Editorial policy

How content on this site is produced, what software does and what humans decide, how everything is sourced, and how to get an error fixed.

Our standards

• Every number traces to a public source. Outage counts are the figures the utilities and the federal ODIN outage feed themselves report — we never estimate how many customers are out. Where a displayed number that combines utility feeds with the federal county count differs from the county count alone, the page says so. Every source and how often it updates is documented on the sources page.
• Safety and preparedness claims cite named authorities. Guides attribute every factual claim to a named public authority (USDA, FDA, CPSC, Ready.gov, the American Red Cross, HHS) with a link, and give no medical or legal advice beyond citing them.
• Predictions are graded in public. Every restoration estimate we publish is later scored against when power actually came back — the full, unedited record, including the misses, is on the accuracy page. Utilities' own posted restoration times are graded by the same yardstick.
• No fabricated anything. No invented quotes, no fake author personas, no speculation presented as fact, and no content written to fill space. If we don't have the data, the page says so.

How content is produced — what software does, what humans decide

This site is data-driven and largely automated, and we think you should know exactly where the automation stops:

• Live pages are automated. The map, county/city/state pages, and utility pages render live feed data on a ~15-minute cycle. No human writes "12,304 customers out" — the feeds do.
• News articles are drafted by software and published on one of two paths. Major outages auto-draft into structured articles from the live data. Most then wait for an operator to review and publish them. Events above a size we set in advance — currently 25,000 customers out, or a quarter of a county (at least 5,000 customers), sustained for at least ten minutes — publish automatically, without a person reading them first, because a report that arrives after the lights come back is not a report. Both paths clear the same publishing gates, which refuse a draft outright: timelines must be internally consistent, restoration times already in the past can't be presented as predictions, weather claims must come from the live National Weather Service feed, and every link must resolve to a real page. Each published article records which path published it and when, and its byline says so — so "human-reviewed before publication" appears only where that is literally true.
• Restoration estimates are algorithmic — computed from each outage's own recovery trend (method on the accuracy page) and clearly labeled as ours, separate from the utility's official time.
• Guides are edited documents with a visible reviewed date, updated when the cited authorities' guidance changes.

Authorship

Content is published under organizational authorship — "When's the Power Back? editorial" — with a visible reviewed or published date. We don't attach invented human bylines. Structured data identifies the organization as the author and publisher.

Corrections

If a number, claim, or citation is wrong, tell us via the contact form (choose "correction" or mention it in your message). What happens next:

• We check the claim against its source — the live feed, the archived reading, or the cited authority.
• If it's wrong, we fix it. Published news articles are corrected in place and show an updated timestamp distinct from the original publication time; guides bump their reviewed date.
• If our data source itself was wrong (a utility feed mis-reporting, for example), we say that on the affected page rather than silently changing history.

Live outage numbers correct themselves on the next data refresh (~15 minutes); the corrections process above is for published articles, guides, and methodology claims.