Editorial Policy

What this page is

This is how we report and edit Above Grade. We publish it because the AI-assisted workflow we use is unusual enough — and high-stakes enough for the realtors and mortgage brokers who rely on us — that you deserve to know how the work gets made before you trust it.

If you ever have a question about how a particular story was reported, or you think we have fallen short of what we say here, write to us: newsletter@abovegrade.ai. We read replies.

How an issue gets made

Every Tuesday Brief follows the same drafting flow:

Ingest. A research pipeline reads the week's housing coverage from public sources: CREA, CMHC, Bank of Canada, OREA, TRREB, RBC, Globe and Mail, Financial Post, BNN, Storeys, and a curated list of others. It pulls full article bodies, not just headlines.
Score. The pipeline ranks stories by whether a number moved, whether there was legal or regulatory novelty, and whether the audience (realtor or mortgage broker) is directly affected.
Draft a candidate pool. A large language model (Anthropic's Claude) is given the top sources and a detailed system prompt — written by our editor, refined over months — that defines the Above Grade voice, copyright rules, structural format, and source-grounding requirements. The model produces a candidate pool: three Top Story options, seven Rest-of-News options, three Regional options, a market snapshot, subject-line suggestions, and a tip-of-the-week pool.
Copyright check. Every draft passes an automated n-gram comparison against the source text. If any article shares five or more consecutive content words with a source, the draft is flagged for rewrite and blocked from progressing.
Editorial curation. Our editor, Hurriya Afzal, opens the candidate pool, picks the issue's lineup, rewrites where the voice isn't right, finalizes the subject line, confirms or overrides the editorial Pick, and approves the issue.
Approval. Haris reviews the curated draft, requests changes if any, and approves for publish.
Publish. The issue goes live on the website and the Brief is sent to subscribers via our email provider (GoHighLevel).

The human editor sees every word that lands in your inbox. The model never publishes directly.

What the AI does, and what it doesn't

The AI:

Reads public sources we feed it.
Drafts text in the Above Grade structural format and voice.
Suggests subject lines, regional spotlights, quick hits, and tips.
Resolves images via standard image APIs (Unsplash, OpenLibrary covers).
Generates a personalized "What this means for you" paragraph for portal readers based on their selected role.

The AI does not:

Decide what we publish. Selection is editorial.
Sign off on facts. We attribute statistics to originating releases, and our editor verifies key numbers against source documents.
Speak for a real person. We don't put words in any named person's mouth that they didn't say in the cited source. Quotes are linked to the source that published them.
Generate book content for Reads from a model alone — book reviews are written by our editor, with the AI sometimes drafting a structural starting point that gets substantially rewritten.

Copyright discipline

We hold ourselves to a strict copyright standard.

Our copyright rules:

No more than five consecutive content words shared with any source. This is enforced by an automated n-gram check before publish. Any draft that fails is sent back for rewrite, not published.
All statistics attributed to the originating release. When a number comes from CREA, CMHC, the Bank of Canada, RBC, OREA, or TRREB, that's who we credit — not the reporter who covered it. We link directly to the originating release where possible.
Original analysis, not displacive summary. We don't reproduce the structure or argument of a source article paragraph-by-paragraph. We write our own piece, with our own framing, citing the source.
No chart images lifted from sources. When we use a chart, we generate it from publicly available data.
Links to the original article, not a syndicated republish. If a story ran in three places, we cite the publication that broke it.

Source attribution

Every article in every issue carries attribution three ways:

Inline hyperlinks on key statistics, quotes, and references. Click any number and you can verify it against the originating release.
A `Sources:` line at the end of every article listing each source we used, with the publisher and publication date.
A primary-source link card for the lead source on Top Stories, showing the source's own preview metadata (OpenGraph image, title, description) — the standard, opt-in link-preview convention publishers use to advertise their own articles.

If you click a link and find we have cited a source incorrectly, please tell us. We correct misattributions promptly.

Editorial independence and disclosures

Above Grade is published by Above Grade AI, Inc. Above Grade is editorially independent: Hurriya makes every editorial call, and no advertiser, sponsor, or partner reviews issues before they publish.

We carry advertising. Advertiser placements are clearly marked SPONSORED, POWERED BY, or ADVERTISEMENT within any issue or on any page they appear, in line with CASL and Competition Bureau disclosure standards. Editorial content and advertising are visually and structurally separate.

No advertiser:

Approves story selection
Dictates the angle on any story
Reviews issues before publication
Has access to subscriber data

Where a topic intersects an advertiser's commercial interests — a regulatory change that affects an advertiser's industry, a story that names an advertiser or their competitor — we disclose the relationship in that issue, in the article itself.

Our relationship with Treadstone Law

The "Powered by Treadstone Law" marking in our masthead and footer reflects Treadstone Law's role as a marketing partner and information resource for Above Grade. Treadstone Law sponsors a portion of our operating costs and is a subject-matter reference we consult on legal and regulatory questions that come up in our reporting.

Treadstone Law does not own, operate, or publish Above Grade. Treadstone Law has no editorial control over our content. The formal legal terms of this relationship are set out in our Terms of Service §7.

Where Above Grade covers a story that touches Treadstone Law's practice areas — Ontario real estate law, mortgage finance regulation, condo law, related litigation — we disclose Treadstone Law's role to readers in that issue.

Corrections

We make mistakes. When we do, we want to know about them, and we want to publish the correction in the most useful place.

How to flag an error:

Reply to the Tuesday Brief in which the error appeared. We read replies.
Email newsletter@abovegrade.ai with subject line `Correction — [topic]`.

What we do:

If we agree there's an error, we update the web version of the affected article with a dated correction note at the top.
For significant errors — a wrong number, a misattributed quote, a material misstatement — we also note the correction in the next Tuesday's Brief.
We try to acknowledge corrections quickly. Most are turned around within one to two business days.

Use of subscribers' personal information

We do not draw on subscribers' identities, locations, or engagement patterns to choose what to publish. Engagement data tells us, in aggregate, what topics resonate — never which named person reads which article. See the Privacy Policy for the full detail of what we collect and how it's protected.

Reader rights

You can:

Quote and share Above Grade with attribution and a link to the original article.
Ask us to correct, clarify, or remove a citation of you.
Ask us where a stat or quote came from. We will point you to the originating release.

You cannot:

Republish Above Grade content in whole or in substantial part without our written permission.
Use Above Grade content to train an AI model.

Both of these are covered in the Terms of Service.

Why we publish this

Most publications don't disclose their drafting workflow. AI-assisted journalism is new enough that we think a clear statement of how the work gets made matters more than the marketing benefit of hiding it. We'd rather be questioned on a discipline we can defend than be discovered cutting corners we never owned up to.

If you read this and think we should hold ourselves to a higher standard somewhere, write to us. We will consider it.

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Above Grade AI, Inc. · Above Grade · Powered by Treadstone Law Last reviewed: [DATE — set when policy lands]