--- title: "Fact-Check Policy" date: 2026-10-09 author: "Brad Nickel" --- # Fact-Check Policy Every number, date and attributed claim on Tricity Local News is checked against its source before publication and signed off by a named reviewer. The steps below apply to statistics pages and news alike. ## What counts as a claim A claim is any sentence a reader could test: a figure, a percentage, a ranking, a date, a quotation, a company or product attribute, or a statement about what a regulator, standards body or court did. Opinions attributed to a named person are checked for accurate attribution only. Background sentences that make no testable statement are not tagged, and a page that is mostly background is rewritten until it has figures to check. ## Which sources qualify Sources rank in this order, and a page uses the highest available rank for each figure: 1. The organization that produced the data: a regulator, a standards body, a statistics office, a court filing, a company’s own financial filing, or the published methodology of a named survey. 2. A peer-reviewed study or a dataset with a published method and sample. 3. An independent industry survey whose sample size, dates and sponsor are stated. 4. Reporting by a named outlet that itself cites a source in rank 1 to 3; the page then cites the original where it can be reached. Vendor benchmarks, uptime figures and customer counts are used only as the vendor’s own claim, attributed to the vendor in the sentence. Paid market-research summaries are not used as sources for statistics. ## Step one: capture The writer records, for every figure, the source URL, the exact passage the figure comes from, the date of the data and the date it was retrieved. The capture stays with the draft. No capture, no figure: anything that cannot be traced to a passage is removed before the draft goes to review. ## Step two: cross-check A second editor, named on the page as the reviewer, reads the draft against the captures. Three questions per figure. Does it match its passage? Does the scope stated in the sentence (region, period, company size, definition) match what the source measured? If it is a forecast, is it labeled as one, with the forecaster named? Where two sources give different figures for what looks like the same thing, the reviewer requires both figures and the difference in scope that explains the gap, or the removal of one. ## Step three: sign-off The reviewer signs off by name, and the page shows both the author and the reviewer. No second name, no publication. ## When a check fails A figure that fails the cross-check is corrected from the source, replaced with one that passes, or cut. The page waits. Several failures on one draft send the whole draft back to the writer rather than fixing them one by one. ## Scheduled review Statistics pages are revisited when the source publishes new data, and at least once every twelve months whether or not it has. A review that changes a figure adds a dated note. The date shown on the page is the date of the last review that changed the content, never a cosmetic update. ## Independence No vendor, sponsor or subject of a page sees the draft before publication or approves copy. Where a commercial relationship touches a page, the [Ethics Policy](/ethics-policy/) requires a disclosure on that page. ## Errors found after publication Readers who find an error can report it to with the page URL, the figure and the source. The [Corrections Policy](/corrections-policy/) sets out the response times and what the correction note contains.