SignalPop methodology
How SignalPop tiers its 32 news sources for trust
A three-tier system that decides which sources route directly to the brief, which get LLM scoring, and which need multi-source corroboration before they appear at all.
SignalPop pulls from roughly thirty-two sources every two hours. Not all of those sources are treated equally. We sort them into three tiers based on accuracy track record, correction policy, primary-document linkage, and whether their editorial process is auditable.
Tier one is the verbatim tier. Reuters, the Associated Press, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal news desk, the Financial Times news desk, the Federal Reserve, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Treasury, and SEC filings. Items from these sources route to the brief without LLM rewriting and without the Bullshit Index threshold being applied. The reasoning: these are the sources the rest of the media is quoting an hour later. We carry them as primary signal.
Tier two is the corroboration tier. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, Bloomberg, Axios, CNBC, MarketWatch, the Guardian, the Economist, NPR, PBS NewsHour, the Hill, Just the News, NBC, ABC, and CBS news divisions. Items from these sources go through the standard headline-scoring pipeline. They appear in the brief if they corroborate a tier-one report or if they are the only source carrying a substantive story.
Tier three is the watch tier. Cable-news websites, opinion-heavy outlets, single-author Substacks, partisan press shops. Items from these sources are ingested but they do not surface unless a tier-one or tier-two source corroborates the same story. A tier-three exclusive is treated as a rumor until a tier-one or tier-two confirms it.
We publish the tier assignments because they are the most consequential editorial decision SignalPop makes. The tier system is the difference between a balanced wire-led summary and a feed that drifts toward whichever cable network had the loudest evening. We adjust tiers in response to documented accuracy failures — a major retraction moves a tier-two source to tier-three for ninety days; a sustained correction streak moves a tier-three source up to tier-two.
The full source list is in our admin and we are working on a public source-trust page that surfaces current tier assignments and recent moves. Until then, the rule of thumb is: if it leads with the wire copy, it's tier one; if it ran the wire copy plus a take, it's tier two; if it is all take and no wire, it's tier three.
FAQ
- Is the tier system ideological?
- No. Tier assignment is based on accuracy track record and correction policy, not editorial slant. Outlets on the left and right are present in all three tiers. The Wall Street Journal news desk and NPR are both in tier one. The New York Times and the Hill are both in tier two.
- Does a tier-three source ever make it to the brief?
- Only when corroborated by a tier-one or tier-two source carrying the same story. The tier-three source is then cited alongside the corroborating source.
- How often do tiers change?
- Rarely. Tiers reflect long-run accuracy patterns. We've moved one source up and two sources down in the last year. Each move is logged.
- Why is the X (Twitter) firehose not a source?
- Because the firehose is not a publisher. We do ingest specific accounts with reporter credentials, but they appear in the brief only when their reporting is later confirmed by their publication. We are not in the business of citing tweets as news.
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