Across reader emails and comments, one question recurs more than any other about our AI news coverage: how do we decide what counts as news versus what's just a company's own promotional announcement dressed up as one? It's a fair question, and one we think about explicitly rather than treating as obvious.
Why this question is harder than it sounds
Nearly every AI news item originates from a company with an interest in how it's covered - a funding round, a product launch, a partnership. The information is often genuinely newsworthy and also genuinely self-interested at the same time, and readers are right to wonder where the line sits.
Our actual answer
We ask whether the underlying fact would be worth reporting if the company involved had no communications team pushing it - a real funding round, product capability, or leadership change clears that bar regardless of how it reached us; a press release's own framing of why something matters generally doesn't, on its own.
Why we don't have a cleaner rule than this
A more mechanical rule would be easier to state but would either exclude genuinely newsworthy company-originated information or include genuinely promotional framing, depending on which direction it erred. We've settled for a judgment call applied consistently rather than a rule that sounds cleaner but works worse in practice.
Why we're answering this publicly rather than just applying it silently
We think readers evaluating any news source benefit from knowing the actual editorial judgment behind what gets covered, not just trusting that some judgment was applied. This is ours, stated plainly.