Standards

Primary sources, or it does not run

Every claim in a story must trace to a primary source — a government statement, an on-the-record official, a named agency dispatch, a document, or a news organization quoting one of those things where we can show the URL. If we cannot point to the source, the claim does not publish. Anonymous color, unsourced casualty figures, and “officials say” without a document are not enough.

Sources sit on the story page: title, publisher, date, URL, and a short excerpt. They are not optional chrome. If a fetch failed — a bot wall, a 401, a government site that would not return HTML — we say so on the source card rather than pretending we read what we did not.

Uncertainty is labeled

News is often unfinished. We mark that in the open, next to the headline, with one of four labels:

• Confirmed. Independently documented, or stated on the record by the institution that would know, without a competing official account that contradicts the core fact.
• Partially confirmed. Part of the claim is solid; another part is still moving, incomplete, or only one-source.
• Disputed. Responsible parties disagree about the fact itself — casualties, targets, intent — and we cannot adjudicate it from the documents in hand.
• Unverified. Someone said it. We have not seen it confirmed, and we will not write as if we have.

A story may carry more than one label. A strike can be confirmed while the casualty count is disputed. That split belongs in the status well, not in a hedged verb halfway down the page.

Corrections are public

If we get something wrong, we correct it in public, with a timestamp, on a dedicated corrections log. We do not silently rewrite history. The original wording stays visible next to the replacement so a reader who saw the error can see the change.

Independence

The File is not a brand extension of any other company, platform, or political project. We do not sell access to the newsroom, and we do not put the day’s report behind a login. Readers should be able to add this site to a home screen and read it like a paper.