Editorial Standards & Ethics
These are the rules the bulletin is written under. Most exist because we needed them after getting something wrong, and where one costs us money we have said so. Last updated: August 2026.
What has to be true before a bulletin publishes
Every bulletin carries four things: what happened, on whose authority, what changes because of it, and what is still not known. Before it goes out, every name, title, figure, date and quoted line has been checked against a document or a person in a position to know. Where a primary source is public we read it, which means the filing rather than the release describing the filing.
What threatens this is speed on a developing story. Forty minutes in, almost everything available is a claim by somebody, and the incentive is to publish it with a hedge bolted on the front. We hold what is not attributable and accept being second. Deaths, arrests and casualty figures never enter a bulletin on the strength of another outlet’s report. The second failure mode is ours alone: compression that changes meaning. A figure rounded the wrong way, a “may” hardened into a “will”, an allegation printed as a finding. Our fact-checking process exists mainly to catch that.
Sourcing, attribution and whose voices appear
Attribution sits inside the sentence carrying the claim, not in a line at the bottom. Short writing tempts you to drop it, because “according to the filing” costs four words and the sentence moves faster without them. That is the saving we refuse to make. A reader is owed the ability to discount a claim by knowing where it came from.
Anonymous sources are rare and approved case by case by our managing editor, who has to know the person’s identity before the bulletin runs. Anonymity is granted against a risk we can describe, usually a job or a legal exposure, never as a convenience for somebody who would rather not be named. We do not run anonymous criticism of an identifiable person, and we never publish on a single unnamed source.
A two-hundred-word bulletin has room for one or two voices, so the choice weighs more here than in a long feature. The easy default is the official, the spokesperson and the same few analysts already sitting in our inbox, and left alone it builds a site where power explains itself. Every few weeks we look back at who was quoted across a beat, by role rather than by name, and ask whether anyone living with a decision appeared beside the body that made it.
Fairness and the right of reply
Anyone facing a criticism or an allegation is contacted before publication and told the substance of what we intend to say, not given a vague warning that something is coming. We state a deadline and hold to it. On a fast story that deadline may be a few hours, which is a real limitation of publishing quickly rather than something to dress up as good practice.
If we cannot reach someone in time, the bulletin says we tried and by what route. A refusal to comment is reported as a refusal and never as evidence. When a response arrives after publication we add it and note that it was added. None of this is suspended because a story is moving.
News, analysis and anything that was paid for
The default here is news, written straight, with our judgement kept out of it. Where a bulletin has to say what something means rather than what happened, it is labelled analysis and the reasoning stays visible so you can disagree with it. We publish little opinion, and what we publish is labelled and signed by the person holding the view.
Sponsored material carries the word Sponsored above the headline and in every list where it appears, names the advertiser as its source, and stays out of our news feeds. Nobody who edits bulletins writes or edits paid copy. The rules a buyer accepts, including the categories we turn down, are on our advertising page.
Where advertising stops
Advertisers are never shown what is scheduled, never see a bulletin before it publishes, and have no route to having one changed, moved or removed afterwards. Being an advertiser earns no coverage. Being covered earns no discount. A company running a campaign here gets no warning that it is about to be the subject of a bulletin.
The team is small enough that the people editing the news also read the advertising mail, so we claim no firewall built from separate departments. What we have instead is checkable. Requests for editorial influence are refused and recorded with a date, and revenue is not reported story by story, so no editor here can find out which bulletin earned what. The rest sits on our ownership and funding page.
Gifts, holdings and what our editors do off the clock
We accept no gifts from anyone we cover. Promotional items are binned, anything of value goes back with a note, and where return is impractical it is donated and logged. We pay our own travel and accommodation. Review hardware goes back when the piece is done, and if a company refuses to take it we say so in the bulletin.
Our editors hold no shares in individual companies covered here, and nobody trades on anything learned before publication. Broad index holdings are fine and are declared internally. On politics, everyone here votes and nobody here campaigns: no donations, no committee work, no candidacy, no partisan posting under their own name. Where a connection cannot be avoided, say a family interest touching a story worth publishing, it is disclosed in the bulletin and a second editor takes it over.
Plagiarism and fabrication
Neither survives here. Copy taken from another outlet, a press release passed off as our reporting, a quote lifted out of somebody else’s interview without credit: any of it ends the working relationship, with no graduated warning first. When another outlet has a story before us we credit them by name and link out, aware that it costs us. Our founding editors spent years on rewrite desks watching that laundering done to other people.
A fabricated detail, quote, source or figure is the one thing that gets a bulletin pulled rather than corrected. We replace it with a note saying what was fabricated, the note stays up, and the person does not write here again. Everything else we fix in place, as our corrections policy sets out.
AI tools, and who answers for the words
We use some. Transcription of interviews and recorded press conferences. Keyword search inside long filings and court dockets. Sorting the overnight wire and regulator feeds into a shortlist a human then reads. The ordinary code and spellcheck help any small site uses. That is the list, and we would rather print it than have you guess.
No bulletin here is written by a model. We publish no machine summary of a document nobody on the desk has read, and no synthetic images or audio of real people or real events. If generated text ever survived into a published bulletin it would be labelled on the story, and so far none has. The reason is the failure mode we already worry about most. These tools are fluent, and fluent compression is how a “may” turns into a “will” without anybody noticing. A named editor answers for every published word here, and “the tool produced it” is not a defence any of us gets to use.
Names on it, and how to complain
Every bulletin carries the name of the editor who wrote it. No initials, no unsigned copy, and that name is reachable through the single address that reaches this newsroom, support@theibulletin.com. Our managing editor signs off on anonymous sourcing, on any decision to withhold a detail, and on corrections.
Complaints are answered by a person rather than a form. If you think a bulletin is wrong, quote the sentence and tell us where the correct information can be checked. Our corrections policy explains what happens next and how quickly, and our contact page covers how to label a message so it lands the same day. Where we cannot fix what you raised, we tell you why.
