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Editorial standards

Our policies for sourcing, verification, and the rest of the daily work of reporting.

Sourcing

Every factual claim in a Curated Weekly article must be traceable to an identifiable source. Where the source is a published study, we link to the original journal article whenever possible — not to a press release or a popular-press summary. Where the source is an interview, we identify the speaker by full name and affiliation unless an explicit anonymity agreement applies (see below).

We prefer primary sources over secondary ones. When citing scientific evidence we cite the underlying paper; when citing a regulatory action we cite the agency document; when citing a financial product feature we cite the institution's published terms.

Verification

Every Curated Weekly article passes through at least two sets of eyes before publication: the reporter and one editor. For features that involve original measurement, claim-checking, or scientific reasoning, we add a third reviewer with subject-matter expertise. Numerical claims are independently re-derived from the source data whenever feasible.

Anonymous sources

We grant anonymity sparingly. A source can speak on background only if (a) the information is genuinely newsworthy, (b) the source could face credible professional or personal harm by speaking on the record, and (c) we can corroborate the substance of the information through at least one other independent source. When we grant anonymity, we describe the source's relationship to the story in enough detail that the reader can judge the source's credibility, even if the name is withheld.

Quotations

Quotations are reproduced as spoken or written, with light editing only for grammar and clarity. We do not paraphrase a source and present the result as a direct quote. When a quotation is condensed, we indicate the omission with an ellipsis. When a quotation is reconstructed from notes rather than from a recording, we say so.

Conflicts of interest

A reporter who has a financial interest in a company we cover, a personal relationship with a subject of the story, or any other reasonable appearance of a conflict, will not write that story. Reporters disclose their relevant holdings, relationships, and prior employment to the editor at the start of any assignment that touches a company in their disclosure.

AI in our newsroom

We do not use AI tools to generate editorial content. We do not use AI to draft, rewrite, ghostwrite, or "augment" articles or article sections that appear under a human byline. We do not publish AI-written reviews or AI-generated rankings. Reporters may use AI tools for non-publication tasks — searching their own notes, summarizing a source document for personal reading, or scheduling — but the prose, reasoning, and judgments that appear on this site are the work of named human journalists.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is grounds for immediate dismissal. The Curated Weekly does not republish another publication's reporting without independent verification and clear attribution. When we draw on another outlet's work, we say so by name and link to the original.

Off-the-record

Information given off the record cannot be published in any form, including paraphrase. Information given on background can be used in the article but cannot be attributed to a named source. The terms of any conversation with a source are agreed at the start of the conversation; we do not retroactively reclassify a source's statements after the fact.

Updates and live stories

For breaking or developing stories, we date-stamp each material update with the time and a one-line note explaining what changed. We do not silently overwrite a published version of a story with a different one.

For more on this, see our corrections policy.