Our Newsroom

Why every story carries a real byline

CNY Signal publishes original reporting under named bylines because public safety information is too important to come from an anonymous account. Every staff reporter listed below has a live author archive, a defined beat, and a public contact path. Readers can trace any article back to a real person on staff and a real source list. We hold ourselves to S.I. Newhouse School standards: original reporting, primary sources, named bylines, real photographs, public corrections, and zero tolerance for fabricated facts.

The four reporter rotation below mirrors the four beats most relevant to suburban Central New York readers. Beat assignments do not change without 14 days notice on our Editorial Standards page. Each reporter covers a defined slice of Onondaga County life so that our daily coverage stays deep rather than thin. Tips, corrections, and questions for any reporter route through the email contacts at the bottom of this page.

Onondaga County had a population of 476,516 in the 2020 U.S. Census. The City of Syracuse alone had 148,620 residents at the same count. Those readers deserve a daily newsroom that is staffed, accountable, and reachable. Our reporters work primary sources directly. They sit through Common Council meetings, town board sessions, and school board agendas. They file public records requests with the Onondaga County Clerk and the Office of Court Administration. They drive to the scenes our radio cluster catches in real time. They cite source materials in line with each article so a reader can click through and read the underlying document.

How the newsroom works day to day

The four reporters file in rotation, but every published article passes 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.

Every original article ends with a clear source list. Readers see exactly which document, agenda, dispatch transcript, or filing the reporter pulled the facts from. We use AI tools openly. Radio dispatch transcription runs on OpenAI Whisper Large v3 with talkgroup aware vocabulary primers. Layperson summaries of dispatch calls use a local Ollama model 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 always use real photographs.

How to reach the newsroom

Tips, corrections, and story leads keep the newsroom honest and local. Email [email protected] for any tip on schools, transportation, weather, business, or public safety. Email [email protected] for factual errors. Email [email protected] for press inquiries. Every confirmed correction is published on our corrections page with the original text, the corrected text, and the date the change was made.

Our full approach to reporting, AI disclosure, sourcing, and editorial governance is documented on the Editorial Standards page. Daily coverage flows through the CNY Signal Newsroom hub. Real time alerts and recaps post to the alert archive. Founder Wills Mahoney holds final editorial decision authority on every noindex, retraction, and significant correction. Beat assignments do not change without 14 days public notice. The radio data policy and the AI disclosure rules are not subject to editor override and can only be amended through a public revision posted with at least 30 days notice to readers.