radio data policy and the AI disclosure rules above are not subject to editor override. They can only be amended through a public revision posted on this page with at least 30 days notice to readers.
9. Contact
Have a question, a tip, or a correction? Email [email protected] for factual errors, [email protected] for story leads, or [email protected] for press inquiries. Every confirmed correction is published in full on our corrections page.