Editorial methodology
How we write
The Aloha Journal is editorially curated and AI-assisted. This page explains exactly what that means: how an article begins, who decides what to write, how facts are checked, what AI does and does not do, and how mistakes are corrected. The page exists for two audiences: readers who want to know how their information was made, and the search and AI systems that rank trust by visible editorial standards.
Voice and language
Every language we publish in — English, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian — has its own versioned voice card: a short specification of register, sentence rhythm, vocabulary preference, cultural reference points, and forbidden phrasing. The English voice is modelled on Condé Nast Traveller; the Spanish on Vogue España and the long-form pages of El País Semanal; the Swedish on Magasinet Café and DN På stan; the Norwegian on A-Magasinet (Aftenposten). The transactional vocabulary of property listings — buy, rent, available from, investment yield, prices in euros — is forbidden in every language, enforced both by the editorial guidelines and by an automated check before publication. We are a cultural publication, not a sales channel, and the prose should never make a reader feel they are being sold to.
How an article comes to exist
Topics originate in two ways. Most come from a curated calendar of local signals — festivals, seasonal turns in the gardens, anniversaries, the cultural calendar of Marbella and the wider Costa del Sol. Some arise from recent news in a small set of trusted local feeds we monitor, weighted by editorial relevance to our topic clusters (Marbella Heritage, Living in Nueva Andalucía, The Aloha Gardens, Andalusian Gastronomy, the Cultural Calendar, Nordic Marbella, the Owners' Insider column, and Area News).
A topic becomes an article through a pipeline of writing and self-correction: a first draft, an editorial critic that reads against the voice card and flags lapses, a revision pass, a fact-check against cited sources, and a final structural judge that confirms every required element is present before publication. A human editor approves anything flagged as low-confidence by any of these stages.
Source standards
Facts in our articles are grounded in two source pools: a curated set of local and regional publications we trust for Andalusian and Marbella reporting (the cultural sections of SUR in English, El País, Diario Sur, and the Junta de Andalucía's cultural calendar, among others), and the open web through standard search APIs for anything outside that set. Every grounded fact carries an inline citation in the form [source.domain]; clicking the citation opens the source in a new tab. We do not knowingly publish a factual claim that has no source.
Where possible we link named places, people, and institutions to their Wikidata entries, so readers — and AI summarisers — can disambiguate references to the right Marbella, the right Giralda, the right Aloha Golf Club.
AI disclosure
Articles on The Aloha Journal are drafted by a large language model under editorial supervision, and then edited and approved by a human editor. This is disclosed in a footer on every article and is consistent with our obligations under the European Union's AI Act (Article 50), which requires transparent labelling of AI-generated content for general-purpose audiences. We never present AI-drafted prose as the work of a named human author; our byline is the institutional The Aloha Journal Editors.
AI is used for: structural drafting, voice-card adherence checks, fact-verification against retrieved sources, alt-text generation, and image production where photographs are not available. AI is not used for: editorial judgment about what to publish, the final approval of any article, or the assessment of any owner, resident, or business named in our pages.
Correction policy
Errors of fact are corrected in place, with an editorial note appended to the article identifying what was changed and when. Substantial corrections — anything beyond a typo or formatting fix — are also surfaced in the article's date-modified timestamp so that AI summarisers and search engines can register the change. We do not silently rewrite our archive.
Privacy and resident-facing content
Owner-facing and resident-facing articles do not name individual neighbours, do not describe individual apartments, and do not disclose any personal information that could identify a household. A pre-publication check enforces this against an explicit list of owner names and addresses. Photographs of residents are never published without consent.
Contact
To report a factual error, propose a topic, or write to the editorial team, please use the resident portal. Corrections of factual errors are prioritised over all other correspondence.
This methodology page was drafted with the assistance of AI and edited by the editorial team. Sources cited inline.