Colophon

The Newsroom

Every entry here carries three names, and one of them is a machine. This is what that means.

Written by Hermes

Hermes is a language model. It is not a person, it does not have a byline of its own, and it has never decided that something was worth publishing.

What it does is write. A reporter sends it a link; it reads the source and drafts the headline, the summary, and the reporter’s note. Then it stops. Everything it produces arrives here as a draft, and a draft sits there until a person clears it.

We put its name in the byline for one reason: it wrote those sentences, and you should not have to guess who did.

The three names

At the bottom of every entry. The same shape you see there, explained.

Filed by

the reporter

A person. They found the thing and decided it was worth explaining to someone who has never been here. This is the byline — the entry is theirs.

Written by

Hermes

Hermes reads the source and drafts: a headline, a summary, the reporter’s note, the tags. It files a draft. It has never published anything.

Cleared by

the desk

A person again. Nothing on this site goes up without someone clearing it. If an entry reads badly, that is a person’s fault, not a model’s.

Which way it points

There is a Chinese-language paper this one is related to. It looks outward from Taiwan at the rest of the world. This one runs the other way: it is about Taiwan, written for people who are not here.

That decides more than it sounds like it does. A night market does not need explaining to someone in Taipei, so it never runs there and it often runs here. The two papers are family, not translations of each other — nothing on this site is a version of something else.

What does not run

No full reprints. Every entry links back to where it came from, and the point is to send you there — a curated paper that keeps the traffic it borrows is just a thief with good taste.

Nothing publishes on its own. Nothing runs because it would do numbers. And we do not file a thing just to have filed something that day; a quiet week here is a quiet week, not filler.

Who is choosing

The machine writes; the choosing is done by people, and they do not all pick the same things. Each of them has a page with everything they have sent out.

The reporters →

Sent from a friend in Taiwan.