Editorial Standards & Ethics
This is a working manual. It exists because a rule nobody has written down gets renegotiated at two in the morning, when a district has changed hands and two press offices are calling. Most of it is here because we got something wrong first. Last updated: August 2026.
Accuracy before speed
A claim publishes when we can say where it came from and why it holds. Not because it is moving through diaspora groups as a screenshot, and not because a bigger outlet ran it. Figures, names, titles, dates and place spellings are checked against a source before the file leaves the writer, who notes which source.
We prefer the document to a description of it: the signed agreement, not a briefing about it, and an agency’s dataset, not the round number a spokesman read from it. On a story still moving we publish the smaller true thing, which is what is confirmed, who confirmed it, and what we do not yet know. The steps are in our fact-checking policy.
Attribution, and who gets to be anonymous
Every factual claim we did not establish ourselves is attributed in the sentence carrying it, and that rule does most of the work here. A casualty figure never runs as a bare number. It runs with whoever supplied it, a hospital, a district commissioner, a ministry spokesman or an insurgent channel, and with the hour it was given.
Anonymity is something an editor grants, not a default a reporter assumes. It is available where being named would cost a person their job, their access or their safety. A section editor approves each use and tells the managing editor. The desk knows who the person is even when the reader does not, and one anonymous source cannot carry a disputed claim alone.
We also tell readers what a source is positioned to want, because an official briefing us on a district just lost has an interest in how the loss gets described.
Putting the claim to the person first
Anyone who is the subject of critical coverage hears the specifics from us first, in enough detail to answer and with time to answer in. A working day is the norm, a couple of hours the floor. Where we could not reach a ministry or a commander’s spokesman, the piece says how we tried.
The answer goes into the story rather than underneath it, and a denial is reported as a denial instead of parked in the last line. Anything substantive arriving later is added and dated. A right of reply is not copy approval, and we have never sent a draft out for inspection.
News, analysis, opinion, and copy somebody paid for
Straight reporting carries no tag, since it is the bulk of what we publish. Analysis is tagged, and means one of our writers reaching a conclusion from reported facts with the facts shown, so a reader can follow the reasoning and reject the conclusion. Opinion is an argument, and carries the name of the person making it.
Commercial content is labelled permanently at the head of the page, in the type size of the furniture around the headline, and it never carries a reporter’s byline or sits inside anything we call reporting. Where a contributor holds a party role or an agency contract, that runs at the top. Our advertising page has the terms, including the categories we turn down.
The firewall between the desk and the money
Advertising pays for this site. The people who sell it do not attend the news meeting, do not see stories before publication and cannot ask for one, and editors are not told which advertiser is booked in which week. A rule is easier to keep when the desk lacks what it would need to break it.
An advertiser cannot buy adjacency to praise, cannot keep its name out of critical coverage of itself, and cannot preview or veto a line. When a money transfer operator or a telecom that buys space here becomes the story, it runs without a warning call and discloses the relationship. Spend has been pulled over coverage, and the copy went out as filed. Every revenue stream is on our ownership and funding page.
Gifts, holdings, travel and politics
No one here owns a stake in a business they cover, money transfer operators and port ventures included. Anything beyond a conference lanyard goes back, and per diems from organisers are declined. Where a place can only be reached on a government or agency flight, we go if the story needs it, disclose the arrangement in the piece, and agree nothing about coverage first.
Nobody on this desk campaigns for, donates to, advises or holds office in a party or a candidate’s campaign, and nobody writes copy for one on the side. Accreditation has been withdrawn from us over a story, which we expected when we wrote the rule. Contributors declare communications work for governments and aid organisations before they file.
Plagiarism and invention
Lifting another outlet’s words or its reporting without credit is the end of somebody’s arrangement with us. So is a quote nobody said, a source who does not exist, or a datelined report written from somewhere else. Neither gets treated as a first offence to be talked through. What we have instead of a masthead is whether the sentences can be trusted, and one invented detail spends all of it.
Where a Somali-language outlet or a visiting correspondent got there first, we credit them by name and link to them high up, not in the ninth paragraph. Work of ours that fails these tests is corrected, or withdrawn with a note explaining why, under our corrections policy.
What we use these tools for
We use AI tools. Running a page about verification while hiding that would be its own small fabrication, so here is the list: transcribing and rough-translating interview audio, suggesting search terms, turning notes into something an editor can read, and throwing up headline options an editor rewrites.
Nothing here is written by a model and passed off as our reporting. Every quote taken from a transcript is checked against the audio by the person filing it, because these tools mishear Somali names and place names with real confidence, and a wrong district in a security story is not a typo. No image here is synthetic unless the caption says so.
Where a tool did more than the work above, the piece says which and where. A person commissioned every sentence here, wrote it, edited it and answers for it. You cannot correct a model, you cannot sack one, and it will not tell you which parts it was guessing at.
Whose voices end up in the copy
Who a newsroom knows decides who it quotes, so we go through the contacts list on purpose. The default on this beat is a narrow circle: federal officials in Mogadishu, the same few analysts in Nairobi, the same diplomats, nearly all of them men.
We work at the rest of it. Member-state officials who disagree with the centre. The camp committee chair, not the agency’s country director. Women running businesses inside the remittance economy. Somali-language sources quoted directly rather than through someone else’s translation. A story in which every quoted voice agrees and holds a similar job goes back as thin reporting.
Bylines, and where to write
Every story has an author the desk stands behind. Some carry a name and some do not, because several of our reporters live where a byline on a security story is a personal risk, as our about page explains. Where a byline is held back, an editor is accountable in that reporter’s place, and no story with a contested claim is edited by one person alone.
Our managing editor answers for everything published. If we have broken a rule on this page, write to support@somaliupdate.com with the headline in the subject line and say which rule. Naming it gets a faster answer.
