Editorial standards

Sourcing

Name the practitioner, the body or the thread, or cut the claim. When we say what people in the profession think, do or charge, we say who: a named practitioner who has agreed to be quoted, a professional body or regulator, a published survey, or a specific public discussion we can link to. A sentence like “many firms are saying” with nobody behind it does not run.

• We state what we have verified and hedge what we have not, in plain words.
• Anything that changes over time (a price, a threshold, a deadline) carries the date it was true.
• Pieces about tax and regulation link the regulator or professional body that sets the rule, and say that the piece is journalism, not advice for your circumstances.
• We never invent quotes, anecdotes, case studies or statistics. A case study carries its numbers and says where they came from.

How we use AI

Some of our articles are drafted with AI. The process is the same every time, and a person decides at each point that matters:

1. Choosing what to write. A research routine reads our search data and the events calendar and proposes topics against a written brief. Many weeks it proposes nothing, and that is allowed.
2. Drafting. AI writes a draft under our house brief: the sourcing rule above, no invented facts, and no recommended fees.
3. Checking. Every draft goes through an automated check for banned phrases, unsourced fee figures and formatting, and through editing passes before a person sees it.
4. Approving. Drafts are staged unpublished with a private preview. A person at The Firm reads each one and either publishes it or turns it down with a reason. Nothing an AI drafts goes live on its own.

We also use AI to maintain what is already published: adding a short set of questions and answers drawn only from what an article already says, fixing page titles and descriptions, rewriting the one-line summaries on story cards in plain words, correcting a wrong word or date in the body (each correction is listed on our corrections page), and adding links between related pieces. Those changes are proposed, never applied automatically. A person applies each one, and every change is recorded so it can be undone.

The newsletter works the same way: AI prepares an unsent draft, and a person reviews it and decides whether and when it goes out.

Corrections and updates

These are different things, and we treat them differently.

A correction is when we got something wrong. We fix it in the article, add a note saying what was wrong and when we fixed it, and list it on our corrections page. We don’t quietly rewrite a mistake away.

An update is when something has changed since we published: a consultation closes, a date passes, a rule takes effect. We add a box at the top of the article headed “Update” and the date, say what has changed and what to do now, and leave the original reporting in place underneath. If the headline named a date that has passed, we change the headline so it no longer promises something the page can’t deliver.

Found a mistake? Email hello@thefirm.media or use the contact form with the article’s link and what is wrong. The corrections page says what to include.

Sponsorship and paid placement

The Firm is paid for by advertising, sponsorship and partner plans. How that shows up on the site:

• Advertising in and beside articles is labelled “Sponsored”.
• A sponsor shown next to an article about their category is labelled “Sponsored” and “Paid placement”, and sits after any tools the article itself names.
• Event pages name their presenting partner as a partner.
• Guides in our technology directory that carry a partner’s note label it as a partner note, outside the body of the guide.
• Outbound links to vendors carry a sponsored attribute.

In the directory, a listing is free, and paid placement is labelled wherever it appears. The details are on how the directory works.

How we write about fees

We write a lot about pricing, because how to run the work profitably is the question we exist to answer. We never publish a recommended fee, a range or a benchmark for what firms should charge. Accounting firms compete with each other, and a publication nudging them towards a common price is a problem, not a service. We explain how to decide what to charge: the work a change creates, how to scope it, and what to tell clients.

Conflicts of interest

Writers don’t cover companies they have a financial stake in without saying so in the piece.

Images

We don’t use stock photography. Article images are made in-house from our own collage and pattern set, and a photograph of a person shows the person named.