The rules we actually follow.
Aggregating the news is easy. Doing it without becoming part of the noise takes some rules. Here are ours — sourcing, AI, bylines, and the wall between editorial and the ad people.
Where the news comes from
SignalPop aggregates from a curated list of named US and international outlets that have actual editorial operations — Reuters, AP, BBC, NPR, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, Politico, Axios, the Guardian, and a few dozen more. We do not republish full articles. Every headline links out to the publisher that did the work.
What doesn't make the cut: tabloids, AI-generated content farms, pure aggregators, and anything with no masthead. The full source list and its trust tiers live at /about/methodology.
How we use AI
The daily Brief is drafted by AI and edited by a human. In plain language, the pipeline is:
- Round up the most important, multi-sourced headlines from the last several hours.
- A model drafts a ranked summary into a strict format — no free-form AI rambling ever reaches you.
- A sanitizer strips exclamation points, ALL-CAPS, Twitter-style snark, and anything editorializing on a claim nobody's verified.
- Chris Kaz reads the result. Only then does it publish.
Every brief is reviewed by Chris Kaz before publishing. The AI never publishes unattended.
Bylines and who wrote what
On story cards: when a source feed provides a journalist byline, we surface it as By [Author] · [Source]. Those bylines credit the reporter at the publisher — they are not SignalPop staff. SignalPop is a one-person operation; the only human writing or editing here is Chris Kaz, Editor.
On the daily Brief: the byline is the editor. The body is AI-drafted and human-edited, and every item links back to its original sources.
Headlines stay as written
The original publisher's wording is preserved on every outbound link. Our scoring affects ranking only — it decides what floats to the top, never what the headline says.
Conflicts of interest
SignalPop accepts sponsorships. Sponsored content is always labeled Sponsored and never dressed up as editorial. Who buys an ad has exactly zero influence on which stories appear, how they rank, or what the Brief says. The editor doesn't take gifts, junkets, or pre-publication review from companies in the news mix.
What we don't do
- We don't republish full articles.
- We don't scrape paywalled content past the abstract.
- We don't sell the subscriber list or run affiliate links inside the Brief.
- We don't take payment for placement, inclusion, or a friendlier framing.