TownVue Editorial Standards

1. Editorial policy

TownVue publishes three kinds of content: business, event, and experience listings; community articles; and platform-generated copy on town and category landing pages.

Listings

When TownVue launches in a new state, our small data team seeds the platform with verified, publicly-available information about local businesses so the directory is useful to residents from day one. Owners then claim their listing and take editorial control: they update hours, add photos, write descriptions, post events and experiences, and respond to customer questions directly. TownVue staff do not edit a claimed listing's owner-authored content. Our role on claimed listings is limited to safety and policy enforcement.

Community articles

Community articles are written by the TownVue user who publishes them, typically a local business owner posting about their services, an upcoming event, or a community story. Articles flagged for review by our automated moderation queue or by other users are evaluated by a TownVue admin against our listing guidelines before they go live or stay live.

Platform-generated copy

Some short text on TownVue is generated with AI assistance: town-page intro paragraphs, "browse by type" labels, AI-suggested FAQ drafts that owners can accept and edit, and direct-answer summaries on detail pages. All AI-generated copy is grounded in the listing's own data (its categories, hours, description, attributes, location, and pricing) and runs through brand-voice and safety filters before being published. AI-generated text is never represented as owner-authored, and owners can edit or remove any AI-suggested FAQ at any time.

2. Corrections policy

If anything on TownVue is wrong, we want to know about it. Here is how corrections happen.

If you're the listing owner

Claim or log in to your listing and edit it directly. Changes are saved immediately and propagate to public detail pages, town landing pages, search results, and structured data on the next page render. There is no editorial gatekeeping on owner-driven corrections to a claimed listing.

If you're a customer or community member

Email support@townvue.com with the URL of the listing or article and a short description of the error. We aim to acknowledge correction reports within two business days. If the error is on an unclaimed listing, we may correct it directly using the same publicly-available sources we used to seed it. If the error is on a claimed listing, we route the report to the owner.

When TownVue acts directly

A TownVue admin will edit, disable, or remove a listing or article without owner action when the content violates our listing guidelines, when a listing is reported as no-longer-operating, when an owner does not claim a listing within 30 days of seeding, or when content is reported as fraudulent or unsafe. Admin actions are logged internally so corrections are traceable.

Versioning

TownVue does not currently publish a public revision history for individual listings or articles. Listings show a "Listings updated" date that ticks forward when a user-visible field changes, so visitors can see how recently information was confirmed.

3. Fact-checking policy

TownVue is a directory and community platform, not an investigative newsroom. We do not employ professional fact-checkers, and we do not represent every listing as independently verified. What we do is build verification through a combination of identity signals, data sourcing, and ongoing moderation.

Identity verification on claimed listings

When a business owner claims a listing, identity is established through two independent signals: (1) the claim code we send to the public contact information of the business at seeding time (so only someone with access to that channel can claim), and (2) a paid subscription via Stripe, which carries its own identity and payment verification. A business that has cleared both signals is what we call a "claimed" listing.

Data sourcing on unclaimed listings

Unclaimed listings are seeded from publicly-available sources. We do not represent unclaimed listings as owner-verified. We mark them as eligible to claim, and we expire and remove them after 30 days if no owner has claimed them.

AI-generated content

AI-suggested copy never invents facts that are not already in the underlying listing data. The AI is given the listing's own categories, hours, attributes, address, pricing, and description as context, and is prompted not to add details outside that input. AI-generated FAQs are reviewable and editable by the owner before they go live.

Reader-flagged content

If a TownVue user reports a listing or article as factually incorrect, that report enters our moderation queue and is reviewed by a TownVue admin against the original source data and any owner edits. Listings or articles found to be substantively misleading are corrected, disabled, or removed depending on severity.

Limitations

TownVue is operated by a small team. We do not independently verify every claim a business makes about itself in its own description or FAQs. The visible "this is owner-authored content" framing on the page is the user's signal that the words are the owner's, not TownVue's. The structured data we publish to search engines reflects the same: owner-authored fields are attributed to the business, AI-generated direct-answer summaries are grounded in the underlying data, and anything we don't have a confident source for, we don't publish.

About TownVue

For background on the company, the founders, and how we operate, see About TownVue. Security disclosures: /.well-known/security.txt.