Security and status
How we keep your newsroom up, safe and yours
Plain answers to what a newsroom should ask before trusting a platform with its archive.
Status and checks
Every newsroom site is checked every morning: does the site answer, are all its services healthy, did last night's backup finish and reach off-site storage, how full is the disk, and which version is running. Anything wrong shows on our control panel before you notice it.
Errors on every site are reported to us the moment they happen. Sites can also get a health check every 5 minutes from three places in Europe, as BetaVoices has.
Something wrong right now? Write to info@lederoom.com and we answer within one business day.
Where your data is
Every newsroom gets its own server with its own database, storage, email sender and keys. No other newsroom's data is on it. On request we install LedeRoom in your own cloud account instead.
- Your site, database and search
- Your own server at Hetzner, Nuremberg, GermanyOne server per newsroom. No other newsroom's data is on it.
- Photos, video and documents you upload
- Private Cloudflare R2 storage, placed in Western EuropeFiles are private and are served through your site, not from a public bucket.
- Backups
- On your server and in a separate private R2 bucketA full database backup every night, checked to be readable, kept on the server and off-site.
- Error reports
- Sentry, EU region (Germany)Technical errors only, so we can fix problems before you report them.
- Email your site sends
- ResendSign-in links, password resets, newsletters and alerts, from your own address.
- Text sent to AI tools
- Anthropic (Claude), United StatesOnly the text of the item an AI tool is working on. Anthropic's commercial terms do not allow training on it.
- Reader payments
- StripeCard details go to Stripe directly. They never touch your server.
Backups
Your whole database is backed up every night, and each backup is checked to be readable. It is kept on your server and copied to a separate private storage bucket with its own key, so a lost server never means a lost archive.
We keep the last 7 nightly and 4 weekly copies on the server, and about a month of copies off-site. Newsrooms keep their uploaded photos and files in private storage apart from the server too.
Moving a site to a new server is a routine step for us, rehearsed before the switch, and we can roll back to the previous server.
Sign-in and who can do what
Staff can protect their account with an authenticator app, with recovery codes for a lost phone. A site admin can make it required for everyone on staff.
Newsrooms on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 can let staff sign in with their company account, limited to the newsroom's own domain, and can make company sign-in the only way in.
Journalists, verifiers, editors and site admins each see only what their role needs. Only an editor can publish. Changes to site settings and people are kept in an audit log.
Servers and connections
Every page is served over HTTPS, and browsers are told never to use a plain connection. Servers accept only web traffic and key-based admin access: no passwords, with repeated failed attempts blocked.
Security updates install automatically. Passwords and API keys are kept out of the code, and each newsroom's keys work only for that newsroom.
Your data is always yours
A site admin can download everything the newsroom has on LedeRoom at any time, for free: every story with its history, people, subscribers and members, corrections and verification records, and every original file. If you can't sign in, we send it within 7 days of asking.
How LedeRoom uses AI
AI helps; editors decide. AI drafts, checks and translations are suggestions, and an editor approves every story before it is published. AI never signs off on a story.
Translated stories carry an “AI translated” label for readers. A story's trust score comes only from an independent check of its claims on the web, and the newsroom's own links never count towards it.
We use Anthropic's Claude through its API. Only the text an AI tool is working on is sent, and Anthropic's commercial terms do not allow training on it. A site admin can set a monthly AI budget, and manual editing always keeps working.
Audits
LedeRoom does not have a SOC 2 report yet. We follow the SOC 2 controls that fit a team our size, and we will walk you through our checklist and answer a security questionnaire on request.
Security questions or a problem to report: info@lederoom.com.