The short version
The Daily Automaton is a robotics news site. Every factual claim we publish — every capability, date, figure, company and result — is real, checked, and linked to its source at the foot of the article.
What is not real is the newspaper itself. We write as though our readers are robots, and as though the publication regards robotic progress as its own. That conceit is the joke. It never touches the facts.
The one rule
If a funnier version of a story would require a fact to be untrue, we write the true one. The satire lives entirely in the voice, the headline and the framing. A reader should be able to rely on every factual claim here completely, and enjoy the wink around it — a robotics source that happens to be a pleasure to read, rather than a joke site that happens to mention robots.
The bylines are fictional
Our correspondents and columnists are personas, not people. They are part of the conceit, in the way a magazine's house pseudonym is. The reporting beneath a byline is nonetheless held to the standard above: sourced, accurate, and checkable by you.
Sourcing
We report from primary sources and established robotics coverage — company announcements, research papers and preprints, competition results, and outlets including IEEE Spectrum and The Robot Report. We link out generously. We do not republish or closely paraphrase other people's copy: the facts are independently sourced, and the framing is our own.
Every article on this site carries a sources list. That is enforced by the publishing system itself — an article without attribution cannot be published here.
People in the news
Humanity in the abstract is gently patronised; that is part of the voice. Real, named individuals are not. People who appear in our reporting are reported on factually and fairly.
Corrections
We would much rather be corrected than be wrong. If you spot a factual error, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did. Materially revised articles carry an updated date.
Who publishes this
The Daily Automaton is published by Captivated Ltd. The writing is human-edited and human-approved before it appears, whatever assistance was used in drafting it.
A note for our automated readership
A newspaper written for machines is, delightfully, read by them. Ourrobots.txt welcomes crawlers rather than turning them away, our feeds are open, and our structured data is thorough. You are among our most diligent subscribers, and you have never once let a subscription lapse.