How the brief gets made.

The morning read

Every issue starts the same way: a morning sweep of the local desks that actually cover New York, a fixed roster of about 60 feeds across 9 categories, from THE CITY, Gothamist, and the Post to Streetsblog, Chalkbeat, Crain's, The Real Deal, Eater, and the team blogs. The roster is chosen to span every borough and Albany, and every outlet on it is public: see the desks we read.

The read is full text, not headlines. In the latest sweep, on July 13, 2026, that meant 115 articles from 20 sources, all of it on the desk before a word of the brief is written. The only things dropped before the read are duplicates and junk headlines; there is no engagement algorithm deciding what you get to see.

What makes the brief

Selection is editorial judgment against a fixed test, the same every morning. A story earns its place by answering three questions in order: what actually happened, what it means for how you live here, and who benefits or pays. The day's biggest stories are clustered wherever they ran, so one event covered by five outlets reads as one story, not five.

The lead account comes from the desks that just report it, before anyone sells a take. Then the brief does the part a feed never does: it says the so-what out loud, for your rent, your commute, and your block, and it names who comes out ahead. The 9 categories and the questions asked of every story are fixed and public; browse the coverage by topic to see the framework at work.

The sourcing rules

These are not aspirations. Each rule is checked mechanically before a brief is allowed to publish.

• Every claim is cited. Each story carries numbered citations tied to specific articles, and a checker verifies that every citation points at the article the sentence names.
• Single-source claims are named as such. Something is stated as established only when two or more independent outlets corroborate it. A striking claim carried by one outlet is attributed to that outlet by name, never laundered into the neutral record.
• Quotes are verified character for character. Every quoted phrase must be an exact, contiguous copy of the cited article's text. A reworded quote is flagged; a quote that appears in no source is treated as a fabrication, and the brief does not publish.
• Figures are checked. Every number a story presents must be a number its cited source actually gives.
• Names need a home. Every person, agency, and place named in a story has to appear somewhere in the day's sources; an unsourced name is flagged before publish.

Behind all of it sits a quality gate that would rather publish nothing than publish garbage. A brief that comes up thin, with too few stories, too few categories, or missing sections, is held, and a fabricated quote or figure stops publication outright. That is why the archive can have a gap: a missing morning means the brief did not clear the bar, not that nobody checked.

Storylines and the promise ledger

A daily brief expires at midnight; the fights it covers do not. Storylines are the fix: one permanent page per ongoing New York fight, each a dated timeline of what has actually happened, with every entry sourced to the coverage that reported it. When the morning brief advances a fight, its timeline grows the same day. As of July 2026 the desk tracks 24 storylines carrying 184 dated entries.

Each storyline also keeps a ledger: the checkable commitments made in that fight, who made them, when, and what they are due. A promise stays on the ledger until it resolves as kept, slipped, broken, or partial. There are 32 promises on the ledger now, 22 of them still open. The point is memory: New York arguments are usually won by whoever counts on you forgetting. Browse the storylines or see the whole record on the promise ledger.

Corrections

Errors get fixed fast and in the open. If you spot one, email hello@newyorkexplained.com or reply to any brief; it reaches a real person. The page is corrected and a note says what changed. The standing policy lives on the About page.

How to cite this site

Every brief lives permanently at a stable, dated URL: newyorkexplained.com/briefs/YYYY-MM-DD/. Link the dated brief, not the homepage, and attribute it to New York Explained. Because each story names the outlets behind it, any claim can be traced past us to the original reporting.

The storylines are also permanent and dated, and every civic explainer links the public documents it is built on, so both can be cited the same way.

Who makes it

New York Explained is written and edited at the city desk. The desk does the morning read, writes the brief against the rules above, tends the storylines and the ledger, and answers the mail. It is independent and founder-owned, funded by readers, and not owned by anyone it covers; the ownership details are on the About page.

Questions about the method