Editorial Standards

Fact and opinion are separated

Every story has two parts. The Breakdown is what can be established from sources. Harvey’s Take is opinion, and it is labelled, styled differently, and never presented as reporting.

Words that carry legal weight

Alleged, accused, sued, charged and convicted are not interchangeable, and we do not use them as if they are. A person who has been charged has not been convicted. A civil complaint is an allegation, not a finding. We say which one applies.

Sourcing

Sources are attached to the specific claim they support rather than dumped at the bottom of a page. We prefer primary sources (court records, government filings, agency statements) over coverage of those sources.

Where a claim cannot yet be sourced, we say so plainly instead of implying it is established.

AI assistance

We use software to help structure drafts, suggest headlines and flag claims that still need sourcing. Every story is reviewed and published by a person, and no factual claim is published because software produced it.

Corrections

When we get something wrong we fix it visibly, with a timestamp, on the story itself. We do not quietly edit and move on. See the corrections log.