Editorial Standards & Ethics
Why we write this down
Standards that live only in an editor’s head bend under pressure. Writing them down means a reader can hold us to them and a new team member has something to inherit. This page describes how PLAY AT HOME FEST decides what to report, how we source it, how we keep opinion out of the news, and what we do when we fall short. It applies across all our coverage, from BUSINESS and ECONOMY to HEALTH, POLITICS, SCIENCE, SPORTS, TECHNOLOGY, and WORLD.
None of this is a boast. It is a set of commitments, and the only thing that makes commitments real is being measured against them. Where we fail, our corrections policy is how we own it.
Sourcing: where facts come from
Our default is the primary source. If a story turns on a court ruling, we read the ruling. If it turns on a company’s numbers, we read the filing. If it turns on what an official said, we go to the statement or the recording, not to someone’s summary of it. When we rely on another outlet’s reporting because we cannot get to the source ourselves, we say so and we credit them, because passing off borrowed reporting as our own is a form of dishonesty.
Single-source stories make us nervous, and on anything contested we look for a second, independent confirmation before we publish. Where a claim cannot be confirmed but matters enough to report, we attribute it clearly and say what we do not know. A story that says plainly what is unconfirmed is more honest, and usually more useful, than one that papers over the gap.
Anonymous sources and confidentiality
Named sources are better than unnamed ones, because a reader can weigh them. We grant anonymity only when the information matters and the person has a real reason to fear naming, such as a risk to their job or safety. When we do, we tell the reader why the source is unnamed and what standing they have to know, without pointing at them. A promise of confidentiality is absolute. We do not identify our sources to anyone, including advertisers and lawyers, and how to reach us securely is on our contact page.
Fairness, and the right of reply
If a story makes a serious allegation about a person or an organisation, we put it to them before we publish and give them a fair chance to respond, and we carry their response. If they decline, we say they declined. If they respond after publication, we add it. Fairness does not mean false balance: we do not give equal weight to a well-established fact and a fringe denial of it just to look even-handed. It means representing each side’s position accurately and not ambushing anyone with a claim they were never given the chance to answer.
News is not opinion, and both are labelled
A report tells you what happened. A comment or analysis piece tells you what one of us makes of it. We keep those apart, and we label opinion as opinion so a reader is never left guessing which they are reading. Reporters keep their personal views out of news stories. That does not mean pretending every question has two equal answers. It means the facts lead and the writer’s preferences stay out of the way. Where analysis interprets the news, it is grounded in reporting and marked as analysis, not slipped in as straight news.
Independence and conflicts of interest
Our judgments about what to cover are ours alone. Advertisers do not influence coverage, do not see stories in advance, and do not get stories pulled, a firewall described on our advertise page and our ownership and funding page. Where a member of the team has a personal, financial, or family interest in a story, they declare it and hand the story to someone else. We pay our own way on reporting, and where a trip or access is ever provided by a party with a stake, the story says so.
Harm, privacy, and vulnerable people
Publishing can hurt people, and we weigh that against the public interest rather than pretending the two never collide. We take particular care with private individuals caught up in news, with children, with victims of crime, and with people in the middle of grief or crisis. We do not publish graphic material for its own sake, and we think hard before naming someone whose naming serves curiosity rather than the public interest. Public figures acting in public roles get less of this shelter, because scrutiny of power is the job.
Images, AI, and honest presentation
A photograph should show what it claims to show. We do not stage news photographs or alter them in ways that mislead, beyond ordinary cropping and colour correction, and a photo illustration is labelled as one. Where we use any automated tool to help produce or research a story, a human editor is responsible for every fact that results, and the standards on this page apply unchanged. Headlines must be supported by the story beneath them, because a headline that oversells is a small lie with a large reach. How we verify before publishing is set out in our fact-checking policy, and if we still get something wrong, tell us at support@playathomefest.com.
Last updated: August 2026
