Ethics and standards
These are the rules our journalists work by. They apply to everyone who reports, edits or produces work for The Overseen, including freelancers.
Accuracy
Every fact in a story must be supported by a document, a recording, our own observation or a named or described source, and every story is checked against those materials before publication. Numbers are recalculated by someone other than the reporter. When we are not sure, we say so, or we leave it out.
Fairness and the right of reply
Before we publish, we tell every company and person we write about what we intend to report and give them enough time to answer: at least two working days, and more for a long investigation. We publish the substance of their answers. If they answer after publication, we add their response and say when. We do not share drafts with the subjects of stories.
Sources
We prefer sources who speak on the record. We grant anonymity when a source would face real harm, such as losing a job or legal action, and when the information cannot be obtained another way. At least two editors know the identity of every anonymous source, and the story explains why the source is not named. We do not pay sources.
How we preserve what we cite
Company websites change. A notice can be edited, a policy revised and a page removed after we report on it. When a story relies on something a company has published online, we save a copy of the page on the day we read it, with the date and time, and keep it with the story’s records.
We also check whether independent web archives have captured the page, and we cite their captures where we can, because a copy held by a third party is harder to dispute than our own. Some archives publish the lists of addresses they set out to capture in each crawl, which lets anyone see whether a page was meant to be preserved. The Lazarus Archive, for example, publishes the seed list for its autumn 2026 crawl.
When a page we cited changes in a way that matters to a story, we say so in the story.
Independence from funders and partners
No donor, foundation, member, sponsor or partner sees our reporting before it is published or has any say over what we cover. Our development team, which raises money and manages partner content, has no role in editorial decisions, and the editor-in-chief decides what we publish. If a funder or partner asks us to change, delay or drop a story, we will tell readers. Partner content is labeled and set apart; see our partner content page.
Conflicts of interest
Staff may not own shares in companies they cover, accept gifts worth more than a cup of coffee from people they cover, or do paid work for anyone they might report on. Staff disclose any relationship that a reader might reasonably think affects their work, and are taken off stories where one exists.
Legal review
Our counsel reads every investigation before publication. Legal review is about whether a story is accurate, fair and defensible; it is not a way to delay or soften reporting, and a story that passes it is scheduled by the editors.
Corrections
When we get something wrong, we correct it promptly, say what was wrong, and note the correction at the foot of the story with its date. Every correction is listed on our corrections page. To report an error, write to corrections@theoverseen.org.
Images and graphics
We rarely publish photographs of the people in our stories. Our graphics are drawn from data and documents; when a graphic is an illustration rather than a chart of real data, its caption says so. We do not use generated images.
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