Editorial standards
How we source, correct, fund and disclose. Published so you can hold us to it.
These are the rules we hold ourselves to. They are published so that you can tell when we have broken them.
Sourcing
Documents first. Where a claim can rest on a contract, a log, a filing or a data set, it does. We say what we obtained, how we obtained it, and what we could not get.
No anonymous adjectives. Unnamed sources may supply facts we can verify elsewhere. They do not supply characterisation, and we say why anonymity was granted.
Right of reply. Every organisation named in a critical story is put to the specific findings before publication, with enough time to answer, and its response is carried at length rather than summarised into a single line.
Argument is labelled. Reporting reports and essays argue. Every story carries its type next to its section, so you know before the first sentence which one you are reading. Where a piece does both, it is marked, and the reader is told which paragraph turned.
Corrections
Errors of fact are corrected in a dated block at the foot of the story, describing what was wrong and what it now says. We do not silently edit a published sentence.
Corrections are free to read, they are never removed, and they are never quietly folded into an update. Where an error was material to the argument, the correction is also carried in the following Late Letter.
To report one, write to corrections@thelatecity.com with the address of the page and the sentence. You do not need to be polite about it.
Funding and independence
The publication is funded by readers. It carries no display advertising, runs no sponsored posts, and accepts no payment for coverage of any kind.
Where a story concerns an organisation that has given us money, including a reader who has, that relationship is disclosed in the piece.
Nobody outside the masthead sees a story before publication, except the subjects of it, and then only the findings that concern them.
Use of AI
We do not publish generated text. Every sentence here was written by a person.
Language models are used in two places and no others: searching large document sets for passages a person then reads in full, and transcribing interviews, which a person then checks against the recording. Neither produces anything you read.
The halftone illustrations are generated algorithmically, from a seed and a set of drawing rules, rather than by a model. They appear only where a story has no photograph, and they are captioned as illustrations.
Contact
Editorial: editor@thelatecity.com Corrections: corrections@thelatecity.com Privacy and data requests: privacy@thelatecity.com
A person answers all three.