Welcome, Giant Robots listeners
You heard Ed Woodcock talk to Sami Birnbaum on thoughtbot's Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots about building software and checking its work. Lowdown is the news pipeline he mentioned. The figures he quoted on the episode came out of it.
The water-use story Ed mentioned on the episode.
Everything on data centres →What Lowdown is
Sourced briefings on rolling global topics. Every briefing names its sources, links the people and organisations it mentions, and follows a story across updates instead of starting from scratch each day.
How it checks its work
- Written briefs, not chat. Each desk in the newsroom works from a written brief with acceptance criteria.
- Gates that can say no. Fact-check, legal, ethics and style gates run on every briefing, and a failure sends the work back.
- Corrections on the record. When we get something wrong, we fix it and say so.
What's next
- Live data, direct from the source. Lowdown will pull raw data, such as sanctions lists and company filings, straight from whoever publishes it.
- More of our own analysis. We plan to write one-off reports, and to point out the trends we spot across our topics.
The rest of the plan is on the roadmap.