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Editorial policy

Effective October 21, 2026. Supersedes the standards section of the About page.

Mission

Mepa8 reports what changed in medicine, EMS and public health, in the United States and worldwide, from the primary records, so that the people who run the calls can check the facts themselves. We aim to be the most accurate and most-cited source of EMS news anywhere.

Sourcing standards

  • Tier 1, primary records: regulator and agency documents (FDA enforcement reports and press releases, CDC, NIH, WHO, UKHSA, MHRA, Health Canada), peer-reviewed journals, government data and official statements. Every story must rest on at least one of these, or on two independent outlets reporting the same facts.
  • Tier 2, trade and specialist press: used to find stories and for context, never as the only source of a fact.
  • Tier 3, general news: used only to discover events; the story is then built from the primary record.
  • We do not use anonymous sources. We do not publish facts we cannot link.
  • Research stories state the study type and size and distinguish an abstract from a full paper and a preprint from a peer-reviewed article.

How a story is produced

  1. The newsroom system collects new items every few hours from the sources above, in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and from WHO and European agencies.
  2. Items are ranked by how directly they matter to EMS clinicians and clinical readers, how new and specific they are, and how many independent sources confirm them. A Class I recall touching EMS equipment or medication publishes at any hour.
  3. A source packet is assembled from the records themselves. When a trade article points to a regulator or journal, the system fetches that record and writes from it.
  4. A draft is written from the packet and nothing else.
  5. The verification program runs (next section). A draft that fails is rewritten once with the failures listed; if it fails again it is discarded.
  6. An illustration is chosen from openly licensed photographs with machine-readable rights, or a headline card is rendered. Credits are shown on the story and logged on the credits list.
  7. The story publishes with its sources, its verification record and a note on how it was made.

Verification

Before publication, a program checks each story against its source packet:

  • Every number (counts, doses, percentages, ages, amounts) appears in a cited record.
  • Every quotation of six words or more appears verbatim in a cited record.
  • No run of twelve or more words is copied from a source outside quotation marks.
  • Every link in the story is a record the system actually fetched, and it opens.
  • The story contains a section on what the records do not tell us.
  • No advice language and no hype words.

These checks catch invented numbers, misquotes and copying. They do not judge emphasis or completeness; that is what the editor, readers and the corrections process are for.

How we use AI, and how we disclose it

Mepa8 Newsroom is an AI-assisted reporting system. It gathers records, ranks stories, drafts them and runs the checks above. Stories it produces carry the byline "Mepa8 Newsroom", name Ryan Bolden as editor, and end with a "How this story was made" note. Stories written by a person carry that person's name. We never present AI-drafted text as a named person's writing.

The editor, an EMS professional, reviews published stories, sets the sources and rules the system works from, and handles every correction. We are adding a clinical reviewer; until then each story says "Medical review pending".

Corrections

When a story is wrong, we correct it and add a dated note at the end of the story saying what changed. Every correction is listed on the corrections page. We do not silently edit published facts. Report an error through the contact form; corrections are reviewed within one business day.

Ownership and funding

Mepa8 is independently owned and operated by its founder and editor, Ryan Bolden, in Sacramento, California. It is free to read. It carries no advertising, no paid placements and no sponsored stories. If that changes, this page will say so first, and any sponsored content will be labelled on the page.

Ethics

We follow the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics: seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, be accountable and transparent. We report news; we do not give medical advice. We do not identify patients. We cover the whole EMS community, across regions, systems and roles, and we welcome tips and criticism from anyone in it.

Contact

Tips, errors and questions: contact the editor. Machine-readable policy pointers are in our trust.txt and llms.txt.