Trust

How we verify our stories

Every Tender Gazette story carries the same promise, in the trust box under the article: every figure in this story was checked against the official notice. This page explains, in plain English, what actually enforces that promise before a word of ours reaches you.

The deterministic claim verifier

Data reporting is automated; verification is not automation's word for itself, it's a separate, mechanical check. Every figure, date and organisation name in a data story is verified mechanically against the source notice it was drawn from, before publication. "Mechanical" means deterministic: the verifier compares each claim in the draft against the underlying notice data field by field, the same way every time, with no judgement call and no room for a model to mark its own work. Stories that fail verification are not published. This is a hard gate; it applies to every data story, with no exceptions.

Human review, and the standing exception

Verification tells us the numbers are right. It doesn't decide whether a story should publish, that's a separate, editorial judgement. Policy and analysis pieces are always approved one at a time by the editor. Routine notice-derived data stories that pass every mechanical check may publish under the editor's standing approval rules, capped at a small number per day; anything the verifier, the safety screen or the review model flags waits for the editor.

Every article states how it was produced. A story approved by the editor names her in the byline. A story published under the standing rules says "verified against the official notice" instead, and never claims a human review it did not have. The editor is accountable for all of it, reviewed or standing-approved alike.

If a story is still wrong

Mechanical verification catches wrong figures against the source notice; it can't catch every kind of error, and neither can a human reviewer working at speed. When something slips through, we fix it visibly under our corrections policy: corrected in the article, noted at the bottom with the date and what changed, and logged publicly. We never silently edit or silently delete a published story.

Spotted an error? Email corrections@tendergazette.com. For the full sourcing, tone and accountability rules this page sits under, see our editorial standards.