Editorial Policy
Last updated · June 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 six kinds of editorial content. Five of them are original journalism we write ourselves — primary-source reports, diaspora analysis, explainers, data stories, and guides — not a retelling of someone else’s article. The sixth, our digest, is the only curation-and-linking format, and we label it plainly as such. Every callout below is tagged so you always know which is which.
Plain-language reports written directly from official documents — USCIS and DHS announcements, IRS notices, Federal Register rules, state and city press releases. What changed, when it takes effect, who it affects, and what readers need to do, with a link to the official document.
When a story has already been reported well, we don’t rewrite it — a short cited brief points you to the original reporting, and our article is the analysis the source doesn’t contain: what the event means for Vietnamese Americans, with the mechanism, the affected segments, and the history spelled out. Long-form deep analyses extend this format on the most significant stories.
Fact-grounded explainers of the stories in the news right now, written for immigrants and everyday Americans alike — what happened, why it matters, and what it means for you and your wallet. Each is built from at least three cited sources rather than an AI model’s memory, and every claim traces back to the reporting we link.
Original reporting from public datasets — immigration processing times, unemployment, inflation, remittances, Census figures on the Vietnamese-American community — with our own charts. Every figure traces to the named dataset.
Practical, accessible explainers on topics that matter to our community — immigration processes, financial literacy, healthcare navigation, cultural history, education planning, and more.
“Điểm Tin” — a daily list of stories worth your time that we are not covering in full, each with one line of our judgment and a direct link to the original reporting. Clearly framed as curation, never presented as our reporting.
Sources & Verification
Our daily pipeline follows established news organizations — AP, Reuters, NPR, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, VnExpress, Tuổi Trẻ, Thanh Niên, and a range of regional outlets covering Houston, Southern California, and the Bay Area.
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-assisted newsroom built on Anthropic’s Claude. We believe in full transparency about how our content is produced:
- Daily news articles are written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, which synthesizes source material into Vietnamese-language reports with original analysis and diaspora framing.
- Explainers (“What to Know”) are written by Claude from at least three cited sources, turning a current story into a plain-language walk-through of what it means for readers.
- Guides are written by Claude, chosen for its ability to explain complex immigration, financial, and civic topics in accessible Vietnamese and English.
- Long-form analysis is written by an advanced Claude model selected for nuanced reasoning, multi-stakeholder analysis, and historical contextualization.
- Article illustrations are AI-generated and always labeled as such.
- Audio narration is produced using AI text-to-speech technology in Vietnamese. 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 mitigate. Our pipeline includes multiple layers of defense:
1 · Source-Grounded Writing
Claude is given the reporting from the original source that we cite and link, 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 · Automated Quality Gates
Before publication, every article passes through automated editorial checks: originality scoring against the source material (articles that lean too closely on a source’s wording are rejected), citation enforcement, fact-grounding spot checks that verify concrete claims — numbers, names, dates — against the cited sources, translation completeness, and tone compliance (state-media propaganda phrases are flagged). Articles that fail any check are held for revision and are not published.
3 · Human Editorial Oversight
The Editor-in-Chief sets the editorial standards and prompts that govern every article, reviews each piece before publication, audits published output, and handles reader-reported corrections within 24 hours. AI drafts and translates; nothing is published until it has cleared both the automated quality gates above and that editorial review.
Despite these measures, no 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.
Editorial Voice & Standards
Our editorial guidelines enforce a consistent voice across all content:
- Non-partisan: We write openly for the diaspora, but we take no party line and endorse no candidate. As a US-based outlet, we refer to Vietnam in the third person, and 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 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. 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.
Audio Narration
Every article is available as audio in Vietnamese, produced using AI text-to-speech. The daily audio briefing is hosted by Hoài Trang, an AI persona — 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].