The Standard

Every publication has editorial rules. Most keep them private, which means the reader has no way to hold them. Ours are published, and a piece that fails one does not run.

1. 01

   Hard subjects, no outrage

   We cover politics, health, culture and work without softening the difficulty. What we will not do is manufacture anger as an engagement strategy. If a piece works only because the reader is furious, it does not work.

2. 02

   Every critique carries an alternative

   Naming a failure is the first half of the job. A piece is finished when it can say who has solved a version of the problem and how. Complaint without a working alternative waits until we can report one.

3. 03

   No dunking

   We do not build pieces around the worst available reading of an opponent, or around the least representative person on the other side. We argue against the strongest version of a position or we leave it alone.

4. 04

   Conservative, and honest about it

   The disposition here is conservative: institutions are hard to build, inherited arrangements usually encode a forgotten reason, and change carries the burden of proof. That is a stated lens, not a hidden one. It is also not a team — we praise good work regardless of who did it and criticise our own side when it earns it.

5. 05

   Correction in public

   Errors are corrected at the top of the piece, dated, describing what was wrong. Silent edits are a breach of the standard.

6. 06

   Pictures follow the same rules as words

   A photograph is an argument. Where two or more people appear together in a comparison, every image is drawn from the same class of source, cropped to the same ratio and framing, and given the same treatment — never one candidate mid-speech and another blinking. If a compliant image does not exist for everyone in the frame, nobody gets one. We licence what we publish: official portraits, campaign-issued press material, or our own house artwork. No wire photos, no image lifted from an article, and no retouching that flatters or diminishes a subject.

7. 07

   Nothing invented

   No composite people, no reconstructed quotes, no statistic without a source the reader can follow. Where we are uncertain we say so in the sentence rather than the footnote.

These rules are the product. A reader cannot verify our motives, but they can hold us to a published standard — and tell us when a piece has failed one.