How Insolvency News is made

Every article on this site is drafted from a single official record by a large-language model (currently Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6) and then human-reviewed by a named editor before publication. This page describes the pipeline end-to-end so you can judge its reliability.

Where the data comes from

Each article is anchored to one notice published in The London Gazette under section 175 of the Insolvency Act 1986 (and related provisions). We additionally pull, from Companies House under the Open Government Licence v3.0: the company's officers at the time of the notice, the registered office address, registered charges, accounts filing history and previous company names. We do not use private databases, social-graph signals, leaked information or unattributed sources.

How an article is drafted

The drafting pipeline runs in five passes for every published article. The same pipeline applies to every notice; there is no separate manual writing path.

Pass 1 -- ingest. The Gazette public Atom feed is polled every ten minutes. For each new notice we capture the raw feed entry, the JSON-LD record, and the full HTML notice body via the Gazette's public page. The full body text is preserved so the writer has the same material a journalist would have working from the printed Gazette.

Pass 2 -- enrichment. The Companies House API returns the officer list, registered office, SIC codes, accounts filings and registered charges associated with the company named in the notice. Where the notice references a court case, we capture the court name and case number. Where the notice names an insolvency practitioner with an IP number, we verify the IP number against the Insolvency Service's recognised-practitioner register.

Pass 3 -- angle. A large language model (currently Claude Sonnet 4.6 via OpenRouter) reads the structured bundle and proposes the news angle: which fact is the lead, what length the article should be, and whether the case is high, medium or low newsworthiness. The angle is logged with every article.

Pass 4 -- write. The same model then writes the article to the proposed angle, using ONLY the structured bundle as source material. The writer is forbidden from drawing on its own prior knowledge of named companies, directors or firms. Where the bundle does not provide a fact, the writer omits the fact rather than fabricating one.

Pass 5 -- humaniser. A copy-editing pass rewrites the draft to remove AI writing patterns (rule of three, conjunctive scaffolding, AI vocabulary) while preserving every named entity, number, date and section structure. Output is checked for forbidden markup (em-dashes, bullets, bold) and any survivors are stripped programmatically.

Editorial review

Every draft article lands in a review queue. The editor (currently James Waterton, Editor) reads each article, cross-checks the structured facts against the Gazette notice and the Companies House record, and either approves, edits or rejects it. The article is only published once the editor approves it. The article footer carries a "Last reviewed by" line stating who reviewed it and on what date.

Where the article shows its sources

Every article links to the originating Gazette notice. The schema.org JSON-LD on each article page carries the company number, the named insolvency practitioners (where present), the appointed firm and any outstanding secured-creditor names. The "Key parties" block under the hero links to per-entity archive pages.

What we do not do

We do not pay for sources. We do not run sponsored content. We do not enrich articles with quotations, photographs or commentary from third parties unless they are explicitly attributed to a published source. We do not use generative AI to draft headlines, comments or moderation decisions about reader comments.

Errors and corrections

When we are wrong, see our corrections policy and the corrections log.

The editor

James Waterton is the named editor of Insolvency News. Editor of Insolvency News. Covers UK administrations, voluntary and compulsory liquidations, moratoriums, prohibited-name notices and secured-lender activity from the official record. You can reach the editor at editorial@insolvency-news.uk or via the author archive.