Editorial Standards & Ethics

What we are trying to do

RTD JOURNAL exists to tell readers what is happening in the world as accurately and as fairly as a small independent team can manage. These are the standards we hold our own work to. They are not decoration for a footer. They are the rules the desk actually argues about, and publishing them is a way of letting you hold us to them.

None of this is unique to us. It is the ordinary craft of honest journalism, written down. What varies between newsrooms is not the principles, it is whether anybody follows them when a story is hot and the clock is against them. We try to follow them then most of all.

Sourcing

A story stands on its sources, so we are careful about them. We prefer primary material we can examine ourselves: the filing, the transcript, the dataset, the ruling, the person who was there. For anything contested we look for at least two independent sources, and we treat a single anonymous claim as a lead to chase rather than a fact to print.

Named sources are better than anonymous ones, and we use anonymity sparingly, for people who would face real consequences for speaking, not for officials who simply prefer not to be quoted. When we grant it, we know who the source is even if you do not, we tell you why they are unnamed and what stake they have, and we do not let anonymity become a way to launder an attack. We protect sources absolutely, a commitment described in our contact page.

Verification before publication

We check before we publish, not after the complaints arrive. That means confirming names, dates, titles, and figures against the record, reading a document rather than a summary of it, and putting a serious allegation to the person or body it concerns before it runs. The detailed mechanics of how claims are tested are in our fact-checking policy.

Speed is real and we do not pretend it away, but speed is not a licence to guess. On a breaking story we publish what we can stand up and label the rest as unconfirmed, and we would rather carry less and be right than more and be wrong. When we do get something wrong, it is fixed in the open under our corrections policy.

Fairness and right of reply

If our reporting makes a specific, damaging claim about a person or an organisation, they get a fair chance to respond before we publish, with enough detail to answer and enough time to do it. Where they respond, we represent their answer honestly, not as a token line buried at the end. Where they decline or do not reply in time, we say so.

Fairness is not the same as false balance. Giving equal weight to a well-evidenced account and a baseless one is not neutrality, it is a distortion dressed as manners. We weigh claims by the evidence behind them, and we do not manufacture a fake symmetry to look even-handed.

Keeping news and opinion apart

A news report tells you what happened. An analysis explains what it might mean and is labelled as analysis. A comment or opinion piece argues a view and is labelled as opinion. We keep these visibly separate, because a reader is entitled to know whether they are being told facts or being offered a judgement. Blurring the two is one of the fastest ways a masthead loses the trust it took years to earn.

Reporters keep their personal politics out of the reporting. That does not mean pretending every question has two equal sides. It means the facts in a news story are gathered and presented without a thumb on the scale, whatever the writer privately thinks.

Conflicts, gifts, and independence

We do not cover things we are personally entangled in without saying so. Where a writer has a financial, family, or close personal interest in a story, they disclose it and, where it matters, hand the story to someone else. We do not accept gifts, paid trips, or hospitality meant to buy favourable coverage, and where something of value is unavoidable in the course of reporting, the story discloses it.

Advertising does not touch the newsroom. An advertiser buys space, not influence, and a company that advertises with us gets no softer treatment and no advance sight of coverage. The full arrangement is on our advertise page and our ownership and funding page, and the point of writing it down is that independence you cannot inspect is just a slogan.

Dignity, privacy, and harm

Being newsworthy does not strip a person of all privacy. We weigh the public interest in a fact against the harm publishing it could do, and the more private and painful the detail, the higher the bar it has to clear. We take particular care with grief, with people caught up in a story who did not choose to be, and with children, who are not fair game because of what an adult around them did.

We do not identify victims of certain offences, we handle images of the dead and injured with restraint, and we think about the safety of the people in our stories, not only the interest of the people reading them.

Corrections, and being held to this

Standards mean nothing without a mechanism for admitting failure, and ours is spelled out in our corrections policy: errors fixed on the page, dated, and described, never edited away in silence. If you think a story falls short of anything on this page, tell us at support@rtdjournal.com, and if we agree, we say so and put it right. If we disagree, we will tell you why. Either way, a person reads it.

Last updated: August 2026