Editorial Standards & Ethics

What this document is

These are the working rules of STUDIO ONE NETWORKS. They are not aspirations written for a plaque; they are the standards actually applied, story by story, across everything we publish, from world news and business to sports, technology and gaming. Where a story fails these standards, our Corrections Policy describes what happens next. Readers are invited to hold us to every line on this page.

Accuracy before speed

We cover breaking news, where the pressure to publish first is constant, and we accept a simple ordering: being right beats being first, every time the two conflict. A claim goes into a story when we have verified it or when we can attribute it precisely to a named source whose reliability the reader can judge. The mechanics of verification, including how we treat wire copy, official statements and social media material, are set out in our Fact-Checking Policy, which is part of these standards.

Sourcing

Readers deserve to know where information comes from. Our default is on-the-record attribution: statements are tied to the person, institution or document that made them, with links to primary sources wherever they exist. Anonymous sourcing is the exception, used only when information is genuinely newsworthy, the source has direct knowledge, and identification would expose the source to real harm. When we grant anonymity we tell readers as much as we can about the source’s position without identifying them, and we never use anonymity to launder speculation or personal attacks. A promise of confidentiality, once made, is kept.

Wire services and other outlets’ reporting

Like most of the world’s news pages, our coverage sometimes builds on reporting by wire agencies and other outlets. The rule is attribution without exception: when a fact comes from another organization’s reporting rather than our own, the story says so and links to it. We do not present others’ reporting as our own, and we apply our own judgment before repeating anyone’s claim, because an error does not become acceptable by being someone else’s first.

Headlines

The headline is the most-read sentence of every story, and for many readers the only one. Our rule: a headline must be supported by the story beneath it, with no invented drama, no bait, and no question marks doing the work of evidence. Numbers in headlines match the numbers in the story. If the story is uncertain, the headline carries the uncertainty too. A headline that must be walked back by its own first paragraph is treated as an error.

News and opinion are separate

News reporting tells you what happened; analysis and opinion tell you what we make of it. The two are never blended silently. Any piece that goes beyond reporting into judgment is labeled as analysis or opinion, and no news report is angled to smuggle in a conclusion. Our reviews, in technology, auto, entertainment and gaming, are honest opinion by definition, and their independence from advertisers is absolute, as described below.

Independence and conflicts of interest

Nobody buys coverage here. Advertisers do not see stories before publication, do not influence story selection, and get no gentler treatment in coverage than anyone else; the revenue relationship is described openly in Ownership & Funding. Within the team, anyone with a personal or financial stake in a story’s subject does not work on that story. We do not accept payment, gifts of more than trivial value, or junkets in exchange for coverage. Where we review products, review units are returned or disclosed, and a company’s decision to supply one buys exactly nothing.

Fairness and the right of reply

When a story makes a significant claim about a person or organization, we seek their response before publication and include it, or note that they did not respond, in the story. Criticism must be of actions and claims, not identity. We report on people at their worst moments; we do so without cruelty, and we weigh the public interest before publishing details that would merely wound. Coverage of tragedy names victims with care and follows the simple rule that the families of the dead also read the news.

Images and quotations

Photographs and video are not altered in ways that change their meaning; editing is limited to technical adjustment such as cropping and exposure. Composite or illustrative images are labeled as such. Quotations are what the person actually said, trimmed only for length and clarity, never reshaped to sharpen a story. Archive material used in current stories is identified as archive material.

Tools, including AI

We use modern tools in research and production, as every newsroom now does. The line is responsibility: no story is published without human verification and human judgment, and no tool output is treated as a source. A fact is not true because software asserted it; it is true when it traces to a primary source, as our Fact-Checking Policy requires. Responsibility for every published word rests with the editorial team, and no error will ever be excused here by blaming a tool.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism, presenting someone else’s words or original reporting as our own, is a firing-line offense in any newsroom worth the name, including this one. Attribution and linking are not courtesies; they are the mechanics of honest publishing.

Privacy in reporting

The public interest justifies reporting private facts only when those facts genuinely bear on it. We do not publish home addresses, private contact details or the identities of people who are incidental to a story. Reporting involving minors is handled with heightened care, and suspects are described in accordance with their legal status: an allegation is an allegation until a court says otherwise, and our language keeps that distinction visible.

Enforcement

These standards are enforced by the editorial team on itself, in the only way that means anything: published corrections when we fail, visible labels on updates and opinion, and answers when readers challenge us at support@studioonenetworks.com. A standards page is a promissory note, and the archive of our corrections is the record of whether we pay it.