The rules the Wire operates under. Published in full, applied to every story, enforced by humans who sign their bylines.
1 · Selection. The editorial system monitors NCUA filings, FedNow registry changes, court records, regulatory enforcement orders, and a curated set of state-regulator feeds. Filings that meet our newsworthiness thresholds are surfaced to the publisher daily.
2 · Drafting. Once the publisher selects a story, the system drafts from the underlying records — never from press releases, never from trade-press coverage. The draft cites every claim back to a specific filing or dataset.
3 · Fact-check. Before publish, every number in the draft is re-pulled from its primary source and compared against the draft. Drift triggers a hold, not a publish.
4 · Human review. The publisher reads the full draft, verifies sourcing, checks framing, and signs the byline. No story ships unsigned.
5 · Publish & pin. Sources are linked inline. Verification timestamps are written into the page. The page becomes the canonical, dated, named-byline record.
6 · Corrections. If anything is wrong — a number, a name, a date, a framing — we fix it on the original page, note what changed, and add a line to the corrections log. The original error is not removed.
The Wire uses AI deliberately and openly. We do not use it to fabricate, to summarize trade press, or to manufacture quotes. We use it to do what AI is genuinely good at — pulling filings, re-checking numbers, drafting from records — under human editorial control.
What AI does. Monitors regulatory feeds. Reads filings. Re-pulls every number from its primary source on publish. Drafts story bodies from sourced records.
What AI does not do. Pick what gets published. Manufacture quotes. Invent sources. Summarize other reporters' work. Generate photography. Decide who to interview. Send the story.
Who is accountable. The publisher. Every byline names a human. Every correction is owned by that human. The editorial system is a tool, not a journalist.
Every correction is listed here with the date, the story, and what changed. We do not quietly edit published work.
No corrections published yet. When a story needs correcting, the correction will appear here — with the date, the story, what changed, and a link to the current version of the page. The corrections log is also available at /thecreditunionwire/corrections for direct linking.
The Wire takes no vendor sponsorship and sells no editorial influence. Trade-group, league, institutional, or philanthropic support is acceptable only when disclosed and governed by a written editorial-independence firewall.
It is also worth saying out loud how the publication is currently sustained. The Credit Union Wire is published by The Credit Union Wire LLC, a Michigan limited liability company. The same operator also runs a separate data product — CU Wire Data at cuwiredata.com — that operates paid tiers for scaled data use. Revenue from those tiers sustains the Wire. It does not buy editorial input. The two products are walled off the same way Bloomberg's terminal business is walled off from Bloomberg News, or Consumer Reports' testing operation is walled off from its reporting. A future nonprofit conversion is planned; it will be disclosed publicly when it happens.
The access model is free public inspection and paid operational-scale use. The Wire remains free to read. Basic public-interest data access can be free. Institutions pay for convenience, workflow, monitoring, exports, bulk access, and heavier research use — not for influence over the journalism.
The current concrete commitments. No funder, sponsor, or data-product customer reviews drafts, picks stories, gets advance notice of coverage, or has veto over corrections. Funding relationships are disclosed in stories where they are relevant. Major gifts of $5,000 or more will be named publicly when received. The editorial wall is documented and the agreement template is available on request.
A list of things the Wire will not do, written down so they can be held against us.
· Sell coverage or access. No sponsored articles, no paid placement, no draft review, no story vetoes, no quiet retractions, and no preferential treatment for funders, sponsors, subscribers, or customers.
· Publish sponsored content. No native, no advertorial, no "in partnership with."
· Quietly remove or rewrite published stories. Corrections are visible; retractions are explicit.
· Summarize other reporters' work. If a story is broken by another outlet, we credit them and link out. If we add value, we add it through independent reporting from primary sources.
· Use AI to manufacture quotes, sources, or facts. Ever.
· Cover Joshua Herman's outside interests going forward. CU WealthNext has not been covered by the Wire and will not be. The Wire published two stories referencing Runline AI in April 2026, before this commitment was formalized; both remain published with a disclosure linked, consistent with our no-silent-removal rule. CU WealthNext and Runline AI are excluded from all future Wire coverage. See conflicts & disclosures.