Editorial Guidelines
These are the rules our editorial team works to, and that anyone writing for us accepts before a commission begins. They are published so readers can hold us to them.
Sourcing
We work from primary sources wherever one exists, and we link to them. A primary source is the thing itself, not a description of it: a regulatory or court filing; a statute, regulation or programme rulebook; a technical specification; source code, a commit or a release note; an operator’s own incident report; a research paper with its supplementary material; published financial statements or a live pricing page; or a person with first-hand knowledge speaking to us directly. Other outlets and analyst notes help us find stories but are not the basis for a claim; where we rely on one for something we cannot verify, we attribute and link it.
A contested or consequential claim — disputed by the parties, alleging wrongdoing, or likely to affect a reader’s decision — needs either a primary document we have seen ourselves or two independent sources with direct knowledge. Independent means they do not derive from each other; three people repeating one internal memo is one source. Short of that bar we publish the narrower claim we can support, or nothing. We do not run anonymous single-source allegations about identifiable people, treat a case study as evidence of a result, or build a story on a screenshot we cannot authenticate.
Numbers, benchmarks and vendor claims
- Every figure is dated. Prices, valuations, latencies and token costs carry the date or period they describe.
- Currency and units are explicit. CAD or USD rather than a bare dollar sign; monthly or annual; gross or net; percentage or percentage point. Conversions state the rate and its date.
- Arithmetic is shown when it matters. On dilution, payback, margin or infrastructure cost we give the inputs and the working, and flag any figure that is our own estimate.
- Vendor marketing numbers are not laundered into fact. A company’s claim about its own product is attributed to it and, where possible, tested. If we could not test it, we say so.
- Benchmarks carry their caveats: hardware or instance type, software versions, dataset, workload, concurrency, run count and variance. A result with no stated configuration is not a benchmark, and we say so rather than repeat the number.
- Surveys come with their method — sample size, sampling frame, field dates, who paid — or they stay out.
Anonymous and confidential sources
On-the-record sourcing is the default. Anonymity is granted where a source faces real risk — loss of employment, legal exposure, retaliation — and the information matters to readers and cannot be had on the record. It is not granted so someone can attack a competitor or make an allegation they will not stand behind.
The editor always knows an anonymous source’s identity and the basis of their knowledge. We tell readers as much as we safely can about the source’s position and why they are unnamed, and we corroborate the substance elsewhere. Ground rules are agreed before the conversation, not after. We do not grant quote approval or pre-publication review in exchange for access, though we will read quotations back for accuracy. Confidential material never reaches any commercial function.
Fact-checking before publication
Nothing publishes without a documented check. The writer submits the piece with its sources — links, documents, transcripts, calculation notes — mapped to the claims they support. A reviewer who did not write the piece then confirms, claim by claim, that each statement is genuinely supported by the source cited; that every number matches its source and its arithmetic re-runs; that each link resolves to the specific document described; that names, titles, versions and jurisdictions are right; that quotations match the transcript in wording and context; that time-sensitive statements are dated and hedged; and that the headline claims no more than the body proves.
Unsupported claims go back to the writer, then get cut, narrowed or attributed. Where a piece is critical of an identifiable company or person, we put the substance to them before publication with a window to reply, then publish the reply or note that they declined. An editor gives final sign-off; nobody publishes their own work unreviewed.
Use of AI tools
We use AI tools where they help: searching long documents, transcribing interviews, drafting outlines, tightening prose. That is ordinary tooling and we do not badge every article for it.
What follows is not optional. No claim, quotation, figure, citation, date, name or link produced or touched by an AI tool is published until a person has verified it against the underlying source. Model output is an unverified lead, never a source. A human byline means a human did the reporting, the reasoning and the verification. We do not use them to fabricate quotations, invent examples presented as real, or generate images that could pass as documentary photographs, and we do not paste confidential or embargoed material into third-party tools. A human editor signs off on every piece and is accountable for it. Contributors who pass off AI-generated drafts as original work are not published again.
Plagiarism, attribution and quoting
Plagiarism ends a working relationship immediately: copied prose, close paraphrase of someone else’s structure and analysis, an uncredited translation, or lifting another outlet’s reporting to obscure who did the work.
If another publication broke a story, we say so and link to them in the piece, not in a footnote. Claims taken from someone else’s investigation, dataset or benchmark are credited by name at the point of use. Quotations are kept short, clearly marked and linked to the original; we quote what is needed to examine a point and never reproduce whole sections of another work. Charts built from others’ data credit that data. Requests to republish our work go to [email protected].
Conflicts of interest and disclosure
Anyone writing or editing for us declares, before work begins, any interest a reasonable reader would want to know about: equity, options, tokens or other holdings in a company being covered, directly or through a fund they influence; employment, consulting, advisory or board relationships, current or recent; a client or competitor relationship; funding received from a company covered; a close personal relationship with a subject.
Where the conflict is direct — a holding in the company being written about, or a live commercial relationship with it — the writer does not take the assignment. Where the interest is distant and the writer’s expertise is genuinely valuable, we may proceed with a disclosure published on the article itself rather than buried in a bio. Broad index exposure needs no disclosure. Editors recuse on the same terms, and we accept no payment, gift, travel, equity or preferential access in exchange for coverage.
Sponsored content and affiliate links
A sponsored article carries a "Sponsored" label at the top of the page and in every listing, feed and newsletter where it appears, and names the sponsor. If the sponsor supplied or approved the text, the label says so; if our team wrote it, it is written to the sourcing standards above and the label says that instead. Sponsored pieces are never styled to resemble our reporting, are excluded from editorial rankings, and are never presented as an award or endorsement. Editorial holds the final say on labelling and can decline a topic outright; full terms are on the advertise with us page.
Affiliate links may appear in editorial articles and are disclosed on any article containing them, per our affiliate disclosure. An affiliate programme never determines what we cover, recommend or rank first, and no commercial partner sees an article before publication. Contributors may not add links of their own; concealed commercial links get the piece unpublished.
Review units, travel and hospitality
Hardware or software supplied for review is a loan, returned when the review is done or its retention disclosed. We keep no gifts of value; trial licences granted for testing are disclosed. We pay our own way to conferences; where a company covers travel in a case we judge worth the access, that is stated prominently in the resulting article. A briefing carries no obligation to publish.
Corrections, updates and retractions
We publish quickly enough to be wrong sometimes. When that happens we fix it in the open, in one of five categories.
| Category | What it covers | How it is disclosed |
|---|---|---|
| Typo fix | Spelling, punctuation, formatting or a broken link, with no effect on meaning. | Fixed silently, no note. |
| Clarification | Accurate but ambiguous, easily misread, or missing context. | Dated note at the foot of the article saying what was reworded. |
| Update | Nothing was wrong; events moved — a figure changed, a company responded. | Dated update note, original text left intact above it. |
| Correction | A factual error: a wrong number, name, date, attribution or claim. | Text corrected plus a dated note saying what was wrong and what it says now. |
| Retraction | The central claim does not hold and cannot be repaired by correction. | Marked retracted at the top with a dated explanation, and left accessible. |
Headline errors are corrected in the headline and noted in the body. Nothing is quietly overwritten and we do not backdate changes.
Right of reply
Anyone criticised or accused of something in our pages is offered the substance before publication and a fair chance to answer. Afterwards, a subject may send a response; where it is substantive and on point we will quote it in an update or publish it, edited only for length, clarity and legal risk. Nobody has to accept our conclusions to be allowed a reply.
Takedown and unpublishing
Unpublishing is rare, deliberately: a record that can be removed on request is not a record. Discomfort, changed business circumstances, a reputation-management campaign, or a legal threat with no identified error are not grounds for removal. Correction, clarification, update and right of reply fix the accuracy problem while keeping the history intact. We will consider removal or redaction where publication creates a real and disproportionate risk to someone’s safety, where personal information was published in error, where we are legally obliged to act, or where a piece is so unsound that retraction plus removal is the only honest option. That decision belongs to the editor, and we leave a note recording that something was removed and why.
Reporting an error
Email [email protected] with "Correction" in the subject line, the article URL, the sentence or figure at issue, what you believe the correct version is, and a source we can check. We handle these first and tell you what we decided either way.
Comments and moderation
Where comments are open they are moderated. We remove abuse, harassment, threats, doxxing, spam, undisclosed promotion and link-dropping. Corrections raised in comments are acted on through the process above rather than settled in the thread — the fix belongs in the article. Moderation decisions can be appealed to [email protected].