Editorial Policy

Who we are

Zethiopia is a bilingual English–Amharic newsroom serving the Ethiopian American community, founded as a print newspaper in 2002 and relaunched as a digital publication. It is edited by Dereje Desta.

What we cover — and what we don’t

We report on development, business and investment, technology, health, social affairs, education and tourism, and on the life of the Ethiopian American community in the United States.

We do not publish partisan political coverage, and we do not publish ethnic advocacy of any kind.

This is a choice, not an oversight. Ethiopian media inside and outside the country is saturated with both, and a reader looking for either has no shortage of places to go. What is genuinely scarce is a publication a family can read together without first checking whose side it is on. We would rather be the paper that tells you what a new investment law actually changes, or how a clinic in Addis is coping, than one more voice in an argument that is already too loud. Where politics is unavoidable context for a story we cover, we report it as fact and attribute it plainly.

Sources

We link to our sources. Where a source is in Amharic or another language, we say so and we cite it anyway — much of what matters is reported first in Amharic, and a briefing built only from English sources is an incomplete one.

Where we could not independently confirm a claim, we attribute it rather than state it as established fact. Every item carries the date of the event it describes.

The AI Ledger

Every article we publish carries a short disclosure box stating what the machine did and what a person verified:

AI Ledger. Drafted with AI assistance from the sources listed above. Amharic translation produced with AI assistance. Facts, sources and Amharic verified by Dereje Desta.

We publish this for three reasons.

The first is simple honesty. Many publications now use these tools. Few say so. A reader is entitled to know how the thing in front of them was made.

The second is that disclosure is only meaningful if it is specific. “This article used AI” tells a reader nothing. Naming which stage was machine-assisted and which was human-verified tells them what to trust and where to check.

The third is that Amharic is a low-resource language, and machine translation into it remains unreliable in ways that are not obvious to a reader who does not speak it. Every Amharic text we publish is reviewed by a native speaker before it runs. That review is the point of the ledger, and it is not optional.

What AI does not do here. It does not decide what is worth publishing. It does not verify a fact. It does not approve an Amharic sentence. Editorial judgment, verification and final language sit with a person, and that person is named.

Corrections

We correct errors promptly and visibly. Corrected articles carry a dated note describing what was wrong and what was changed. We do not quietly edit published work.

To report an error, contact us through the Contact page.

Contact

Corrections, questions and story tips are welcome through the Contact page.