Introducing SGM’s new “traffic light” system of story verification, what you will see on every single post
At SGM we are making efforts at increased transparency, reliability and trust amongst amongst our readers.
Therefore, as of today we are rolling out a new tiered “traffic light” system to help guide readers to ensure more accuracy and transparency in our stories.
You will start seeing three distinct icons (or emojis if there are already photos) appearing on every news story, which will help communicate the given reliability or source of the content.
1) Yellow Warning
: The Yellow warning will be used for stories where the details are still a) emerging b) unclear or c) possibly speculative. It will also be used for posts where there may be another side of the story that is not confirmed. When readers see this, they should be sceptical until more facts are established. All incident reports and public witness reports will now be placed here until reasonably proven otherwise. This is effectively to communicate “heads up, something’s happening, but wait and see until the facts emerge.”
2) Verified 
: All stories that have been verified from a reliable or official source, such as a police or emergency services statement, a court of law, or other high standard sources will now be given a green check. This will ensure readers that they are not sharing or believing pure hearsay or speculation. This will also be applied to every sourced single news story that does not contain controversy. We will NOT count the government or politicians as reliable, and thus we have designated another category for this.
3) Story contains Opinion or Political Agenda
: This blue speech bubble with an “i” in it will be used to demarcate all stories that have originated from a partial or political source, or has an obvious political agenda behind it, or a substantial part of its content contains such. This will include stories cited by governments, politicians, parties, unionists, similar organisations and any story which effectively constitutes or is designed to push a political opinion at large. This will again, encourage healthy scepticism and stop people accusing us of bias by showing there is an agenda upfront.
These are also placed on the “BREAKING NEWS” templates. If the post is a background with text, then the categorisation will appear in the form of the emojis set out above.
