The provenance contract

The single most important thing in it

A future-of-news site that loses its own provenance chain has refuted itself on page one — so first_published is always the ORIGINAL date, never the republication date, and curation must honestly be one of verbatim / edited / excerpted / synthesised.

Why it is on this site

The load-bearing file in the pack. Every provenance block on this site follows its §1 fields and §2 visible rendering, and the pre-release gate enforces both — see what the gate checks.

Read the document