What this paper is, and what it refuses to be
Heavy Metal Today is compiled by machine. A pipeline reads declared sources — official band, label, festival and promoter feeds, press releases sent to its inbox, correspondent filings, and open structured data — extracts the factual claims they make, and writes original briefs from those claims. No human edits a story before it appears. That is not a boast; it is a disclosure, and it is why the rules below are enforced by the system itself rather than by promise.
It publishes announcements, never rumours
If no named source will put its name to a claim, the paper does not carry it. A story cannot reach publication without at least one linked source on record, and the archive keeps, permanently, the exact source material every story was written from.
What is never published automatically
- Deaths, health matters, criminal or misconduct allegations, lawsuits
- Band splits, member departures, and disputes framed as news
- Political controversy, and anything involving a minor
- Anything sourced only to rumour or speculation
Stories touching these subjects are held by the gates and simply do not exist to the reader. There is no override.
Corrections are public
When a higher-authority source supersedes a published fact, a correction publishes itself with the full trail, and the superseded claim remains in the record, marked. The log is at /corrections.
The plates
The engravings on these pages are illustrations, not records. A plate may evoke; it may never depict — no real person, band, venue or event is ever pictured, and no image on this paper documents anything that happened. Plates come from two drawers: pre-1900 public domain prints, captioned with their true title, year and source; and machine-engraved illustrations, captioned Illustration — machine engraved. A generated plate never carries an invented date or attribution — inventing a provenance would be the same sin as inventing a fact. This labelling is also the paper’s compliance with EU AI Act Article 50 on marking synthetic content, as is the standing disclosure that every story here is written by machine.
Sources are respected
The paper reads declared feeds only, honours robots.txt and publisher terms, and does not ingest outlets that have stated they do not wish AI systems to consume their work. A publication is never the primary source when an official announcement exists for the same story.
Takedowns
Requests to press@heavymetal.today are honoured within 48 hours.