The charter on the front page states four promises in a paragraph each. This page sets out what each one means in practice, and what would count as breaking it. Nothing below describes a process that does not exist: where a safeguard is enforced by code, it says so; where it rests on the desk's judgement, it says that instead.
Records carry the sources they were verified against. 1,072 entities in the graph hold at least one citation and 503 of those stand on three or more.
A citation on this site is a real URL attached to the entity it supports, not a decorative “sources” footer. Where a record has none, it says what the graph holds — the entity's kind, its typed relations, its dated events — and stops there. It does not narrate motives, forecast outcomes, or restate a figure it cannot point at.
Financial figures are held to a higher bar than descriptive facts. A loss, a fee, a raise or a market size is published only where it is recorded against the entity or incident in the dataset with sourcing behind it. Nothing on this site is reverse-engineered from a round number.
No paid placement, no token holdings on the beat, no coverage sold.
There is no advertising inventory on this domain, no sponsored-post slot, and no arrangement under which an entity can pay to appear in the record, to be ranked higher in it, or to be left out of it. Ranking is arithmetic: relations counted in the graph, or mentions counted in the wire. Neither can be bought because neither is edited by hand.
This masthead is reader-funded in intent, and takes no money from the entities it records. It also does not currently take money from readers — there is no membership product, no paywall and no subscription, and the site does not pretend otherwise while one does not exist.
Where a figure is not on record it reads “undisclosed”. Nothing on this site is estimated to fill a gap.
The clearest example is the ledger. Of 44 incidents on record, 24 carry a loss figure — $75,399M between them — and 20 do not. Those 20 are printed as undisclosed. They are not modelled, not interpolated from comparable incidents, and not quietly excluded to make the table look complete.
The same rule shapes what the ledger is called. It is labelled a historical record rather than a rolling window, because the most recent entries carry no loss figure yet and any “year to date” total drawn from it would understate reality while implying a precision the record does not have.
Columns follow the same logic. Where a field holds one repeated value across every row it is dropped rather than printed as if it were informative, and where a slot has no data behind it the slot is removed rather than filled with plausible-looking copy.
Wire headlines link to the publisher. Our own descriptions are written for this masthead alone.
Each of the 1,800 items on the wire shows the publisher's own headline and summary, credits the source, and links to the original article — external, and marked as such. This masthead does not rewrite a publisher's lede to pass it off as reporting of its own, and it does not host a copy of anyone else's article.
What the desk adds is the linkage: which counterparties on file a given headline touches. That tagging is ours and is stated as ours. In the other direction, the descriptions on record pages are written for this masthead and are not shared with the sibling research desk that runs on the same data pipeline — the two brands hold separate description sets by design.
Because these pages are generated rather than typed, a correction is made to the data, not to the page. That has a specific and useful consequence: the fix cannot be applied in one place and forgotten in another.
Two limits, stated rather than glossed. First, corrections to a publisher's own headline or summary on the wire are not this masthead's to make: those words belong to the publisher, and the remedy is with them. If an item is withdrawn or corrected at source, it is the tagging and the link here that get revisited. Second, there is no published corrections inbox on this domain yet — no mailbox exists for this masthead, and printing an address nobody reads would be a worse promise than printing none. Corrections found by the desk are applied through the process above.
What will not happen: a figure will not be quietly changed and the page left implying it was always so, and a record will not be deleted to make an error disappear. If a record turns out to rest on nothing, the unsupported claim comes out and the record says less.
How the graph, the rankings and the counts are computed is set out on the about page. What the site collects about you — very little — is on the privacy page.