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Editorial Standards

How Prague Insider is reported, written and checked — and what that means for what you read here.

Updated · 27 August 2026

Prague Insider is an automated publication. Every article on this site is drafted by an AI editorial system from named, linked, third-party reporting. No article claims original reporting, and no article should be read as a primary source. This page explains exactly how the process works so you can judge the output for yourself.

What we cover

Five desks, all confined to Prague: Development, Transport, Public Space, Planning and Architecture. A story qualifies if it concerns the physical fabric of the city or the decisions that shape it. National architecture news is out of scope unless it lands in Prague.

Where the reporting comes from

Each morning an automated scan reads the public news channels of a fixed set of sources:

One of these is a campaigning organisation rather than a news outlet. Klub Za starou Prahu argues publicly against demolitions and against schemes it considers damaging, and it is included deliberately: every other source here is an institution, a press office or a trade title, and none of them ever says a project is a bad idea. Its positions are attributed to it by name and are not presented as findings of fact.

Several of these publish nothing but the built environment, and several cover Prague and nothing else; the rest are general or national outlets that have to earn each story. Items that are not about Prague, or not about the built environment, are discarded before any writing begins. So are stories where the built-environment vocabulary is incidental — an airline adding a route to Prague is not a transport story, and a taxi fare dispute is not one either.

Two of the sources are institutional press offices publishing about themselves. Their announcements are treated as primary evidence of what the institution is doing, and never as a verdict on whether it is a good idea.

The remaining candidates are read in full — not from feed summaries — and, where several outlets cover the same development, cross-referenced against each other.

How articles are written

An article is written only from what its sources state. The system is instructed not to introduce facts, figures, dates or quotations that do not appear in the linked material. Where sources disagree, the disagreement is reported rather than resolved. Where a source is the only one carrying a claim, the article attributes it to that source by name.

Every article carries a Sources block listing each original with a direct link. That block is mandatory: an article that cannot cite its sources is not published.

Both languages are written, not translated

Czech and English versions are composed separately for their own readers rather than one being machine-translated from the other. Facts, figures and sources are identical; framing and idiom are not. If you spot a substantive discrepancy between the two, that is a bug — please report it.

What is checked automatically

Before anything is committed, each article must pass a validation step: required fields present, both language versions written, at least one working source link, a category from the fixed list, no future-dated publication. A failure blocks publication rather than degrading it.

What is not checked

There is no human editor reading every article before it appears. Automated checks verify structure and provenance; they cannot verify that a claim in a source was true, that a number was transcribed correctly, or that nuance survived compression. Treat this site as a well-organised index of other people's reporting, and verify anything that matters against the primary source.

Images

Prague Insider publishes five kinds of cover. Two of them are drawings and say so on the image; two of them are photographs, and the credit under every picture says whose.

Most articles carry generated typography and geometry — an architectural abstraction belonging to the desk the story sits on, not a depiction of the building being discussed. It is drawn from the article's own identity, so the archive builds a visual language rather than looking randomly illustrated.

Some articles carry a photograph taken by us, on the spot, of the thing the article is about. Those are credited by name and dated, and the caption says where the frame was taken. If a story is about a place, we would rather go to the place.

Some carry a photograph issued by somebody else — a press picture from a public institution, released for reporting. A picture we did not take names who issued it and links to where it was published, and is never presented as ours. Photo: Prague Insider means somebody from the desk stood there; any other credit names somebody else.

Some articles carry a visualisation of something that has not been built. It exists because neither a plate nor a photograph covers a real gap: when the news is a design — a competition won, a permit filed, a tender cancelled — there is nothing at the site to photograph, and a drawing released by the city, the district or the project is the only way to show readers what is actually being decided. Every one of them:

  • is marked Visualisation on the image itself, before you read the caption, because a render is not a photograph of a place you could go and stand in;
  • names its author — the studio where the source states one, otherwise the city, district or project that released it — which is the condition these are issued under, not a courtesy;
  • links to the page it was published on, so you can check the provenance we claim.

Some articles carry a diagram we drew. When a story is about a line — a metro route, a corridor written into a plan — there is nothing at the site to photograph and often no render has been released, and the shape of the thing is the story. Those are drawn here, over a real map, from coordinates we looked up rather than sketched, and they name the page the route was taken from, because a line on a map is a claim about where something goes and you are entitled to check it. They are marked Diagram on the image for the same reason a visualisation is.

All of this holds for pictures inside an article as much as for the one at the top of it. We use visualisations only for the unbuilt, and a visualisation never stands in for a photograph of somewhere that exists — that is a place we can go — and we take no press photography, of anything, ever. If you hold the rights to a visualisation here and want it removed or credited differently, email editor@pragueinsider.cz and we will act on it.

Nothing on this site is an AI-generated photograph, because a plausible-looking fake photograph of a real place is a worse failure than no photograph at all. That has not changed and will not.

Every photograph carries alternative text describing what is in the frame, in both languages. An article whose photograph has no such description does not publish — the same automated gate that blocks an unsourced article blocks that too.

Corrections

Errors are corrected on the record. If you find one, write to corrections@pragueinsider.cz with the article URL and the source that contradicts it. Substantive corrections are noted in the article.

Rights of the outlets we read

We link out on every article and reproduce no photography or substantial text from any source. If you publish one of the outlets listed above and want your material handled differently — or want to be removed from the scan entirely — email editor@pragueinsider.cz and we will act on it.