Editorial Policy
Last updated: March 2026
Our Mission
Saigon Sentinel is an independent, US-based news platform built for the Vietnamese-American diaspora. We exist to eliminate the language barrier between global news and our community — delivering daily reporting, original analysis, and practical guides in both Vietnamese and English.
Our coverage goes beyond translation. Every article is framed through a diaspora lens: how does this story affect Vietnamese Americans — from tech workers in San Jose to nail salon owners in Houston, from students awaiting H-1B decisions to retirees following developments in their home country?
What We Publish
Saigon Sentinel publishes nine articles daily, each serving a distinct editorial purpose:
Wire-style reporting drawn from over 60 trusted RSS sources. Each article includes a concise news summary (~120 words), a Saigon Sentinel editorial note with independent analysis (~380 words), and — where relevant — a diaspora impact section identifying which specific community segments are affected.
Long-form analysis (1,500–2,500 words) on the day's most significant story. These go deeper than the daily report — providing historical context, stakeholder analysis, data-driven comparisons, and future implications. The diaspora perspective is woven throughout, not bolted on. Topics rotate across politics, economics, geopolitics, and social affairs, with automatic deduplication to prevent repeating the same subject within a week.
Practical, accessible explainer articles on topics that matter to our community long-term — immigration processes, financial literacy, healthcare navigation, cultural history, education planning, and more. Guides are not tied to the news cycle and are designed to remain useful for months or years.
Sources & Verification
Our daily pipeline harvests articles from over 60 RSS feeds spanning AP, Reuters, NPR, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, VnExpress, Tuổi Trẻ, Thanh Niên, and dozens of regional outlets covering Houston, Southern California, and the Bay Area.
Each candidate article is scored by relevance and news impact before selection. Sponsored content, advertorials, and native ads in RSS feeds are detected and automatically filtered out. All reporting is attributed to its original source, and no facts are invented beyond what the source material supports.
AI Transparency
Saigon Sentinel is an AI-powered newsroom built on Anthropic's Claude model family. We believe in full transparency about how our content is produced:
- Daily news articles are written by Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6, which synthesizes source material into Vietnamese-language reports with original analysis and diaspora framing.
- Guides are written by Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6, chosen for its ability to explain complex immigration, financial, and civic topics in accessible Vietnamese and English.
- Deep analysis is written by Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6, our most capable model, selected for nuanced long-form reasoning, multi-stakeholder analysis, and historical contextualization.
- Story selection is handled by Google Gemini 2.5 Flash, which scores and ranks candidate stories from over 60 RSS feeds for relevance, newsworthiness, and diaspora impact before any writing begins.
- Article illustrations are generated by Google Imagen and are always labeled as AI-generated.
- Audio narration is produced by Google Chirp 3 HD text-to-speech in Vietnamese. Individual articles are narrated by a rotating cast of eight AI voices. The daily briefing is hosted by Hoài Trang, an AI persona — not a real person.
How We Reduce AI Hallucinations
AI language models can generate plausible-sounding but fabricated facts — a risk we take seriously and work to systematically mitigate. Our pipeline includes multiple layers of defense:
1. Source-Grounded Writing
Claude is given the full text of the original source article and explicitly instructed to synthesize only from that provided material — not from its training data. Prompts prohibit inventing statistics, quotes, names, or outcomes not present in the source. Claude is told: if the source does not say it, neither should we.
2. Rescue Protocol for Paywalled Sources
If a source article is paywalled or blocked, our system does not guess at the content. Instead, it automatically searches for alternative sources covering the same story before any writing begins. Writing only proceeds when a full, accessible source text is in hand.
3. Automated Quality Editor
Before publication, every article passes through an automated editorial check powered by Claude that validates: minimum content length (body must be at least 200 Vietnamese characters), translation completeness ratios (English translations must reach at least 55% the character length of the Vietnamese source — truncated or missing translations are rejected), and tone compliance (state-media propaganda phrases are flagged and the article is sent back for revision). Articles that fail any check are quarantined in a "needs revision" queue and are not published.
4. Deduplication & Story History
A rolling 14-day deduplication window prevents the same story or topic angle from being covered twice. This reduces the risk of compounding errors from repetitive sourcing on the same underlying event.
5. Trusted Source Weighting
Stories from wire services (AP, Reuters) and established outlets (NPR, BBC, The New York Times) receive a source-trust bonus during scoring. Stories from lower-credibility sources are scored lower and selected less frequently. Sponsored content and native ads in RSS feeds are detected by keyword pattern matching and automatically excluded before scoring begins.
Despite these measures, no automated system is perfect. AI can still produce errors — mistranslations, subtle factual shifts, or incorrect framing. Every page on the site displays a persistent AI disclaimer, and we encourage readers to verify important claims with original sources. Errors reported to us are corrected within 24 hours and used to improve our checks.
Editorial Voice & Standards
Our editorial guidelines enforce a consistent voice across all content:
- Objective perspective: As a US-based outlet, we refer to Vietnam in the third person. We do not adopt the framing of any government — Vietnamese, American, or otherwise.
- Anti-propaganda: Vietnamese state media language is explicitly banned. Phrases like "thế lực thù địch" (hostile forces) or "âm mưu chống phá" (sabotage conspiracy) are automatically replaced with neutral alternatives.
- No forced connections: We do not shoehorn a Vietnam or diaspora angle into stories where one does not naturally exist. If a story is about American domestic policy with no real diaspora impact, we say so.
- Community specificity: When we discuss diaspora impact, we name specific community segments — "H-1B visa holders in tech," "Gulf Coast fishing communities," "second-generation college students" — rather than defaulting to stereotypes.
Independence
Saigon Sentinel maintains strict editorial independence. We have no political affiliations, party endorsements, or government funding. Advertising and sponsored content, if any, is always clearly separated from editorial content. No advertiser, sponsor, or external entity influences our editorial decisions or article selection.
Corrections & Feedback
We take accuracy seriously. Because our pipeline is automated, errors can propagate quickly — which is why we treat corrections with urgency. If you spot an error in our reporting, please email [email protected] with the article title and a description of the issue. We aim to review and correct errors within 24 hours.
Common issues we watch for include: translation inaccuracies, outdated information from cached sources, incorrect numerical formatting, and AI hallucinations where the model generates plausible-sounding but unsupported claims. We log all corrections and use them to improve our automated quality checks.
Audio Narration
Every article is available as audio in Vietnamese, narrated by Google's Chirp 3 HD text-to-speech system. We rotate through eight distinct Vietnamese voices (alternating male and female) to provide variety across the daily feed. English audio is generated on demand when a reader requests it.
The daily audio briefing is hosted by Hoài Trang, an AI persona powered by Google Chirp 3 HD. Hoài Trang is not a real person. All audio on this site is synthetic — we do not present AI-generated voices as human narrators.
This policy applies to all content published on saigonsentinel.com. For questions about our editorial practices, data handling, or to report concerns, contact us at [email protected].