What This Policy Is For
The News Beacon asks readers to trust what they read here. This page sets out what that trust is based on, so you can hold us to a stated standard rather than an assumed one.

How We Source and Attribute
Our coverage draws on wire services, court and agency records, official statements, public documents and reporting by other outlets. We link to those sources so you can check our account against the original.
Where our work rests substantially on reporting done elsewhere, we say so and credit it. We don’t present other people’s journalism as our own.
Contested claims are attributed to whoever is making them. Where the record is incomplete — a document sealed, footage unreleased, a party declining to comment — we say so rather than writing around the gap.

Separating Reporting, Analysis and Opinion
Reported pieces carry sourcing and stay out of advocacy. Analysis interprets events and is identified as analysis. Opinion argues a position, appears in the Opinion section, and reflects its author rather than the publication. You should be able to tell which you’re reading at a glance.

Headlines
Our headlines are written to be direct and to compete for attention. We hold them to one test: every fact a headline asserts must be established in the article beneath it. A headline is a promise about the story, and the story has to keep it. Where we’ve overstated something, we change the headline and note the change.

Corrections — and the Fact That We’ll Need Them
We’re going to get something wrong eventually. Anyone publishing at this pace will, and claiming otherwise would tell you more about our honesty than our accuracy.

So the commitment runs both ways. We put real work in up front to avoid mistakes — that’s what the checking and editing are for. And when one gets through anyway, we fix it fast, we correct the record openly rather than quietly amending it, and where the error mattered we say what changed. We don’t delete published articles to make a mistake disappear.

Spotted something wrong? contact@thenewsbeacon.net — include the article and the specific issue.

Independence and Advertising
The News Beacon is supported by advertising. Advertisers have no role in selecting, shaping, reviewing or approving editorial content, and no commercial relationship determines what we cover. We accept no payment for coverage and don’t publish sponsored material presented as editorial. No party, campaign or committee has any input into our work.

Technology and Human Review
We use software tools to assist with research, drafting and editing. Every article is reviewed by a person before publication, and responsibility for what appears under our name is ours.