Editorial Policy
Only Breaking sends a small number of push alerts for news that meets a deliberately high bar. This page explains how that bar works, in plain terms, so you know what to expect before you turn alerts on.
What qualifies for an alert
The test we apply is: would a broadly informed person reasonably want to be interrupted by this right now? Qualifying stories are newly occurring facts with high consequence, urgency, and broad public or institutional reach — for example, major government action, war or a sudden geopolitical escalation, severe economic shocks, nationally important court decisions, large disasters, critical public-health developments, or major science and technology events with immediate public impact.
If you've set a home state, we also alert on state-level emergencies: declared emergencies, evacuation orders, major disasters, or critical-infrastructure failures. Routine local crime, weather, traffic, and municipal politics do not qualify.
What never triggers an alert
- Opinion, editorials, columns, commentary, analysis, or explainers
- Live blogs and recap pages
- Sports, entertainment, celebrity, lifestyle, travel, food, or promotional material
- Routine local crime, court, government, business, or weather stories
- Predictions, rumors, or unverified claims
- A second publisher's account of a story we've already alerted on
Sourcing and verification
Wire services with a strong track record for accuracy may confirm a story on their own. Other sources normally need a second, independently owned outlet reporting the same facts before an alert goes out. When we link you to a story, we favor an accessible, authoritative source over a paywalled one, even if a paywalled outlet was part of what confirmed the story.
Updates to a story
We only send a second alert about the same event if the facts change in a way that matters — for example, an outcome being confirmed after earlier uncertainty, a significant change in scale, or a new development that would itself clear the bar above. Minor wording changes or incremental details do not trigger another alert.
Keeping alerts rare
We target zero to three ordinary alerts a day. Every candidate story is checked against the criteria above, and a limited number of the most significant stories are held for a person to review before anything is sent automatically, as an added safeguard while we build a track record.
No quiet hours, by design
Only Breaking does not delay alerts to a "quiet hours" window. The promise behind the app is: if we alert you, it matters right now — an alert that clears our bar is, by definition, something worth an interruption, and holding it until morning would either make it stale or make that promise false. The safeguard against unwanted late-night interruptions is the strict editorial bar itself, not scheduling. If you don't want alerts overnight, you can turn alerts off, mute specific topics in the app, or use your device's own Do Not Disturb and notification-schedule controls — Only Breaking does not override those.
Questions
If you think we got a call wrong, or you have feedback on this policy, reach out via the Support page.