Editorial Standards & Ethics
These are the rules our editors apply, in the order they come up during a working day rather than the order that would flatter us. Most of them exist because we got something wrong first.
Last updated: August 2026.
Verification before publication
A claim is checked before it goes up, not after a reader queries it. A figure in a press release is read against the filing it was drawn from. A recall is confirmed in the regulator’s own database rather than in the manufacturer’s summary of it. A change to an airline’s compensation terms is checked against an archived copy of the page it replaced.
One rule sits above the others. No story runs on a single official statement, however senior the person who made it. Something independent has to carry weight: a filing, a register entry, a procurement record, a patch note, a person with direct knowledge who does not work in communications. Where we cannot get past the statement, the article says so, or it waits. The checks themselves are in our fact-checking process.
Sourcing, attribution and the cost of anonymity
The default is on the record, with a name, a title and the date the person said it. Attribution says what kind of thing it is: a written statement, a phone call, a document we read, one described to us by somebody who read it. We do not write that sources say when we mean one person said.
Anonymity is granted when naming somebody would cost them a job, a contract, a visa or their safety. The editor knows exactly who the person is, the article explains why the name is withheld and how they are placed to know, and a second piece of evidence supports what they told us. Our managing editor approves each one, never the reporter who wants it. Somebody described as close to a company or a celebrity is not a source.
Fairness and the reply we wait for
Anyone about to be criticised in an article hears the substance of it from us first. Not a courtesy line. The actual allegations, with the figures and the documents we intend to use, and a deadline a working person could meet. A story that took two weeks does not go out for comment twenty minutes before publication so the file can record that we asked.
What comes back gets published, in their words, at a length that lets the answer land. If nothing comes back, we write that we put the questions and got no reply. Silence after that usually means no. We do not send drafts for approval, and we do not treat a complaint about framing as a factual correction. Factual corrections we want, from subjects as much as from readers.
News, analysis, opinion and paid pieces
News is what we established, sourced inside the copy. Analysis is judgement built on that reporting, labelled, and still sourced. Opinion is argument, labelled, and belongs to whoever signed it rather than to the newsroom. Reviews say how long we used the thing and whether the unit was bought, borrowed or supplied.
Sponsored material is labelled above the headline, written outside the newsroom, and never given a review score or a place in a buying guide. The label is permanent, and a paid piece is never cited afterwards as our reporting. The commercial terms are on our advertise with us page.
The wall between the money and the news list
Reporters are not told which companies advertise in their sections, and commercial conversations never reach the news list. No advertiser sees a story before it publishes, gets a warning that one is coming, or gets a veto. Campaigns have been cancelled here after unflattering coverage and no sentence moved because of it.
The real pressure is quieter than a bribe. It arrives as a condition. Early access if the angle is agreed first. A hosted trip with a publication date on it. An affiliate arrangement that would pay considerably better if one product came top of the guide. Each of those has been refused and each refusal cost us money. The reasoning is on our ownership and funding page.
Gifts, holdings and political activity
Nothing worth more than a coffee is kept. Review hardware goes back at our expense or is bought at market price. No paid trips, no free tickets to an event we are covering, no paid speaking for an organisation on the writer’s beat.
Holdings are in broad funds rather than in individual companies we write about, and anyone with a stake in a company on their beat sells it or stops covering it. Staff vote and hold views privately, which is their business. Nobody covering a beat donates to, campaigns for or takes a role with an organisation on that beat. Where a conflict cannot be removed the story moves, and where it cannot move it is disclosed in the article.
Plagiarism and fabrication
Lifting sentences from another outlet, republishing somebody else’s reporting as our own, passing off a press release paragraph as our writing: that is plagiarism, and it is not a style problem. Fabrication is an invented quote, an invented source, a number nobody produced, a document described as seen when nobody saw it.
The consequence is not a warning. A freelancer who does either is never commissioned again, and the piece is rewritten from source or taken down with a note explaining why. A staff member is dismissed. We would publish what happened rather than remove a byline quietly and hope nobody reads the archive.
Where machines are used, and where they are not
We use software for some of the dull work. Transcribing an interview, translating a filing well enough to decide whether it matters, searching a few thousand pages of a document release for one phrase. Everything a tool produces is checked against the original by the person writing, because transcription drops the word not and machine translation flattens the difference between suspended and cancelled.
No sentence in our journalism is generated by a model and published as reporting. We do not quote a summary of a document instead of reading the document, and we do not publish synthetic images as photographs. Where software did something substantive to a published piece, the piece says so. The name on a story answers for every line in it. If we find a generated fact in our copy it is handled as fabrication rather than as a software fault, because the person who let it through is the story.
Who we ask, and who we keep forgetting to ask
The fastest answer always comes from whoever employs a communications department, which is why unexamined reporting turns into a conversation between companies, regulators and the same three analysts. Left alone, a contact book narrows. Ours drifts towards English speakers, towards men in technology and science stories, towards trade bodies rather than the people the trade is done to.
So we count. Once a month an editor sorts the voices we quoted by type: company, regulator, union, worker, customer, independent researcher. It changes what gets commissioned. In practice it means paying for a translation instead of dropping a source who does not work in English, and calling the staff losing their jobs rather than only the analyst rating the shares. None of it is a quota, and we will not quote somebody unqualified to look even-handed.
Bylines, and reaching the person who wrote it
Every story carries the name of the person who wrote it, and both names when two people reported it. We do not publish under a house name to look larger than we are and we do not invent bylines. A short item carrying no reporting of our own says where it came from and links out to whoever did the work.
Readers reach the writer, and the editor who handled the piece, through one address that editors read themselves: support@thekissingpunk.com. Errors are dealt with under our corrections policy, on the page and dated. Where these rules came from, including the correction that produced the first one, is on our about page.
