Methodology
How evidence-graded timelines work
The problem with conventional reporting
Most news conflates three distinct things: what happened, what probably happened, and what someone thinks it means. These are not the same. Mixing them without labelling them is not a neutral editorial choice — it is an epistemological one that puts the reader at a disadvantage. They cannot evaluate the strength of a claim without knowing what kind of claim it is.
Investigative timelines have the same problem in a different form. A well-researched chronology often presents documented facts and contested inferences in the same prose register, with the same typographic weight. The reader has no way to know which entries rest on three corroborating sources and which rest on one journalist's reconstruction.
The solution: explicit confidence grading
Every entry in a Zero Agenda News timeline carries one of three confidence labels. These are not hedges or disclaimers. They are structural claims about the epistemic status of the entry, enforced by a published specification.
Documented in two or more independent credible sources with no serious dispute among specialists. The event happened. This is not a claim that it matters or what it means — only that it occurred and is recorded.
Single-sourced, contested, or inferred. Plausible, reported, and included because it is relevant — but not definitively established. You should read conjecture entries with more scepticism than fact entries, and check the cited source yourself.
The author's interpretation, judgment, or recommendation. Opinion entries do not claim to describe what happened. They are clearly separated into labelled interpretation and recommendation sections, never embedded in the factual timeline.
Source requirements
Every Fact and Conjecture entry must cite at least one source. Sources are declared in a numbered bibliography at the end of each paper, with stable URLs and publication metadata. Inline citations link back to those entries by ID.
The "two sources" requirement for Fact entries is enforced editorially, not mechanically. Two press reports citing the same original document do not count as two independent sources. What counts is corroboration from separate evidentiary chains: two journalists who independently reported the same event from different access points, or a primary document plus an academic reconstruction based on that document plus other material.
What the format guarantees
A Zero Agenda News paper guarantees:
- Every factual claim is labelled with its confidence level.
- Every Fact and Conjecture entry cites at least one source.
- Opinion is quarantined into clearly labelled sections and never presented as fact.
- Sources are listed in full with URLs and are verifiable by the reader.
- The methodology is published and consistent across all papers.
It does not guarantee that the facts are correct — sources can be wrong, and so can our reading of them. It does not guarantee completeness — important events may be missing. What it guarantees is that you can see exactly what kind of claim each entry is and where it comes from.
The format
Papers are authored in the Evidence-Graded Timeline (EGT) format, an open specification designed for exactly this purpose. EGT is a structured YAML/JSON format with a published JSON Schema. It separates document content from presentation, is validatable by tooling, and is designed to be rendered consistently across different platforms.