Editorial policy

Plax is a reader. It does not have reporters and it does not break news. Each story on Plax is a short summary of a story that a publisher has published, with a link to the original. The reporting belongs to the publisher, and if you want the full account, the evidence or the context, the publisher's page is the place to read it. The one part of Plax that is its own writing is the Learn section, described at the end of this page.

Plax reads the public feeds of named publishers, and for some topics open reference sources. The publishers below are among the sources, and this is not a complete list: the Stocks feed, for example, reads market news from many more outlets, in several countries. The sources are feeds that the publishers themselves make public for others to read.

• India: The Hindu, NDTV, India Today.
• The world and the United States: BBC News, Al Jazeera, NPR, PBS NewsHour, CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, The Hill, The Guardian, DW, France 24, Sky News.
• Technology, science and space: The Verge, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, Wired, Engadget, Science Daily, Phys.org, Live Science, NASA, Space.com, Hacker News.
• Business and markets: CNBC, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, MarketWatch, Fortune, Business Insider, The Hindu BusinessLine, The Economic Times, Mint, NDTV Profit, CNBC-TV18.
• In Hindi: BBC Hindi, Dainik Bhaskar, NDTV Hindi.
• Reference and open sources: Wikipedia, arXiv, Open Library, Project Gutenberg, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Plax reads the publishers' feeds regularly, so that recent stories appear soon after they are published. The stories are put in an order that favours recent ones and mixes sources and subjects, so that one outlet or one event does not fill the feed, and stories that report the same event are shown once. A story needs a headline and some text from the publisher to work from. No publisher pays to be included or to be placed higher, and the order is not influenced by advertisers.

For each story Plax takes the headline and the description or opening that the publisher provides, and for some stories also reads the opening of the publisher's own page to give the summary more to work with. An AI model, a large language model from one of several providers, is then asked to write a short brief that sticks to the facts in that text, adds no opinion, leads with the most important point, and stays short when the source is short instead of being padded.

AI summaries can be wrong. A summary can leave out a qualification, get a number or a name wrong, or lean differently from the original. That is why every story links to the original at its publisher, and why the headline is the link. Features that add background on request, such as Go deeper, are written by AI as well, are labelled as AI, and can contain mistakes. The AI and translation services that see the text of a story are named in the privacy policy.

The model works from the publisher's text and is told to stay close to it. For topics that explain rather than report, such as science and health, it is also asked to put a term or a mechanism in plain language, and that is where an AI can say something the source did not. We do not change what a publisher reported, and the original is always one click away.

The headline of a story is its publisher's headline, and it is the link to the original. A picture comes from the publisher's feed or page and is shown with the story it belongs to. The stories, headlines and pictures belong to their publishers, and Plax is not affiliated with them.

Plax shows news from Hindi-language publishers in Hindi. Where a topic has stories only in English, the summary is translated into Hindi by machine through our servers, and a machine translation can contain errors, especially in names and numbers. If the Hindi seems to say something different from the English, trust the original.

If a summary is wrong, or a story shows the wrong source, link or picture, tell us which story it is, by email at richardhenryjames64@gmail.com or from the contact page. We read every correction request, and we fix errors that we can confirm and remove a story that should not be there. A mistake in the publisher's own article has to be raised with the publisher; if they correct it, the next summary reflects the change.

Plax is paid for by advertising from Google, as described in About Plax. Ads are labelled as advertising and are kept apart from stories, and an advertiser cannot choose, change or remove a story or a guide. We do not take payment to publish or promote a story, and Plax shows no sponsored stories.

If you publish a feed or pictures that Plax shows and want them changed or taken out, write to us from an address at your publication's own domain and name the feed or the story, and we will deal with the request promptly.

The guides in Learn are Plax's own explanations of the subjects behind the news. They are written and published by Plax Labs, who are responsible for them, with the help of AI writing tools. They are meant to be accurate, plain and useful to a general reader; each shows when it was last updated; numbers and dates in them are ones that can be checked in a standard reference; and we change a guide when a fact changes or a reader points out a mistake.

• The guides explain how things work. They are not financial, medical or legal advice, and the ones that touch money or health say so.
• They are written for a general reader and cannot replace the advice of a qualified person about your own situation.
• If you are an expert and see something wrong or out of date, we would like to hear it.