Editorial mission
This publication centers local voices. The goal is to help a reader understand a place as someone who lives there understands it.
Articles about food culture, daily life, and social customs from around the world. Written for travelers who want to understand, not just visit. We write for readers who want a place explained from the inside. Fewer posts, longer posts, clearer intent — and no sponsored content, affiliate links, or listicles dressed up as journalism.
Author
Michael Kovnick
Cultural Observer & Travel Designer
Michael documents daily life as it is lived rather than visited.
How we write
We cite the people who live the story and get out of their way. We resist the travel-writer temptation to speak for a place we are visiting.
- Firsthand where possible. When we’ve been somewhere, interviewed someone, or tested something ourselves, we say so and ground the piece in specifics.
- Research where not. When we haven’t, we rely on primary sources, official documents, academic work, or on-the-record interviews — not on other aggregators.
- Opinion vs. reporting is labeled. Analysis and essay are clearly the author’s view. News, history, and logistics are cited.
- No sponsorship, no affiliate payments. We don’t accept paid placement, press trips in exchange for coverage, affiliate commissions, or gifts conditioned on favorable writing. If a relationship exists, we disclose it in the article.
- No listicles, no clickbait, no keyword stuffing. We don’t write “Top 10” articles for traffic, we don’t trade a headline’s honesty for a click, and we don’t pad prose to hit a keyword target.
Sources and citations
When we make a factual claim — a date, a statistic, a law, a historical assertion — we link to a primary source whenever one exists. If a claim isn’t sourced, treat it as the author’s opinion or on-the-ground observation rather than a verified fact. We prefer official documents, academic publications, and reputable reporting to aggregator pages.
AI disclosure
Some articles on Lived by Locals are drafted with assistance from large language models and then edited, fact-checked, and rewritten for voice by a human editor. We use AI the way an editor uses a good researcher: to gather, to sketch, to speed up the boring parts. Every article is reviewed by a person before publication.
We do not publish AI-generated content unreviewed. If a piece would embarrass us to put our name on after reading it end to end, it doesn’t run. Quotes, statistics, and named claims are verified against real sources before publication, not taken on the model’s word.
Corrections
If you find an error — a misattributed quote, a wrong date, a broken fact, anything — email editorial@livedbylocals.com. We correct the article promptly and append a dated correction note so readers can see what changed. Minor typos get fixed silently; substantive errors get logged.
Conflicts of interest
If the author has a material relationship with a person, business, or institution discussed in an article — financial interest, family tie, prior employment, ongoing consulting — we disclose it in the piece. At time of writing, no undisclosed material conflicts are known. If that changes, we update this page and the affected articles.
Independence
Lived by Locals is independently published. No advertiser, sponsor, platform, or partner has editorial input on what we cover or how we cover it. The only person who signs off on what runs is the editor.
Contact
Tips, corrections, feedback, and source suggestions are welcome at editorial@livedbylocals.com.
Last updated: 2026-04-20