Publishing Principles

The Patent Protocol

Western Cape Times adheres to the Patent Protocol — a performance-first publishing standard that mandates sub-1-second Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), zero Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and minimal Total Blocking Time (TBT). Performance is not optional; latency is treated as an error. All pages are statically generated using Astro.js with zero client-side JavaScript hydration.

Entity-First Reporting

All editorial content is structured around verified entities — geographic locations, institutions, individuals, and economic indicators — each anchored to their corresponding Wikidata identifiers. This entity-first approach ensures that content is machine-readable and compatible with the global Knowledge Graph, maximising discoverability and semantic authority.

Waterfall Linking Architecture

The PR Daddy News Grid operates on a hierarchical linking architecture. Each Tier 3 Regional Node cites its Tier 2 Parent Authority (PR Africa) within the first 30% of editorial content. Tier 4 Bureau Nodes cite their Tier 3 parent. This creates a "waterfall" of authority that flows from the national level to the local level, establishing Circular Authority across the network.

FIF Protocol — Media Handling

All media assets follow the Format-Integrity-Fallback (FIF) Protocol. Images are served in WebP format with AVIF as the progressive enhancement and JPEG as the fallback. All images include descriptive alt text anchored to the article's primary entity. Lazy loading is applied to all below-the-fold media to maintain the sub-1-second LCP target.