Editorial Standards & Ethics

What these standards are for

This page sets out how BROAD BROWSE decides what to publish and how to publish it. It is not a wish list. It is the working set of rules our team applies to a real story on a real deadline, and it is the standard you are entitled to hold us to. If our reporting falls short of what is written here, that is a fair complaint, and the address for it is at the bottom.

We cover general news across many fields, which means the same reporter will not be an expert in all of them. That is precisely why the rules below exist. Careful method is what lets a small team report responsibly on subjects far apart, without pretending to a mastery nobody has.

Accuracy comes before speed

Getting it right outranks getting it first. Breaking news makes that hard, because the first account of any big event is built from fragments, and the pressure to publish is real. We resolve that tension in one direction: if a claim cannot be stood up, it does not run as fact, and we would rather be a few minutes behind and correct than first into an error a screenshot will carry forever.

Where we must publish while a story is still moving, we say so. A developing story is labelled as developing, its updates are timestamped, and its early figures are treated as provisional rather than final. When an early claim turns out to be wrong, we correct it openly under our corrections policy rather than quietly editing the page.

Sourcing, and how we handle it

Every factual claim rests on a source we can point to: a document, a named official, a filing, a study, a recording, an eyewitness we have reason to trust. We prefer primary sources to summaries of them, and we prefer to see a document rather than be told what it says.

• Named sources are the default. A reader can weigh a claim better when they know who made it.
• Anonymity is earned, not offered. We grant it when the information matters and the person faces a real risk for providing it, not to let someone snipe from cover. When we do, we tell you why the source is unnamed and what standing they have to know.
• A single source is a starting point. For a significant or contested claim we look for a second, independent confirmation before stating it as fact.
• We describe our reach. If we could not confirm something ourselves, we attribute it clearly to whoever did claim it, rather than absorbing it into our own voice.

How individual claims are checked against primary evidence before publication is set out in more detail in our fact-checking policy.

News and opinion are kept apart

News reports what happened. Opinion argues about what it means. We keep the two visibly separate, because blending them is how readers lose the ability to tell a fact from a preference. Anything that is opinion, analysis or comment is labelled as such and kept off the news pages, and our news reporting does not smuggle in a verdict through loaded adjectives or a headline that takes a side the story does not support.

This does not make our news neutral to the point of uselessness. Reporting that one claim is supported by evidence and another is not is accuracy, not bias. What we avoid is treating a settled fact as a matter of opinion, or dressing an opinion up as a settled fact.

Fairness, and the right of reply

When our reporting makes a serious allegation about a person or an organisation, we put it to them before publication and give them a genuine chance to respond, and we carry their answer fairly. If they decline or do not reply in time, we say that too. We do not ambush people with a version of events they were never given the opportunity to address.

Fairness also means proportion. We do not inflate a minor matter into a scandal for traffic, and we try to give a story the prominence its importance warrants rather than the prominence its outrage generates.

Independence and conflicts

Our judgement about what to cover belongs to the newsroom and to no one else. Advertisers do not see stories before they run, cannot soften them, and cannot pull them, and when a company that advertises with us becomes the subject of coverage, the story says so. That wall, and the money behind it, is described on our ownership and funding page and our advertise page.

Personal conflicts are declared and handed off. Where a member of our team has a financial, family or close personal interest in a story, they say so and someone else takes it. We pay our own way on reporting, and where any arrangement could reasonably look like it bought coverage, we disclose it in the story.

Reporting on people with care

People in the news are still people. We name the accused only when it is fair and warranted, and we remember that an accusation is not a conviction. We take particular care with children, with victims of crime, and with private individuals caught up in a story through no choice of their own, and we do not identify those who should not be identifiable. Graphic material is used only when it genuinely serves the reporting, not for shock.

Holding us to this

These standards are only worth the paper if you can enforce them. If a story of ours breaks a rule on this page, write to support@broadbrowse.com and say which one and where. Factual errors are put right under our corrections policy, and the wider account of who we are is on our about page. Rules that are never tested by readers quietly rot, and the fastest way to keep these honest is to use them against us.

Last updated: August 2026