Content limits

1. What this site is

Newsroom Horizon is a free, independent editorial knowledge base about digital journalism and the future of media, published from Dublin by Newsroom Horizon Ltd. It explains how news is produced, ranked, funded and disclosed. Everything on it can be read without an account, a payment or an email address, and there is nothing for sale.

This page collects, in one place, every limit that applies to the material. It reproduces the text of the first-entry notice for anyone who has already acknowledged it, and it is the page to read before relying on anything published here.

2. No accreditation, no qualification, no award

This desk holds no accreditation from any body, and it awards none. There is no course, no programme, no cohort, no enrolment, no curriculum, no assessment, no examination, no certificate and no credential of any kind. Nobody here can confirm that a reader has completed anything, because there is nothing to complete.

Reading these pages confers no status in Ireland or anywhere else. It does not qualify anyone to practise journalism, to advise on media law, to conduct verification professionally or to hold any role. Where the material describes a professional practice, it describes it — it does not train anyone in it and does not certify that anyone has learned it.

3. No employment or publication guarantee

This desk has no relationship with any employer, newsroom, agency or commissioning editor. It makes no introductions, holds no vacancies, forwards no applications and has no influence over anyone’s hiring or publication decisions. No claim is made, expressly or by implication, that reading this material improves anyone’s prospects of being employed, commissioned or published.

It is also not a recruitment service, a talent agency, a mentoring scheme or a work-appraisal service. Requests to review, edit or comment on a reader’s own material cannot be accepted, and the contact page says so directly rather than leaving people to wait for a reply that will not come.

4. Not legal or professional advice

Nothing on this site is legal advice, data-protection advice, regulatory advice or professional advice of any other kind, and no adviser-and-client relationship arises from reading it. Media law, defamation, contempt of court, privacy, copyright, confidentiality and data-protection duties differ between jurisdictions, turn on facts this site cannot know, and change over time.

Where pages describe legal instruments — the EU AI Act, the Digital Services Act, the GDPR, the Irish statutory framework — they set out the general shape of an obligation and direct the reader to the current text. Scope depends on the role a service plays and on provisions that phase in over time. Before publishing anything on the basis of material read here, check the current position with a qualified professional in your jurisdiction.

5. Not a regulator, and not regulated as one

This desk is not a press council, an ombudsman, a media regulator or a complaints body. It cannot examine another publication, adjudicate a dispute, order a correction elsewhere or make any finding about anyone’s conduct. Complaints about other publications should go to the appropriate body.

Institutions are named throughout the site as public reference points: Coimisiún na Meán, the Press Council of Ireland and the Office of the Press Ombudsman, the legacy codes of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, the Central Statistics Office, the Data Protection Commission and the European instruments that apply. Newsroom Horizon is not a member of any of them, and holds no recognition, accreditation, endorsement, funding or supervision from them. No such claim appears anywhere on this site.

6. Limits of the material itself

Pages describe mechanisms and general practice. They are not tailored to any organisation, jurisdiction, newsroom size or legal position, and they cannot take account of the circumstances in which they will be applied. A checklist reproduced from this site reduces the chance of an omission; it does not transfer responsibility, and it is not a compliance certification.

Some of the evidence underlying these subjects is genuinely unsettled, and the pages say so where that is the case rather than resolving a debate for the sake of a cleaner sentence. Some subjects are moving quickly enough that a page can be accurate when published and misleading within a year, which is why review dates matter more here than initial accuracy.

7. Worked examples and the calculator

Worked examples use neutral units only — items, words, minutes, hours, frames, sample counts and percentages. There are no monetary amounts anywhere on this site. Examples demonstrate an arithmetic relationship; they are not measurements of any real newsroom and are not recommendations about staffing, volume, tooling or process.

The automation-share calculator in the first analysis computes three ratios from three inputs, displays its formulas, validates its inputs and reports an error in visible text when they are invalid. It is an arithmetic illustration. It does not assess the quality of any review, the accuracy of any tool or the adequacy of any staffing level, and no decision should rest on its output.

8. The first-entry notice, in full

The dialog shown on a first visit reads as follows, and is reproduced here so that it can be re-read at any time after acknowledgement.

Acknowledging the notice stores a single essential value on your device so that it is not shown again. The cookie page describes that value in full and explains how to clear it.

9. If something here is wrong

Errors are expected on any reference site and are treated as ordinary rather than exceptional. The correction route is a plain email address on the contact page, with the subject line “Correction”. A request that quotes the exact sentence, explains what is wrong and cites a source can usually be assessed the same working day.

Corrections are made in place, with a visible note stating what was wrong, what the page now says and when the change was made. The superseded wording is retained where anyone might have quoted it. Pages are not silently amended and are not deleted to resolve a complaint.

Questions about these limits