How we work.

Last verified: 2026-05-28. Edited by The Valley Pulse editorial. Questions, corrections, or takedowns: [email protected].

What we cover

What The Valley Pulse exists to publish:

• Weekend plans. Restaurants, bars, cafés, markets, festivals, concerts, theater, art shows, family outings, hidden corners.
• New openings. Restaurants, businesses, venues, parks, services, retail, with verified opening dates from a primary source.
• Best Of guides. Running, editor-curated, neighborhood-by-neighborhood. Weekly freshness pass, not annual.
• Things to do. Activities that don't fit a single category, hikes, classes, public art, neighborhood walks, kid-friendly afternoons.
• Hidden gems. Spots that don't show up first on an aggregator search but keep coming up in resident recommendations.
• A weekly Thursday newsletter, This Weekend in The Valley, that pulls the week's best items into a four-minute read.

Geographic scope: the San Fernando Valley, with five regions (Northwest, Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, Central) covering ~20 named neighborhoods. We are of the Valley, not visiting from elsewhere.

What we don't cover

• Crime, lawsuits, court reporting. Hard-news territory; other publications do it; we don't have the legal or sourcing infrastructure to do it responsibly.
• School controversies, district disputes, board decisions. Same reason.
• Partisan politics. Endorsements, candidate coverage, ballot-measure advocacy. We may note an election; we won't tell you how to vote.
• National news with a Valley angle. Not our job.
• Restaurant or business reviews in the conventional sense. We don't visit, eat, and rate. See source policy.
• Real estate transactional content. Redfin and Zillow exist; we don't compete on that.

The scope is the point, not a constraint. A newsletter that does one thing well is more useful than one that does ten things poorly.

How we use AI

The honest version, not the marketing version.

What AI does in our workflow

1. Surfacing candidate items. AI systems (primarily Claude, plus a small set of structured-data scrapers) read public RSS feeds, business social posts, city event calendars, festival announcements, press releases, and Reddit threads relevant to the Valley.
2. First-draft writing. AI drafts item copy, the H2 structure for pillar pages, day-by-day weekend posts, and the welcome-email body, always from a public source, never from a fabricated "experience."
3. Cross-referencing. AI helps the editor verify dates, addresses, opening times, and other facts against multiple public sources before publish.
4. Pattern-matching freshness. AI checks the existing Best Of pages weekly to flag businesses that have closed, moved, or changed materially.

What AI does NOT do

1. Publish without a human editor. No auto-publish path on any surface, newsletter, post page, directory entry, welcome email, social caption.
2. Make experience claims. AI doesn't write "we'd send a friend to" or "regulars order…" because AI hasn't been there. See the no-experience-claims policy.
3. Talk to sponsors. Every advertiser interaction is human-to-human.
4. Decide what gets covered. AI surfaces candidates; the editor decides.

The editor

There is one human editor for The Valley Pulse v1. That person:

• Reviews every AI-surfaced candidate before it enters the editorial queue.
• Approves every item before it ships (newsletter, post page, directory entry, social caption).
• Runs the Wednesday-night "second look" pass on the Thursday issue, approval Wednesday evening, send Thursday 9 AM after a final-look check. The editor cannot approve-and-send in the same QA session; this is mechanically enforced (see the QA pipeline stage 6 → 7 gate).
• Maintains the source policy, the claim taxonomy, and the freshness verification cycle.
• Handles corrections, takedowns, and reader replies.

Why we say there's one editor:because there is. Saying "our editorial team" when it's one person is the kind of small dishonesty that bigger ones grow out of. When the second editor joins, this page updates.

Source policy

Every item traces back to a primary public source, the business's own website, official social account, official Google Business Profile, government calendar, festival site, an interview with a named operator, or a named resident comment.

What counts as a primary source

• The business's website (homepage or the relevant menu / event / about page).
• The business's official Instagram, Facebook, or X/Twitter account.
• The business's Google Business Profile.
• An interview the editor conducted (recorded and timestamped).
• A government calendar (City of LA, City of Burbank, Sepulveda Basin, etc.).
• A named festival or event page.
• A named resident, with explicit permission to be quoted.
• A peer publication with editorial standards (LA Times, Eater LA, etc.), cited inline with a link.

What does NOT count

• Yelp reviews, Google reviews, TripAdvisor, useful for signal, not for citation.
• AI-generated summaries of other AI-generated content.
• A press release without a named issuer.
• "We heard from someone who would know." If we can't name the source, we don't run the claim.

Fact-checking

Before any item publishes, the editor verifies:

• Address. Cross-checked against the business's own website AND Google Business Profile.
• Hours. Cross-checked against the business's own website AND Google Business Profile. Hours change; we verify on every weekly Best Of freshness pass.
• Dates. For new openings, verified against a primary source. Items dated more than 30 days from publish trigger an auto-flag for re-verification.
• Awards and recognition. Cross-checked against the official awarding body's site. Awards we cannot verify against an official source do not ship.
• Names of people. Verified spelling against the business's own materials. Misspelled names break trust faster than late hours.

The no-experience-claims policy

A specific class of claim is banned from every Valley Pulse surface: claims about an experience the writer has not actually had.

Examples of banned claims

• "We'd send a friend to without hesitation."
• "Regulars order the carbonara."
• "The kind of room where the bartender starts a conversation."
• "We honestly cannot wait to try it."

These read as insider knowledge. They imply the writer has been there. In an AI-run newsroom, that is almost always not true.

What replaces these claims:specific, verifiable, public-fact framing. "Sushi Note serves a $140 omakase called the Whole Note." Not "we love the Whole Note." This isn't a writing-style preference. It is the line between an editorial guide and an aspirational lifestyle blog. We are deliberately on the editorial side.

AI disclosure standards

Per-page AI disclosure is restored for three content types:

1. Best Of pillars. Footer caption: "Hand-picked by the editor. AI helped surface candidates and draft the structure. Every pick verified against the source-registry standards."
2. Directory entries with editorial blurbs. Footer caption: "Editorial blurb drafted with AI assistance and approved by the editor."
3. Aggregated weekly recaps. Footer caption: "Each weekly issue surfaces candidate items via AI from public sources. The editor reviews, fact-checks, and approves before publish."

AI-generated images:we don't use them. Hero and inline images come from the editor, the business's own marketing with permission, or stock libraries with explicit licensing, never from a generative image model.

Sponsored-content disclosure

When a business pays to be in front of you, you are told before you read.

• The word Sponsored appears in a contrasting capitalized label above the item, not buried in fine print below.
• Sponsored items in the newsletter are visually distinct: a different background, the "Sponsored" label, and the sponsoring business named in the same line.
• The advertise inquiry path publishes pricing for every tier, so sponsors and readers see the same numbers. No secret menu.
• Sponsorship does not buy editorial coverage. A sponsor cannot pay to be included in a Best Of pillar, a hidden-gems list, or an editor's-pick recommendation.

Corrections

We make mistakes. Here is what happens when we do.

Reader-reported correction path

1. Email [email protected] with the URL, the specific claim, and the correct information (with a source if you have one).
2. Editor responds within 3 business days with either the correction made and the page updated, or why the original is correct.
3. Corrections are versioned. The corrected page carries an inline note that stays on the page indefinitely.

Material corrections (an address wrong, an opening date misstated, an award misattributed) get a brief mention in the next Thursday issue under a small "Last week's corrections" line. We don't bury these.

The running log is at /corrections/.

Best-of eligibility

Our Best Of pillars don't list everyone who pitches us. We use a three-leg eligibility gate that runs weekly:

1. Status check. The business has to be confirmed operational. We pull closure signals weekly; a single confirmed closure removes a business regardless of its ratings.
2. Signal check. The business needs enough reviews to be measurably rated, at least 25 Google reviews and 10 Yelp reviews. Below the floor, a single five-star outlier can outrank a well-reviewed competitor; we don't promote on that signal.
3. Ranking check. The business has to sit in the top 10% of its primary category × neighborhood, based on a Bayesian-smoothed composite of Google + Yelp ratings. A 4.6 across 3,000 reviews beats a 5.0 across 50 reviews.

If a brand-new business (say a chef relocation) opens with too few reviews, the editor can override the gate manually with a written rationale, logged and quarterly-audited. This rule applies equally to sponsors. A business cannot buy its way into a Best Of pillar.

Takedown policy

Things we will remove on request

1. Personal-information errors. Wrong address, phone, email, or name, removed within 24 hours.
2. Business listing errors. If we listed a business that's no longer operating, or the owner asks to be removed, we will.
3. Quoted-source removals. If a named resident or business owner asks to have their quote removed, we will. No questions; no debate.
4. Sponsored-content disputes. The cancellation clause in the contract governs.

Things we will not remove

• Negative-tone editorial that the subject doesn't like, if it's factually accurate and within scope.
• Sponsored disclosure labels. The label is the agreement.

Takedown contact: [email protected].

The eight-stage QA pipeline

Every item passes through eight QA stages before publish. The pipeline is enforced by the editorial admin; the editor cannot skip stages.

1. Stage 1. URL-hygiene + link-rot check. Every internal link resolves to a 200; every external link is nofollow where appropriate. Automated.
2. Stage 2. Banned-phrase regex scan against the forbidden-experience-claims list. Automated.
3. Stage 3. Claim taxonomy enforcement: every best / top / new / closed / locals / verified claim carries the required source note. Editor.
4. Stage 4. Schema validation (Article / FAQPage / ItemList / LocalBusiness / Event per page type). Automated.
5. Stage 5. Cross-reference: address, hours, dates verified against primary sources. Editor.
6. Stage 5.5. Featured-business legal-and-reputation lookup: for any Best Of pick or Spotlight, a quick search for active litigation, public-record complaints, or recent reputation issues. Editor.
7. Stage 6. Approval (Wednesday evening for Thursday sends). Editor cannot advance to stage 7 in the same session. Editor.
8. Stage 7. Thursday-morning final-look + send. Editor.
9. Stage 8. Post-send monitoring for the first 4 hours (bounce, complaint, click signal). Automated.

Claim taxonomy (public summary)

• best, Editor sign-off + 2+ named sources OR aggregated metric, methodology disclosed.
• top, Same as best, plus explicit ranking methodology.
• new, Verified opening date from primary source; auto-flag at day 31.
• closed, Verified from primary source or 2 independent named sources.
• locals, Direct quote from a named resident or signed survey response.
• verified, Direct editor check against the business's own listed source on or after the publish date.

A quarterly voice-corpus audit catches drift no single stage would see: once per quarter, the editor reviews ~20 random items from the past quarter against the brand-voice rules.

Last verified: 2026-05-28. Edited by The Valley Pulse editorial. Questions, corrections, or takedowns: [email protected].