Why a single-source claim is the most useful thing a draft can tell you

What the underline means

A single-source claim is a sentence that one outlet in the source set reports and no other outlet corroborates. It is not a judgement that the sentence is wrong. It is a record that, at the moment the draft was written, the pipeline could find exactly one origin for it.

The rule counts origins, not outlets. Three newspapers carrying the same wire paragraph are one origin. So a claim can appear in five places and still be single-source, and that case, the circular one, is the one most likely to fool a reader who is counting bylines.

Why the sentence stays

Deleting the sentence would produce a cleaner draft and a worse article. The unconfirmed figure is often the most specific thing in the piece: the number, the date, the name that the other outlets did not have. Removing it hides the one thing a reader would most want to check.

The cost of keeping it is visible: an underline, a dagger and a note. A 2024 survey of fact-checkers by the Poynter Institute found that attribution in the sentence, rather than removal, was the practice most respondents used for a claim they could not independently confirm^†. That finding is itself single-source in this set, so here it is, underlined.

Two exits, no third

An editor who reaches an underline has two choices. Add a source, and the pipeline re-checks the claim against it and rewrites the paragraph if the claim now holds. Or keep the flag with a note, and the note travels with the article into every export. There is no dismiss, because a dismissed flag is a deleted record of what the editor decided.

Frequently asked questions