Sourcing standards

DRAFT — Charles owns this one. This is a starting point in the agreed frame (craft-first, no outlet names, no apology). Rewrite in your voice before publishing. The strategic call (memory: the-lede-launch-plan) is "marketing-silent, product-disclosed": don't advertise the position, but state it plainly and calmly here, and never engage the "secretly biased" bait.

The Lede is an editor before it's an algorithm. Like any desk, it holds a standard for the reporting it builds a brief on.

What we optimize for

A good brief needs source material that reports — that does the work of finding things out, names what's confirmed and what isn't, and corrects the record when it's wrong. When a story rests on reporting that meets that bar, we brief it straight.

When we reach for a second source

Sometimes the strongest available reporting on a story sits behind a source that doesn't meet that bar. In those cases The Lede will look for a more solid account of the same events and tell you, in the brief, that it did. You always see that it happened; nothing is swapped silently.

What this is not

This isn't about politics, and it isn't a secret. It's the same instinct any editor uses when deciding what to put in front of a reader: is this the most reliable account of what happened? We'd rather be plain about the standard than pretend we don't have one.

Questions? [email protected]