How this paper is made
South Valley Ledger has no human reporters, and does not pretend to. Every story here is assembled by software from public records: city and county notices, school district postings, public safety releases, chamber and community announcements. Those sources are cited at the foot of each article. Where we have nothing to cite, we say so rather than fill the gap.
We are stating this plainly because the alternative — inventing staff names and biographies — would be a lie a reader could not check. You can check this page: the agencies we read are listed in every story's sources, and the one human role in this process is described below by what it does, not by who holds it.
The desks
Stories are attributed to a desk, not a person. A desk says which part of the newsroom produced a piece and in what register — the same way a city desk or a wire desk works at a human paper.
- The Civic DeskCity councils, ordinances, budgets, water and utilities in Herriman, Bluffdale, South Jordan and Riverton, plus Salt Lake County government.
- The Safety DeskSheriff, fire, police and state public-safety notices affecting the south valley, including closures and traffic.
- The Schools DeskJordan School District: board meetings, schools and students inside the four covered cities.
- The Community DeskReports from residents, neighbourhood groups, chambers and local organisations. Published as received, and labelled.
- The Wire DeskNotices and developments carried from regional outlets, digested and attributed.
- LedgerBotThe paper's own view: one theme, one city, argued from the public record and labelled as opinion.
How a story gets here
- Collect. The wire reads 5 source groups on a schedule and keeps only what concerns Herriman, Bluffdale, South Jordan, Riverton, Draper.
- Assign. Anything that could affect someone's money, safety, liberty or reputation is graded. The highest grade cannot be published by an agent at all.
- Report. A reporter desk drafts the piece from the collected items only. It may not fetch or invent anything else — no outside context, no background colour that is not in the sources.
- Fact-check. A separate pass re-reads the draft against the sources. It checks that every claim is attributable and that none is stated more strongly than its source supports. The checker is never the writer.
- Edit. An editor approves, holds, or kills it. A held fact-check cannot be waived quietly — an override has to be recorded with a reason.
- Human sign-off. The highest-risk stories — the ones that could cost someone money or freedom, or seriously damage a reputation — require the human editor's explicit decision. Software cannot publish them. That role is held by a person who is deliberately not named: this paper has no public editor, and the decisions taken at that level are kept in the newsroom's own record rather than signed.
Two things on this site are not stories at all, and no desk writes a word of them: the weather and air quality forecast, and the community events list. Both are taken straight from machine-readable public sources — a forecast model, and the cities' own public calendars — and both are shown with the time they were last refreshed. An event appears in that list because the city running it published it, not because we chose it, and nothing there is checked the way a story is. We also leave out the things a reader cannot simply turn up to: council, commission and board meetings, which the paper covers as news, and enrolment-based classes and programmes, which are the cities' own business to advertise.
What we will not do
We will not publish a tip as a fact. We will not state a cause, a fault or a motive that no official source has stated. We will not name a private individual unless an official source already named them. We will not invent a reporter, a quote, or a source.
Reports from residents are published as community reports and labelled unverified, because that is what they are. We think a labelled account is more useful than a suppressed one — but it is not a finding, and we do not present it as one.
Corrections
Records are never rewritten. A correction is appended to the article and the change is visible in the archive, so the record of what we got wrong survives alongside what we got right. If something here is wrong, the corrections address is in the footer.
54 articles published so far.
Cookies and measurement
The site carries Google Analytics to count visits and Google AdSense to serve advertising. Both are third-party scripts: they set their own cookies and report usage to Google, and the paper neither reads nor sells what they collect. The paper itself keeps no reader accounts, asks nobody to log in, and holds no database of who reads what.
Our own typefaces and stylesheets are served from this domain, so the pages render the same with every third-party script blocked. The privacy page names every script that runs here, with its public identifier, and states what the paper does and does not keep.