Conflicts of interest

Contributors disclose any personal, financial, or family connection to a subject before reporting begins. Where a conflict cannot be removed, we reassign the piece. We do not publish pieces by contributors whose conflicts compromise their judgement.

Compensation

We pay contributors a flat rate per piece, agreed in advance, and we pay on acceptance, not on publication. We do not pay sources for interviews. We do not accept free travel or hospitality from subjects of coverage, with the limited exception of meals in the field, which we reimburse the host where possible.

Subjects of reporting

We treat the subjects of our pieces as people, not as material. We give them the opportunity to review direct quotations attributed to them before publication, where doing so does not compromise the reporting. We tell them clearly what the piece is about, in their language where possible, before the interview begins.

Photographs

We use photographs that document the people and places we cover. We obtain consent for portraits where a subject is identifiable. We do not photograph children without parental consent. We do not stage or alter photographs to misrepresent a scene.

Diversity of voices

We commission across geography, language, gender, race, age, and class. We track our commissioning patterns annually and report them in our year-end note. We will not pretend that universal coverage is achievable by a small magazine, but we will not retreat from the effort.

Mistakes

We make them. When we do, we correct them visibly, we apologize where an apology is owed, and we tell our readers what we have changed and why. We do not blame the subject of the error.

What we do not do

We do not write clickbait. We do not run native advertising. We do not run affiliate links. We do not publish pieces about our advertisers because we do not have advertisers. We do not publish pieces drafted by generative text models. We do not delete pieces from our archive except for documented legal or safety reasons, in which case we leave a stub.