About Us
The iBulletin is a general news bulletin written short on purpose. Breaking news, business, technology and sport, in the space most sites give to the summary box at the top of a long article. We are independently owned and run by the editors who write it.
What we publish
A rate decision with a split vote. A quarterly release where the guidance mattered and the headline number did not. An export rule on chips. A court filing. An injury update two days before a fixture. In each case we try to tell you four things: what happened, on whose authority we are saying it, what changes because of it, and what is still not known. Then we stop writing.
Our readers are general readers, mostly in the United States and across the other English-speaking markets, people who follow the news without following it for a living. They already know what a central bank is. They do not need the four paragraphs of recap that most web stories carry so a search engine can find them. We write as if the bulletin will be read on a phone, standing up, before something else starts.
Where this came from
We came out of rewrite desks. Our founding editors spent years turning wire copy and press releases into web stories for other people’s sites, which in practice meant taking something clear at two hundred words and getting it to nine hundred so it would rank. The note back from the desk was almost never “make this better.” It was “make this longer.” You learn a lot of tricks doing that, and none of them are journalism.
What finally pushed us into starting our own bulletin was the summary box. At some point every long news story grew a “what you need to know” list above the headline photo, five bullet points holding the whole story. Editors wrote the box last, readers read the box only, and nobody would publish the box on its own because five bullets do not carry enough advertising. That is what we publish. The conviction underneath it is that a tight bulletin is harder to write than a long feature, because a feature can hide a thin understanding behind atmosphere and pacing and a bulletin has nowhere to put it. If you do not know which line in the filing actually mattered, two hundred words will expose you. Nine hundred will cover for you.
The rule we got wrong first
Our first attempt at enforcing brevity was a hard word ceiling. Every bulletin had to come in under a fixed count, no exceptions, and for a few weeks it felt like the whole product. Then we handled a central bank decision where the vote was split and the dissent was the actual news, and the ceiling squeezed the dissent into a subordinate clause near the end. A reader could finish our bulletin without learning that two members had voted the other way. That is not brevity. That is losing the story and calling it a style.
We dropped the ceiling that week and replaced it with a test about content instead of length. A bulletin has to carry the four things listed above, and however many words those need is how long it runs, which is usually short and occasionally not. The decision we got right in the same stretch was killing the standing context paragraph, the one that opens “the announcement comes as” and exists to fill space. If context changes the meaning of the news, it belongs inside the sentence carrying the news. If it does not, it belongs nowhere.
How a working day actually runs
The early shift reads before it writes. Overnight wires, exchange filings, court dockets, club statements, the regulator pages that publish at inconvenient hours. Nothing gets typed for the first hour, which feels wasteful and is not. The morning conversation is mostly a list of what we are not covering: a ruling that changes nothing yet, a “sources say” line with one source and an agenda, a product launch with no price, a survey commissioned by the company it flatters.
Everything we publish is read by a second editor who has not seen the source material. Their job is not to hunt typos. They read the bulletin once, look away from the screen, and say out loud what happened. If they cannot, the story is buried somewhere in the middle and it goes back. Late in the day we check the previous day’s bulletins against how each story actually developed, then either update them with a note explaining what changed or leave them alone. Quietly editing yesterday into being right is not available to us.
What we will not do
We do not run live blogs. They are cheap to produce, they perform well on a big day, and they publish the newsroom’s process instead of the news, which leaves the reader doing our editing. When a story is moving we would rather post four short bulletins that were each true when they went out than one endless page whose top third is wrong by lunchtime.
We also do not split anything across pages, we do not publish “here is what we know so far” when what we know so far is nothing, and we do not take another outlet’s exclusive, rewrite it from the top and present it as our reporting. We credit and link out, aware that sending readers elsewhere costs us. Nothing in the bulletin is for sale, and sponsored material is never written by the people editing the news. The rules we sell against are published in full on our advertising page so a buyer can read them before they call.
Who owns us and how this is paid for
The iBulletin is independently owned and run by its founding editorial team. There is no parent company, no outside investor holding a seat at the table, no political party, no state money, no PAC. The people deciding what leads are the people who own the site, and that carries a risk we would rather name than hide: when a decision costs money, nobody else absorbs it. The full picture, stream by stream, is on our ownership and funding page.
The site is free to read and ad-supported. No paywall, no registration wall, no meter counting your articles. Advertisers get no say in what we cover, no advance look at what is scheduled and no veto afterwards. When a buyer asks for any of that, the conversation ends and we do not take the money. It has cost us business and the rule is not negotiable.
Accuracy, and what happens when we miss
Short writing has its own failure mode, and it is not sloppiness. It is compression that changes meaning: a figure rounded the wrong way, a “may” that hardens into a “will”, an allegation reported as a finding, a forecast attributed to the wrong body. Our editorial standards are built mainly around catching that class of error, and our fact-checking process sets out how claims get verified before they go out.
When we are wrong, we fix it on the story, say what was wrong, and leave the record visible. Our corrections policy explains what counts as a correction rather than a clarification, and how quickly each should happen. We work to the IFCN principles on accuracy and transparency. Readers find our errors faster than we do, and email is the quickest way to tell us. One address reaches the newsroom, support@theibulletin.com, and our contact page explains how to label a message so it reaches the right person quickly.
