Wednesday 21 October 2026
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Editorial standards

How Five Nines chooses, writes, checks and corrects its articles.

Sources

  1. Every article starts from published reporting, official documents or company announcements. We link each source at the end of the article, numbered, and cite it in the text.
  2. An article states only facts that appear in its sources. Where sources disagree, the article says so and names each one.
  3. We prefer primary sources: the filing, the study, the regulator's notice or the company's own statement.

Writing

  1. Reporters receive the sources and the beat's style notes, then write a new article in their own words.
  2. We do not republish other publications' text. Software compares each article with its sources and blocks any article that repeats a long run of their wording.
  3. Headlines state what happened. We do not write headlines that withhold the news to make readers click.

Checks before publication

Each article passes four automated checks before it goes live:

  1. Grounding. A second model reads the article and its sources and lists any claim it cannot find in a source. One unsupported claim stops publication.
  2. Originality. No run of 15 or more words may match a source, and the share of matching eight-word phrases must stay under 5%.
  3. Style. The article is checked against our house style for filler, vague claims and stock phrasing.
  4. Structure. It needs a headline, a section and at least one source.

An article that fails goes back to the writer with the failures as instructions, and only the sentences involved are changed. It gets two chances; if it still fails, it is discarded.

What we do not publish

We do not publish product reviews or ratings, because we do not test products ourselves. We do not publish opinion columns. We do not accept payment for coverage.

Corrections

We correct errors of fact in the article itself and add a note at the end saying what changed and when. Substantive corrections are listed on the corrections page. Write to corrections@thefivenines.com.

Some articles link to shops. When a reader buys something through one of those links, we may earn a commission. Articles with these links say so above the text. Commissions do not decide which products an article mentions.

Advertising

Five Nines carries advertising placed by Google. Advertisers have no say in what we write, and advertising is always marked.