Editorial Standards & Ethics
This page is the set of rules our editors work to. It describes what happens during the day rather than what we aspire to, because the second kind is easy to write and impossible to check. Last updated: August 2026.
Accuracy comes before being first
A claim publishes when we can trace it to something we have seen ourselves: a document, a dataset, a filing, an on-record statement, or a person who was there and will say so. “Reported by” another outlet is not verification. If somebody else’s story is all we have, the sentence names them, and we keep looking for the thing underneath it.
That makes us slower, and on a developing story it costs us. The desks we came from resolved that pressure by publishing and fixing afterwards. We publish the part we can stand behind, mark what is unconfirmed, and leave the gap visible. Numbers are checked against the original release and never the site that summarised it, and the second editor re-reads every currency and unit conversion.
Sourcing, attribution and the rare anonymous source
Sources are named wherever naming is possible. A reader cannot weigh “officials said” or “a source close to the production”, so we give the department, the company, the court, and how the person is placed to know. A press release is called a press release.
Anonymity is granted when the information matters, cannot be got another way, and naming the person would cost them their job, their safety or their case. The writer does not make that call. Our managing editor has to know who the source is and agree before the piece runs. Entertainment is where the rule earns its keep, because “a source close to the star” is usually a publicist placing a story. Claims about a named person need a second source or a document, which we learned by correcting, inside the hour, a claim that rested on one social account.
Labels: news, analysis, opinion and anything paid for
Reporting is reporting. Analysis is a piece where an editor with a beat draws a conclusion from reported facts, and it says Analysis at the top. Opinion is argument, carries the writer’s name and a label, and does not arrive dressed as a news report with the conclusions left in.
Anything a company paid for is labeled sponsored at the top, names the sponsor, and sits in its own container away from the section fronts. The label does not get quieter on a phone screen, and sponsored work carries no staff byline. Our advertising page covers the categories we turn down.
The firewall between the money and the desk
No advertiser, sponsor, affiliate partner or agency sees an unpublished story, is told what is coming, or is asked about an angle. Nobody gets to answer a story before its subject does. Editors are not handed the client list, which is the simplest way to keep a commercial relationship out of a commissioning decision.
Offers to insert a paid link into something we already published arrive every week, sometimes dressed as a correction request. They pay better per email than display pays per month, and the answer is still no. Where a piece carries an affiliate link we say so inside it, and the product was picked before anybody checked whether a commission existed. The revenue is itemised on our ownership and funding page.
Gifts, holdings and what our writers do off the clock
Review hardware, screeners, press-trip flights and hotel rooms are the currency of half our desks, and refusing all of it would mean not covering cars, games or travel. So we take access and we do not take gifts. Equipment goes back or the article says it was kept and why, and travel paid for by a manufacturer or a tourism board is disclosed in the piece.
Cash, discounts, personal upgrades and anything offered on condition of coverage are declined, and an offer carrying that condition gets logged. Staff and contributors disclose shareholdings, paid outside work and family employment that touches a beat, and nobody covers a company they hold a stake in. We also ask that nobody commissioning coverage campaigns for, donates to or holds office in a party inside that subject. How anyone votes is their own business, including ours.
Right of reply, before we publish
Anybody criticised in a story is told what the criticism is and given a real chance to answer before publication. The email lists the specific claims instead of asking for general comment, and says when we intend to publish. We do not send a deliberately vague enquiry so that we can write “did not respond” later.
A working day is the minimum, longer for a document-heavy allegation or a company that has to take it to a lawyer. If nothing comes back, the piece says what we asked and when. An answer arriving after publication goes into the article where readers will see it, and a refusal to comment is reported as a refusal to comment with nothing read into it.
Plagiarism and fabrication
Copying another outlet’s sentences, lifting their reporting without credit, or inventing a quote, a source, a place or a number ends a working relationship here. There is no warning stage for fabrication. For a contributor the commission is cancelled and everything else they filed is re-checked. For a staff editor it is a dismissal matter.
If something fabricated got through, we do not quietly delete it. The article carries a note saying what was invented, and so does any other piece by that writer we cannot re-verify. Our founding editors spent years on desks where the whole brief was rewording other people’s reporting, which is why this line sits here rather than somewhere more comfortable.
What we do with AI tools
We use machine tools in the production of this site and would rather say where. They transcribe interviews, rough-translate a foreign-language release so an editor can decide whether it needs a proper translation, trim a headline to house length, and find the paragraph that matters inside a two hundred page PDF. Those are the jobs a keen intern used to get.
No article here is generated by a model and published as our reporting. Where a tool produced anything that reaches the reader as text, the article says so. A machine summary of a document is never the source we cite, so a claim that cannot be traced back to the document does not run, and every published word is read by a person who answers for it. We also do not present generated images as photographs of real events.
Whose voices end up in the copy
A magazine written for readers in many countries fails quickly if it keeps quoting the same few institutions in the same two capitals. Editors are asked at commissioning who is missing from the source list. On a policy story that usually means somebody the policy happens to, and not only the official announcing it.
We do not run quotas and will not claim a scorecard we do not keep. What we do is read back a month of a desk’s output, notice when every expert quoted came from one country or one kind of institution, and fix the next month of commissioning. Local reporting is credited to the outlet that did it, named and linked.
Bylines, and who answers for a piece
Every article carries a named writer, and where the desk assembled a piece from several sources it says so and names the editor who assembled it. Nothing publishes under a house pseudonym, or under an invented name to make the newsroom look bigger than it is. To reach a writer, send the article link to support@worldhab.com and an editor passes it on.
The editor who published a piece owns it afterwards, which means answering for it and correcting it. How a claim is tested before it runs is in our fact-checking policy, and what happens when one turns out to be wrong is in our corrections policy. If you think a rule on this page was broken, use the same address and say which rule.
