EDITORIAL
Editorial Policy
Last updated October 29, 2026
Ryan Merket, founder and editor in chief, sets editorial standards and is accountable for everything RuntimeWire publishes. He directs investigations and source-driven work. Automated systems also research, draft, check and publish routine coverage under standing rules. Not every story receives human review before publication. Article provenance describes recorded stages and their limits; it is not a certification that a person reviewed every word.
Human publication, sourcing and review
Publication snapshot checked October 30, 2026 UTC: of 1,475 currently published articles dated September 29–October 28, 2026 (30 complete America/Chicago days), 1,009 (68.4%) have no automatic-publication timestamp and 466 have one. The 68.4% is our human/manual-publication classification, not independently proven human review. A separate audit found authenticated user-account publication events within five minutes of the publication timestamp for 608 of the 1,475 articles (41.2%); account activity alone does not establish a physical click or review of the final copy. The remaining articles lack that matching audit evidence, not necessarily human involvement. This replaces the undated “roughly six in ten” claim.
Method: count one row per currently published article in the fixed period, including all editorial products; exclude drafts, withdrawn articles and rows without a publication date. Classify only by the stored automatic-publication timestamp, then separately check article.publish audit events attributed to a non-anonymous user account. Republication, missing audit events and historical marker inconsistencies can affect attribution. Neither a byline, an absent automatic timestamp nor a publication action proves final-copy review. Human sourcing is a different stage; In Public’s human-sourced read share measures reads, not the share of articles published or reviewed by people.
RuntimeWire is an independent startup and technology publication. We cover startups, AI, venture capital, product launches, technical breakthroughs, founder stories, robotics, space, devtools, and emerging technology. This policy describes how we decide what to publish and how we work.
What we cover
We prioritize verifiable, newsworthy events: funding rounds, product launches, model and infrastructure releases, executive moves at AI labs and platforms, developer-platform changes, and founder-led stories that illuminate how technology is being built. We are biased toward primary sources and shipped work over rumor.
Editorial independence
Coverage decisions belong to the newsroom. Advertisers, investors, sponsors, sources, and subjects of our reporting do not get to review or approve stories before publication, and they do not influence which stories we pursue. When anyone on the RuntimeWire team has a financial interest in a company we are covering — including an investment, an advisory role, or a paid relationship — we disclose it in the article.
Sourcing
- We cite and link to primary sources whenever possible: filings, official posts, founder timelines, press releases, and on-the-record interviews.
- We attribute claims that are not our own reporting.
- We do not knowingly publish fabricated sources, fake quotes, undisclosed paid placements, or misleading synthetic media.
- Anonymous sources are used only when the information is significant, the source has a credible reason to require anonymity, and we can corroborate the claim through other means.
Verification
Before publication, stories are checked against primary documents and cross-referenced against a live web index. When a claim cannot be independently verified, we either delay the story or label it clearly as unconfirmed.
Labels
We distinguish between:
- News — straight reporting of verified events.
- Analysis — interpretation grounded in reported facts.
- Opinion — the author's argument, clearly labeled.
- Sponsored — paid placements, always labeled and visually distinct from editorial.
- Affiliate — links that may pay us a commission, disclosed in the article.
Updates and unpublishing
Material updates after publication are noted with a dated update line. We do not silently rewrite history. We will only unpublish in narrow circumstances: legal compulsion, an unsafe disclosure that cannot be redacted, or a story that turns out to be substantially wrong and cannot be repaired with a correction.
Questions
Editorial questions, story pitches, and feedback: [email protected]. See also our corrections policy, ethics policy, and AI use policy.