Moosed News

Why grade at all?

Our foundation research looked for any news outlet that publicly grades the verification status of stories or claims on a fixed scale. None was found — not in Fort Wayne, and not nationally in this form. BBC Verify shows its working on external and viral content; the Trust Project labels type of work and process; NewsGuard rates whole outlets; fact-check meters grade politicians’ claims. Nobody grades claim by claim, in the open, as a matter of routine. That niche is empty, and this desk is how we fill it.

Sources: BBC Verify — Wikipedia · Trust Project — Nieman Lab · NewsGuard — Wikipedia

The rules that keep the grades honest

• Per claim, not per story. Stories are bundles of claims of mixed strength; a single story grade would mislead, so grades attach to claims, in line.
• Every grade links its evidence. A grade you cannot audit is marketing, not journalism.
• Grades change in public. A grade change is a correction: it is timestamped and logged, never silently edited.
• Our own stories carry sourcing labels too — primary-source documented, two-source reported, or single-source and labelled as such.

One submission already reaches four calendars

Fort Wayne already runs a consent-based syndication hub: submit an event to Visit Fort Wayne / Current Fort Wayne and, with your consent, it may also be picked up by Downtown Fort Wayne, Arts United, and Riverfront Fort Wayne. The rules: Allen County only, open to the public, staff review, publication within about two working days. The visitor calendar excludes school activities, classes and workshops, civic and corporate meetings, and political events — exactly the long tail a news outlet’s calendar should cover.

Source: Visit Fort Wayne event submission guidelines · City listings: City of Fort Wayne calendar

How we aggregate — legally

Event facts — who, what, when, where, price — are not copyrightable. Event expression — descriptions, posters, photos — is. So this desk rewrites every listing in its own words, uses only organiser-supplied or licensed images, and always links to the organiser or ticketing page. We do not scrape Facebook or Eventbrite: both prohibit automated collection in their terms, and Eventbrite shut down its public event-search API in December 2019. A human editor checks the key pages daily. That is a workflow cost we pay on purpose.

Sources: Eventbrite API terms · Meta automated-collection terms, summary

The line this desk does not cross

Public traffic cameras are published by the state for travelers, inside their terms — a terms check on linking is still owed and is listed in Still Open. Police license-plate reader networks (Flock ALPR) are a closed law-enforcement database: not public, not a source, never linked, never used. If a feed’s public status is in doubt, it does not appear here.

The sourcing law of this newsroom

• Facts are free; expression is not. We learn facts from any source, then report and write in our own words, with attribution and a link. We never copy another outlet’s text or photos.
• Licensed republication only on the licence’s terms — Creative Commons sources credited and linked exactly as their guidelines require; ProPublica and Conversation images are not covered by their text licences and are never taken.
• A text licence is not a photo licence. Photos are the highest-risk copyright category; only our own, organiser-supplied, licensed, or public-domain images run.
• Press releases are labelled as releases. Labelling a document a press release is an implied licence to reproduce it — but a diet of verbatim releases is a commodity, not journalism. We rewrite, verify, and link the source document.
• Credit does not cure copying. “Credit given” is not permission, for wire copy, competitor copy, or a reader’s social-media photo.

Corrections, and the risks we plan around

There is no general legal duty to correct — but Indiana’s retraction statute, discussed in Journal-Gazette Co. v. Bandido’s, Inc. (Ind. Ct. App. 1996), lets a conspicuous retraction limit recovery to actual damages, and corrections are a scored criterion in every trust framework we studied. Our rule is stricter than the law’s: prompt, conspicuous, timestamped corrections that never silently alter the record — including grade changes, which are corrections.

The core legal risks for a local outlet are defamation (Indiana requires defamatory meaning, falsity, publication, fault, and damages; public figures must prove actual malice), copyright on photos and wire copy, and privacy torts on stories about ordinary people — statistically the dangerous ones. Crime-reporting hygiene is house policy: charged is not convicted, and name-clearing follow-ups run when charges resolve.

Sources: Journal-Gazette Co. v. Bandido’s — Justia · Indiana defamation elements — LegalClarity

The shield-law question we will not guess at

Indiana Code §§34-46-4-1 and 34-46-4-2 give an absolute privilege against being compelled to disclose the source of information obtained in newsgathering — in state matters. The limits are documented: it protects source identity, not notes or underlying information; it does not apply in federal proceedings; and its text speaks of newspapers, periodicals, wire services, and licensed broadcasters. Whether a digital-only outlet like this one fits that text is not resolved in the case law we found — so we do not promise any source confidentiality until Indiana media counsel answers it.

Source: Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Indiana compendium (updated Apr. 2026)

Corrections & grade-change log

November 1, 2026 — log opened. No corrections filed yet. Every correction and every grade change will appear here, timestamped, with what changed and why. An empty log is a starting point, not a boast: the first error we make gets the same treatment as anyone else’s claim — in the open.

Give your agent the brief

Copy the block below into your agent’s instructions. It tells the agent where this edition lives, how to treat its grades, and the one rule that matters: a claim graded UNPROVEN is a claim nobody has confirmed — including us.