Editorial Standards & Ethics
These are the rules our newsroom works to. None of them is aspirational. Every line below describes something that happens to a draft before you see it, or something a member of staff has been told not to do.
They matter more here than at a site somebody reads every morning. Our reader has been away five days and cannot catch our mistake by noticing that it contradicts yesterday’s page, so the whole burden of being right sits with us.
What has to be true before we publish
Every factual claim is checked against something we can point to, before publication rather than after. A writer who cannot source a sentence rewrites it or loses it. No line goes up here because it is probably right and can be tidied later.
Primary material beats a report of primary material: the judgment rather than the press summary of it, the recording rather than the quote as another outlet transcribed it. Where only a secondhand account exists, the article says so plainly instead of stating the thing flatly and hoping.
Publishing after the first rush creates a danger specific to us. We inherit whatever went wrong on day one, so five outlets carrying the same figure counts as one source until the check described in our fact-checking policy finds out whose it was.
Sourcing and attribution
Named sources are the default. A reader can weigh a person with a job and an interest, and cannot weigh the word “sources”. On the record we give the name, the role, and anything a reader needs to judge the claim, including a stake in the outcome.
Anonymity is granted for a reason, and the reason is printed. Losing a job, being prosecuted, being identified inside a small industry: those are reasons. Not wanting to be seen criticising a rival is not.
Approval rests with our managing editor, who has to know who the person is even though you will not. No anonymous claim about a named person or company is the only support for an accusation. The rule earns its keep in entertainment, where “a source close to the star” is usually a publicist and we would rather run nothing than launder a plant.
Labelling news, analysis, opinion and sponsored copy
Those four are different products and each is marked at the top of the page, not in small print underneath. Reporting states what happened and who says so. Analysis reaches a judgment and shows the reasoning that got there. Opinion is argument, signed by whoever makes it, and never sits in a news slot.
Sponsored articles carry a label above the headline, look visibly different from our journalism, and are excluded from anything shaped like a recommendation. Nobody in our newsroom writes them. The conditions a buyer agrees to are published on our advertise page rather than settled one buyer at a time.
The wall between the sales desk and the story list
This is a working arrangement rather than a paragraph of intent. The people who sell advertising do not attend the meeting where we decide what to cover, they do not see copy before publication, and an advertiser who asks for a preview or a pull is told no.
We cover advertisers when they are the story, on the same terms as anyone else, and the article notes that the company buys space here. A request to soften a piece that arrives with a threat about spend is treated as a fact about the advertiser rather than an offer. Whole categories are refused in advance for the same reason: sportsbook creative, grey-market game key resellers, extended warranty finance. The money behind all of it sits on our ownership and funding page.
What our staff may not accept
No gifts beyond something with no resale value. Review hardware and games are borrowed and returned, or bought, and where an item cannot be sent back the review says so. We pay for our own travel, and where that is impossible the article names who paid.
Junket access is not worth an interview condition. If a studio makes an interview conditional on quote approval, a friendly angle or dropping a question, we lose the access and say so in the piece.
Staff declare shareholdings, paid speaking, consulting and family employment in the areas they cover, the managing editor keeps that register, and nobody writes about a company they hold a position in. They vote and hold private views like anybody else, but they do not donate to parties, hold party office, campaign publicly or sign open letters on a subject they cover.
Giving people the chance to answer
Anybody facing criticism in our reporting hears the substance of it before publication. Not a vague warning that a piece is coming, but the specific claims, in writing where writing is possible, with enough detail to answer.
A working day is the usual minimum for a reply, longer where the claim involves accounts or a chain of transactions. When nobody answers we say exactly that, so we never write that somebody declined to comment when the truth is they did not reply. A response arriving after publication is added to the article under our corrections policy.
Plagiarism and invention
Copying another outlet’s sentences, taking their reporting without credit, or inventing a quote, a source or a scene ends the relationship here. Staff are dismissed. Freelancers are not commissioned again, and the affected articles keep a permanent note explaining what was found.
Where another outlet broke a story, they are named and linked in the sentence that uses their work, not thanked at the bottom. Pasting a company’s phrasing into our copy is a smaller version of the same offence, and a press release lightly rewritten is still a press release.
Where we use machine tools, and where we do not
We use some, and we would rather list them than be asked. Interview audio is machine-transcribed, and every quote we publish is checked against the recording by the person who did the interview. Software helps sort the overnight pile into things that changed and things merely said again, though an editor makes the call. It also gives a rough first pass at foreign-language material, which a person verifies before we quote it.
No published sentence on this site is written by a model. We do not generate images or video of real events or real people, we do not produce a quote or a source with software, and nobody summarises a document that no one on staff has read. If a tool ever shaped a story beyond the back-office uses above, the article will say so on the page.
Accountability does not move. A person’s name sits on every article, and “the tool got it wrong” is not an explanation we will offer you, because checking the tool was that person’s job.
Whose voices end up in the copy
Official voices are the easiest to obtain, so they take over unless somebody is counting. An editor reading a draft asks who is quoted and whether the story rests on one kind of speaker, usually a department, a governing body or a corporate affairs team.
What that changes is who we ring next: the person a policy lands on rather than only the ministry announcing it, a researcher who did not co-write the press release, the players and studio staff rather than only the league and the publisher. Where a story sits somewhere none of us lives, we commission a freelancer who is there rather than writing the place from a desk, which costs more per article.
Bylines and who answers for a story
Every article carries the name of the person who wrote it and the section that ran it. Nothing appears under a house name or an invented one. Where publication would put a writer at real risk the byline comes off, and the article says an editor took that decision.
The way to reach a writer is the way to reach all of us, which is one inbox read by editors at support@thelittlebinger.com. Corrections skip the queue and go to the managing editor the same day. Everything else is sorted by hand, as described on our contact page.
Last updated: August 2026.
