How Vegan Brief is made.

The morning wire

Every morning the Field Desk reads about 70 sources across the six categories the brief covers: Research & Nutrition, Food & Recipes, Innovation, Activism & Animals, Law & Policy, and Wins & Culture. That range is the point. A cultivated meat approval is a science story, a policy story, and a dinner story at once, and no single outlet covers all three sides of it. The wire runs from nutrition journals and food-tech trade press to advocacy groups, regulators, recipe developers, and the grassroots discussion where vegans pressure-test what actually works. The full category map is public.

Stories that surface in several outlets are pulled into one entry, so you read each development once, with the full picture, instead of six partial versions of it. Every entry names its sources, and the numbered references on each brief link straight to the articles they came from.

Assembled, not asserted

Each story card is built from the sources' own material rather than written about them. A card leads with a checkable headline, then carries the one line a real person actually said, quoted word for word, and the figures exactly as the sources give them. Every claim is attributed to whoever made it: a company's own unaudited number is reported as that company's number, a study's finding as that study's finding, so a peer-reviewed trial and a press release can never blur into the same sentence. The brief tells you what happened and who said what; what to make of it stays your call.

Primary sources first

Reporting a study by its press coverage is how hype gets laundered, so the pipeline goes and gets the paper. Study identifiers behind the day's coverage, DOIs and PubMed listings, are resolved through Crossref and PubMed so the actual abstract sits next to the journalism when the brief is written. A bounded research step can pull in a handful of further primary documents the day's stories lean on, from an allowlist of journals, regulators, and official records. The brief only ever quotes from sources gathered into that day's pool.

The gates: what has to pass before an issue ships

Checking is not a vibe here; it is software that runs on every issue, every morning, after the brief is written and before it is published.

• The quality gate, which fails closed. An issue that is too thin, missing sections, or built on too few articles does not ship at all. On a genuinely bad morning you get silence instead of filler. Nothing publishes by default; the gate has to say yes.
• The citation check. Every numbered reference in the brief is verified to point at the article the prose names. A reference that drifted gets flagged loudly for the desk.
• The quote gate. Every quote and every headline figure is checked, character for character, against the cited source's text. A quote or number that appears in no source stops the issue from publishing, full stop. That is the one error this brief is not allowed to survive.

Follow-ups that actually happen

When a story names a real next date — a vote, a ruling, a deadline — the brief flags it, and the flag goes on a ledger. Items that come due are fed back into future mornings, so a "we will know by December" line actually gets revisited in December, and a fight that moves gets connected to what came before instead of reported as if it were new.

Storylines and the long game

Fights that run for years, cultivated meat approvals, labeling laws, corporate welfare pledges, are kept as Storylines: dated, sourced timelines the morning brief extends. 24 of the 54 tracked storylines are active right now. When a fight resolves, it graduates into the history of veganism, whose own quotes are verified the same way: the daily "on this day" piece re-fetches every page it cites and keeps only the quotes it can confirm word for word.

The reference shelves, audited every morning

The evergreen questions get their own pages: The Evidence (49 articles on what the science actually shows) and Is it vegan? (109 ingredients from the label small print). Both shelves are researched by hand, built on verbatim primary-source quotes, and every quote is archived when the page is written. Each morning, before the site deploys, an audit re-verifies every quoted span on both shelves against those archived sources; a page that no longer matches its receipts gets flagged before it can mislead anyone. A separate freshness guard flags any shelf that has gone more than 30 days without a read-through, and each read-through is stamped on the shelf with a dated review line.

Who makes this

Vegan Brief is written and edited at the Field Desk, and the desk is the author: there is no invented byline and no persona. The framework is human-designed, the six categories, the sourcing rules, the questions asked of every story, and the day's articles are read against that fixed framework every morning, with the checks above run by machine. Ownership and funding are disclosed on the About page: independent, reader-funded, no money from anyone the brief covers.

The honest limits

• The wire has edges. About 70 sources is a lot of vegan world, and it is not all of it. A story none of those sources ran is a story the brief misses that morning.
• Speed costs depth some mornings. The brief is written and checked in hours to be on time for breakfast. The slower, fuller answers live on the shelves, which get the monthly read-throughs.
• Machines catch misquotes, not misjudgments. The gates verify that every quote and figure is real and sourced. Whether a story deserved more skepticism is a judgment, and judgments can be wrong. When one is, it goes on the corrections page.

Checking our work

The receipts are public by design: a numbered source list on every brief, dated timelines for every long fight, and the corrections ledger for every published error. If something here does not hold up, email hello@veganbrief.com; it reaches a real person at the desk.