Editorial Standards & Ethics

These are the rules we work to, written out so a reader can check us against them instead of taking our word for it. It is also the page we hand a freelancer before a first commission.

Very little here is unusual. The point of publishing it is that you can quote it back at us, and readers do.

Accuracy comes before being first

A claim gets into a Blue Hole Men story once we have seen the thing it rests on: the filing, the judgment, the recall notice, the dataset, a person willing to say it on the record. Somebody else’s report of a document is a reason to go and find the document, not a source in its own right. Where a figure appears in our copy, an editor can tell you which page of what it came from.

The pressure we feel most is the developing story. An incident, a resignation, a company falling over, and every hour brings a different figure while whoever publishes first takes the traffic. We run the part that is nailed down and say in the story, plainly, what is still unknown and which official body has not answered. When the only thing we could add is speed, we wait for the record to catch up. That costs us the audience on the day, every time. The checks behind it are on our fact-checking page.

Sourcing, and when we allow anonymity

Sources are named by default. A quote carries a name and a role, a document is linked or described precisely enough for you to find it yourself, and a briefing is attributed to whoever was doing the briefing. If a claim in our copy has no visible origin, treat that as a fault rather than a house style.

Anonymity is for people who would lose a job or their safety by speaking to us. It is not available to a communications team that wants its line in print without owning it, which disqualifies most of what arrives as “a source close to” whoever is in the news that week. Every anonymous source is approved by our managing editor, who knows the person’s identity and why they need cover, and the story says what they are in a position to know. We do not grant anonymity for praise, or to attack a named individual.

Gifts, holdings and politics

Nobody here takes anything from the people we cover beyond a coffee. Trips, hotels, hospitality, tickets, gift bags and hardware that turns up unannounced are declined or sent back. Hosted press trips are refused outright, which is the entire reason Travel is the thinnest section on the site. Review hardware goes back once the piece is filed.

Editors and freelancers declare shareholdings on their beat before a commission, then either sell or hand the story on. No owner of this site donates to a party, campaigns for one or holds office while political coverage is edited here, and if that changes we write it on the ownership and funding page before anyone has to ask. Household and family connections get declared even when they look irrelevant, because that judgement is not the reporter’s to make alone.

Labels, and the wall around the copy

Reporting, analysis, opinion and paid material are four different things and are marked as four different things. A news story says what happened and attributes it. Analysis carries a writer’s reading of the evidence and admits that at the top. Opinion is rare here, labelled where it appears, and never dressed up as reporting.

Sponsored material is labelled sponsored above the headline, treated differently on the page, kept off section fronts and feeds, and carries no journalist’s byline. Nobody who edits our news writes anything paid for, at any fee. Advertisers get no preview, no warning that a story is coming and no veto, and when one is the subject of a story we publish and disclose the relationship inside it. The categories we turn away are on our advertising page.

Telling people before we publish about them

Anyone facing a critical finding in our copy hears it from us first. That means the specific allegation rather than a vague warning, the documents it rests on where we can share them, and a deadline a working person could meet. Complicated allegations get longer, not a token hour on a Friday evening.

If a reply comes, it goes in, at length when the point deserves it. If none comes, the story says we asked and what we asked. A refusal to comment does not delay publication and neither does a solicitor’s letter, though a letter that identifies a real error is treated exactly like a reader who spots one.

Plagiarism and invention

Passing off another journalist’s work as ours ends the working relationship, for staff and freelancers alike, with no second attempt. Inventing a quote, a source, a document or a detail does the same. Neither is a lapse of judgement to be managed quietly.

When we follow somebody else’s story we say so and link to them in the first paragraph that uses their work, not in a nod at the bottom. Rewriting a rival’s reporting and crediting it late is theft with better manners. If lifted material ever gets into something we published, the piece is corrected and annotated with what happened, because deleting it would be the second offence.

AI tools, honestly

We use them for a few narrow jobs and would rather list those than claim a purity nobody in this industry has. Transcribing recorded interviews. Searching a long PDF or a dump of filings for a term. Turning a scanned table into something we can sort. Throwing up headline options that an editor then rewrites. That is the list, and it is the whole list.

No published sentence here is generated by a model. We do not use these tools to draft copy, to summarise a document nobody has read, to produce quotes, or to make images of events. Machine output is checked against the original like any other secondhand account, because it is confidently wrong often enough to be dangerous with a transcript. Where a tool has touched a story in a way a reader would want to know about, the story says so at the foot. Every published word is the responsibility of the named writer and the editor who cleared it, and that does not get shared out with a vendor.

Whose voices end up in the copy

Documents do not talk, so most stories need people, and the easiest people to reach are the ones already quoted everywhere. We keep a source list by beat and check who we have been leaning on: whether a sector story contains anybody who does not run a company, whether a story about a place quotes somebody who lives there.

The question gets asked at commissioning, before the second read, and the answer is sometimes that the piece waits a day while somebody harder to reach gets a proper chance to answer. We are small, with the reach of something small, and we miss the obvious person more often than we would like. Mail telling us so is useful.

Bylines, and how to hold us to this

Every story carries a named writer who can be reached through support@blueholemen.com, and every story was cleared by an editor who is answerable for it. Nothing runs under a house name or an invented byline. Where the call a reader is likely to question was the editor’s rather than the writer’s, the editor answers for it.

If we have broken one of the rules on this page, that is mail we want rather than mail we are hoping you skip. Factual errors are fixed on the story with a dated note, in the way our corrections policy describes. Complaints about judgement go to an editor who had nothing to do with the piece, and we answer them even when the answer is that we would run it again.

Last updated: August 2026