Editorial Standards

These standards govern everything published under an MFN byline. They are enforced by the editor in chief, who has final authority over sourcing disputes and corrections.

Sourcing and verification

• We prefer primary documents — filings, rule texts, statistical releases, court records — to characterizations of them.
• Figures are attributed to the body that produced them. Where a number has been revised, we report the revision alongside the original.
• We do not report a fact from a single anonymous source unless a document or a second independent source supports it.
• Where we cannot verify a material claim, we say so in the article rather than omitting the limitation.

Company-reported figures

Companies routinely publish performance statistics about themselves that no third party has audited. When we report such figures we attribute them explicitly as company-reported, and we say whether the methodology behind them is public. This applies with equal force to editorial coverage and to sponsored articles.

We do not present an unaudited internal metric as an established fact, and we do not repeat a marketing claim in our own voice.

News and opinion

Columns argue positions and are labeled as opinion. Columnists do not report the news stories their columns comment on, and news reporters do not write opinion about companies on their beat. The editorial board’s positions are its own and do not commit any reporter to them.

Conflicts of interest

• Reporters may not write about a company in which they hold a financial position.
• Staff do not accept travel, lodging, gifts or fees from companies they cover.
• Where the publication itself has a commercial relationship with the subject of an article, that relationship is disclosed in the article, not only in this policy.

Corrections

We correct errors of fact promptly and visibly, and we do not silently edit a published article to remove a mistake. Our corrections policy describes the process and how to report an error.

Use of AI

We do not publish machine-generated articles under a reporter’s byline. Where automated tools assist with tasks such as transcription or data extraction, a human reporter remains responsible for verifying every fact that reaches print.