Editorial Standards

It is normal for several publications to cover the same event, and it is normal for them to arrive at similar conclusions. That is not copying. What is prohibited, and what this newsroom does not do, is reproducing another organisation’s article text, paraphrasing it sentence by sentence, borrowing its distinctive phrasing or structure, or presenting another publication’s reporting as our own.

Where a story summarises reporting published elsewhere, it is published as From Around The Web. It is attributed by name at the top of the piece, the original outlet is linked, and the article tells the reader to go there for the full account.

The type is set on every article and is not a stylistic choice. It tells the reader what kind of claim is being made, how it was established, and what they are entitled to expect from it.

Original Reporting means this newsroom independently worked the underlying documents, datasets or public records. It does not mean we were present, and it does not mean we conducted interviews we did not conduct.

News Update is an independently written report on a current event, established against verified information.

Explainer supplies background so a reader can follow an ongoing story.

Analysis is argument. It is labelled as opinion and does not represent the view of the editors as a whole.

From Around The Web is a summary of someone else’s reporting, attributed and linked.

Official releases and institutional datasets come first, because they are the record of the decision itself rather than a report on it. Wire services follow. Established publications come last, because they involve one organisation’s own reporting.

Every article prints its sources at the foot, with the outlet name, the publication date where one is known, the byline where one exists, and a link. The complete index is the source register.

No invented quotes. No invented interviews. No invented eyewitness accounts. No unnamed sources presented as though they existed. No statistics, and no claims that this newsroom reported something at a time it did not.

This archive is compiled from published sources after the fact. Every entry carries a reporting note saying so. Where a figure is contested between sources, the article reports the contest instead of resolving it silently.

There is also no borrowed imagery. Every illustration on this site is original vector artwork generated from the article identifier and its desk palette.

Publication timestamps are stored in UTC and displayed in IST with an explicit label. Every article shows when it was published, and shows an update time when one exists.

Archive entries are retrospective and are dated to the month they cover. They are not dispatches from that month and are not written as though they were.

A byline identifies the desk and the journalist accountable for the text. It does not assert that the person named was present at an event or conducted an interview. The reference desk maintains the archive, verifies events against primary sources, records source metadata, and marks retrospective coverage clearly.

When we get something wrong we correct it on the article, timestamp the correction, and log it. Substantive changes are described. Silent editing of a factual error is not a correction.

Illustrative photography on this site comes from Wikimedia Commons and is published under a licence that permits it: CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA. Nothing here uses another publication's news photography, and nothing here uses a photograph of a named person from a press agency.

Every image is credited to its photographer, carries its licence, and links to its file page. The photographer gets the attribution; the licence gets honoured.

Captions describe the subject, never the event. Most images on this site are not pictures of the specific thing the story reports, and we say so in the caption rather than letting a photograph imply otherwise. Where no freely-licensed photograph of a subject exists, the story shows original generated vector artwork instead of substituting an unrelated stock image. A visible gap is more honest than a picture that quietly misleads.

This is a deliberate trade-off and it is visible: a large share of stories carry artwork rather than photography, because freely-licensed photography of Indian news events simply does not exist at the moment.

Top Stories, Breaking, Trending and Most Read are audience and desk signals. Top Stories reflects editor judgement. Trending and Most Read reflect reading velocity. Breaking means the desk is actively following a developing story.

None of these is a claim that a story is more important than another story. A developing flood in Nepal and a disputed GDP figure are both in the archive because both were real and both were reported.