Editorial standards

SHOTS condenses news. That means most of what you read here started as somebody else's reporting, and how we handle that is the whole of our editorial practice. This page states it in full.

The condensing rules

An editor condensing a story from another publication follows five rules, in this order.

1. Never add a fact the source did not carry. Not a number, not a name, not a date, not a place.
2. Never sharpen a claim. If the source says a thing may happen, the card says it may happen.
3. Never drop the attribution. A figure that came from a minister still says it came from a minister.
4. Keep the fact and the number. Drop the background paragraph and any quote that repeats the headline.
5. Credit and link. Every condensed card names the publication and links to its page.

How a card says what it is

Every card carries one of three words. Reported means the publication named on it did the reporting. Aggregated means we condensed somebody else's work, credited on the card. Opinion means it is an argument rather than a report. The word is on the card because that is where the reader is.

Which cards may carry advertising

Not all of them, and this is enforced in software rather than by policy alone. A card carries no advertising when it is any of the following.

• A publication's own opening sentences, cut to length. No editorial judgement was applied, so there is nothing of ours next to the advertisement.
• Machine-condensed and not reviewed by a person. Software drafts some cards. A draft that no editor approved never carries advertising, whatever it looks like.
• Too short to stand on its own, below roughly two hundred and forty characters.
• Anything we cannot classify. The rule fails closed.

This costs us inventory on purpose. Advertising next to work we added nothing to is the thing we would rather not do, and it is also against the policies of the networks we would serve it through.

Corrections

A correction is published as its own card in the same feed, stating the error first and the fix second, with the time. The original card is not rewritten and its address does not change, so a reader who saved or forwarded the link finds the correction at that link rather than a silently different story.

Each publication's record is public on its own page: how many corrections it has issued, the median time it took, and how many stories it returned to. A high correction count is not a bad sign. A publication with none across hundreds of stories is not accurate, it is not looking.

Images

A card shows the photograph the publication published with the story, cropped and never otherwise altered, and it is used with that publication's agreement. If you hold rights in an image on this site and believe it is here without that agreement, use contact and it will be taken down while the claim is checked.

Telling us we got it wrong

Every card has a link that puts a question in front of the desk that published it. It is not a comment: no other reader sees it, and it goes to the newsroom rather than into a thread.