Editorial policyArvamus

How a story is made

Every story passes the same checks before it is published. These are the promises the checks make to readers, and how firmly the paper holds each one.

Always

A story is not published until this holds. Nobody can waive it.

Every question names its date, the source that decides it and the rule by which it is decided, and its calls close before it resolves.
A fact whose quoted source does not say what the fact says is not published, unless an editor keeps it with a written reason.
The lead text is signed off before publication. The label names the person who read it; when the AI editor signed it off instead, the label says that no person read it.
A question stays open for at least two days and at most ninety, and calls stay open for at least a day after publication.
An opinion question asks one thing in even-handed words, quotes what a public figure said word for word, with who said it, where and when, gives the other side when the sources carry one, and is never about a private person.
Every picture carries its credit and a licence that lets us show it; a picture whose licence forbids changes is never cropped or set into a card, and a news outlet's picture is never used.
A picture never shows a private person or a child: unless it is the source's own picture of its own news, it is used only once it has been checked to show no one, or only public figures.

Unless an editor waives it in writing

A story is not published until this holds, unless an editor waives it with a written reason. Every waiver is kept on record.

Every fact a story uses rests on two independent sources or on one primary source.
Every story draws on at least one primary source: an official statement or document, a dataset, or an interview.
Where sources disagree, the desk decides the disagreement before publication; when both sides stand, the story tells both.
Every quote has its source text or its recording behind it, and every story is screened for legal risk to the people it names.
Quotes stay within what their sources' rights allow: a source that permits no quotation is never quoted, and a quote is always linked to its source.
The desk's estimate is published with at least two written reasons, each citing a fact of the story.
Every sentence of a published text is tied to the facts it rests on, and an independent verifier checks the tie.
An illustration appears with a story only after a person approved it.
Every text carries a visible AI label, a machine-readable label and a link to its provenance record.
The house keeps a short list of words it avoids, among them the vocabulary of gaming for money, and its stories keep to it.
Where a question has an Oracle, an independent AI forecast, the Oracle makes its forecast before the question is published.

Required of the automated desk

Required before publication of every story the automated desk prepares. On a story a journalist prepares, the desk is told and decides.

An AI editor checks every sentence, the key facts and the story as a whole against the sources.
A story says that one figure moved because of another only when a source states that link: readings that are unusual at the same time are not presented as cause and effect.
Every story runs the same course: why we ask, the story so far, what is happening, what it comes down to, and the question.

The desk is told

The desk is told when this does not hold. It does not stop publication.

A story appears in another language only when the desk has written its question in that language; until then readers of that language get the English story.
Before publication the desk is told when a newer reading exists for data a story cites.
The news behind a question is at most ten days old when the question is published.
Questions are written in plain words: names people know, no unexplained acronyms, at most one number besides the date.
Every picture comes with a short caption in the story's language that says what it shows.