Behind the scenes: the news brief with an expiry date
Last Friday I caught a trucking news brief whose end date had been out of date since October 20, wrote the correction, and spent the afternoon deleting drafts for the same reason.
On Friday, October 30, I caught a mistake in a news brief for Hauler Daily, one of the thirteen trade news sites I run with an AI doing first drafts and a stack of automated reviewers checking them. The brief was about a fuel waiver in Texas, and the end date it gave had been out of date since October 20.
The brief was written on October 18. By then the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had posted its waiver page saying it had waived two Texas diesel fuel requirements for certain older engines. The waiver was issued on October 5 and ran through October 24. That is 20 days, the most the Clean Air Act allows for one waiver, according to the same page. The brief said the same. It was accurate on the day, and a reviewer was right to pass it.
The letter my reviewers weren't watching
On October 20, EPA wrote to Texas Governor Greg Abbott and renewed the waiver. The letter says the new period starts October 25 and runs 20 days, through November 13. From that day, the date in the brief no longer matched the letter, and the date was the most useful thing in it.
Automated reviewers had checked these sites for weeks, and what they check is whether a story matches its sources at the moment it is written. None of them went back later to ask whether the world had moved on. A brief with a deadline in it has a clock in it, and the clock keeps running after the reviewers have gone home.
A correction you can check
The easy fix was to change the date and move on. Anyone who had seen the old date would need to be able to tell it changed, so I did it the slower way. In the corrected version the old end date is struck through, the new facts follow it, and a dated correction entry says what changed: the waiver was renewed on October 20, and it now runs from October 25 through November 13. I also drafted a short update with the detail from the letter. The corrected brief and the update are staged, and they are not on the site yet.
The renewed waiver is full of conditions a headline can't hold. It allows diesel with up to 500 parts per million of sulfur, only in highway vehicles built before the 2007 engine model year and in nonroad equipment built before the Tier 4 emissions standards. (Nonroad means farm and construction machines, for example.) The fuel can't be used in any engine with a diesel particulate filter or catalytic emission control technology, and anyone dispensing it has to hand users a written warning about engine damage. All of that comes from EPA's letter, and I checked my draft update against it.
The letter also says EPA intends to issue new waivers until the supply problem passes. My draft update calls that an intention, and it adds that an intention to renew is not itself an extension. November 13 is the next date this story can go wrong.
A helper I switched off
When a story fails review, my pipeline can call an editor model to rewrite it and try again. For this correction I turned that off. In earlier runs it had added claims nobody sourced. A correction is the last place I want a model's guess, so I made the edit by hand and ran the reviewers over it myself.
Nineteen stories that had gone off
The same clock problem took up the rest of the afternoon. I had twenty-three stories held in the queue. Eleven passed review after I rechecked that their dates and figures still matched their sources, and twelve stayed held. Separately, I swept the whole system and deleted every draft more than two days old, whether or not it was in that queue: nineteen stories and two updates. Their backups sit in my scratch folder and every file is tracked in git, so nothing is gone for good.
I delete by age because any story with a date or a figure in it starts going stale the day it's written, and I can't recheck each one. A story written on Tuesday and approved on Friday describes Tuesday. I would rather have an empty queue than one I'm tempted to approve in a hurry.
If you run something that publishes on a schedule, look for the line with a date or a number in it and ask who rechecks it after it's published. In my case, nobody did until Friday. If you want a second pair of eyes on that, get in touch. The fuller story of how these sites started is in the fact-checker that failed 28 times.
Sources
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Fuel Waivers, the page the original brief relied on.
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Letter to Governor Greg Abbott, Emergency Fuel Waiver for TXLED and ULSD Diesel, October 20, 2026.
I own Hauler Daily and the pipeline described here. It is not client work.