Editorial Standards & Ethics
Accuracy first, speed second
A claim is checked before publication, not after a reader challenges it. We prefer the document to the summary of it, and the person who saw the thing to the person who was told.
Kerala punishes loose writing in a particular way. An alert applies to a district. A holiday applies to a category of institution in a district on a date. A reservoir sits at a level at an hour. Our copy carries those qualifiers even when they weigh the sentence down, because the alternative is a reader acting on a warning never issued for their district. The cost is that we lose flood stories by twenty minutes to sites that publish the rumour, and we keep paying it. The method is in our fact-checking policy.
Attribution, and the few times we withhold a name
On the record is the default: a named person, a named office, a named document, and the hour where the hour matters. “Sources said” is not a sourcing standard, and we treat it as a reporting failure rather than a style choice.
Anonymity is granted for risk, never for convenience. A clerk who shows us a file, a nurse describing what a taluk hospital ran out of at four in the morning, a worker whose residency depends on his employer’s goodwill: those people can lose a job or a visa, and they get protection. A press officer who wants to brief without owning the quote does not.
Our managing editor approves every grant of anonymity and knows the person’s identity even when readers do not. We tell you why the name is withheld and what that person is placed to know. An unnamed source cannot accuse a named one, and no allegation runs on a single anonymous voice.
Independence: holdings, gifts and political activity
Nobody on this desk holds shares in a company we cover, takes retainer work from a party, a government department or a PR agency, or writes copy for an organisation whose coverage they touch. Party membership, campaign work and standing for office are incompatible with a job here. Where somebody’s family is in local government, the editor declares it and stays off that panchayat.
The offers arrive weekly and most are hospitality: tourism boards, resorts, airlines, hospitals, a film distributor with a junket and a hotel room. We pay our own way or we do not go, and Onam hampers go back. Accreditation and review copies we do accept, and we say so in the piece where a reader could want to know. What comes in at the other end is on our ownership and funding page.
Labels, and the wall behind them
A news report gives you what happened and who said it. Analysis is labelled analysis and shows its reasoning instead of hiding a conclusion inside a description. Opinion is labelled opinion, carries the writer’s affiliation where they have one, and is not written to order.
Sponsored material carries a label at the top, in the same position every time, in words rather than a euphemism. It names the company that paid, looks different from our journalism, and is written outside the newsroom. It never takes the shape of a news alert, a live update or an official notice. In this state the format of a weather warning is public safety equipment, and it is not for rent.
Behind the labels the rule is plain. Advertiser names are not circulated with the day’s story list, no advertiser sees copy before publication or gets a veto after it, and requests to pull or soften are refused. Where a direct advertiser becomes the subject of a story, the story says the company advertises with us and runs as written. The sales rules are on our advertise page.
Right of reply
Anybody facing criticism in our copy hears from us first. We put the specific allegations to them, in writing when they ask for that, rather than a vague request for comment that can be answered vaguely. The deadline we give is real. On a story that has been building for a week, that means days, not the twenty minutes that lets a writer type “did not respond”.
If they decline or stay silent we say exactly that, including when we asked and by what route. “Reached by telephone on Tuesday evening, the office said it could not confirm the figure” tells you more than “officials were unavailable” ever has. A reply arriving after publication is added and flagged at the top, not tucked into the last paragraph. On a live emergency the window is short by necessity, and we say how short.
Plagiarism and fabrication
Both end the working relationship. A staffer who invents a quote, a place, a number or a person does not stay, and a freelancer who does it does not file here again. There is no first-offence conversation about a fabricated source, because the only sane response to one invented fact is to assume nothing else in that file is real. We tell readers what we found and read back through everything else the person filed.
Lifting is the local form of the problem. English coverage of Kerala runs substantially on Malayalam reporting, and the decent practice is to credit and link the newsroom that did the work, by name, high in the story. Rewriting somebody’s scoop into fresh sentences and calling it ours is theft with better grammar. One or two of us have been on a desk that did it.
Where we use AI, and where we do not
We use machine tools in a few places and would rather list them than let you guess. First-pass transcription of interview audio in Malayalam and English. First-pass translation of documents, including Malayalam orders and Arabic ministry circulars. Spelling and grammar checks. Occasionally a suggested headline out of several, and a few lines of code to parse a rainfall table.
Every one of those outputs is checked by a person against the original before a reader sees it. Anything carrying a number, a place name or a legal category is read against the source by an editor who reads that language, because a machine that turns a shutter level into a water level produces precisely the error this site exists to prevent.
What we do not do: generate reporting, quotes, sources or facts; publish a sentence no human here can vouch for; make or use synthetic images or video of weather, damage or people; put a tool’s name on a byline. If AI-generated text of any substance ever appears in a published piece, the piece will say so. The named author is accountable for every line regardless of which tool touched it.
Whose voices get into the copy
A Kerala news file left to its own habits becomes ministers in Thiruvananthapuram, businessmen in Kochi and a court order. Panchayat presidents and ward members, many of them women, run the layer of government that actually reaches people, and they are quotable. Fisherfolk on the coast, Adivasi settlements in Wayanad and Attappady, migrant workers from Bengal and Odisha living here, domestic workers in the Gulf: those are the people a state story is about and the last ones it tends to quote.
We count rather than trust our impressions. Once a month somebody tallies the officials we quoted against everybody else, a crude check that has never once flattered us. Interviews conducted in Malayalam are marked as translated, so you know the words are ours and the meaning is theirs.
Bylines, and how to argue with us
Every story carries the name of the person who wrote it, and that person is reachable at support@keralanews247.com. We do not use house pseudonyms or a generic desk byline to make a small team look larger. Copy assembled from a news agency says so and names the agency.
Rules like these only mean anything when they are enforced on a story we badly want to run. When we break one, the mechanics of putting it right are in our corrections policy. If you think a piece has failed a standard on this page, write with the link, the sentence, and which standard you mean.
Last updated: August 2026
