Sourcing and Methodology

In roughly this order of authority:

Regulators, central banks, courts and standards bodies. Filings, rule texts, consent orders, enforcement notices and supervisory publications. A regulator's own document is the highest authority available on what a regulator decided.

Wire releases. The announcement as the company distributed it, with the terms and figures it chose to disclose.

The company's own account of itself. Newsroom posts, investor materials, earnings releases and the documents attached to them.

Trade press and aggregators are not sources. That another outlet wrote something up does not make it established, and an article here will not cite one as the basis for a fact.

Where another publication genuinely broke a story, we attribute it to them by name and treat the claim as theirs until a document confirms it.

Articles link out to the documents they draw on, in the body where the claim is made, and list the specific documents they relied on. Those links are the point: they let you check the claim at its source instead of taking our word for it.

Where an article names a figure, that figure comes from the source document. Where a figure was not disclosed, the article says it was not disclosed rather than supplying an estimate dressed as a fact.

An announcement is a company telling you what it wants you to know. Reporting one accurately is not the same as endorsing it, and a funding round, partnership or product launch is a claim about the future until it is a track record.

Where we assess what an announcement means, that assessment is analysis and is distinguishable from the facts it rests on.

If a source has been read wrong, we want to know. The corrections policy sets out how to report it. See also the editorial policy.