How we choose what to cover

The four criteria

A piece moves from "interesting" to "commissioned" when the editorial team can write affirmative answers to four questions. Drafts that we publish typically satisfy all four; drafts that look promising and end up unpublished usually fail one.

1. Beat fit. Does the piece advance the publication's coverage of opacity, auditability, interpretability, or the regulatory machinery around them? A piece that is interesting but sits outside the beat is a piece for a different publication. We have killed our own drafts for this reason and we are sometimes unhappy about it.
2. Specific access. Does the contributor have direct access to a primary document, a working system, a named source, or a regulatory development we have read in the original? Pieces that rest on secondary commentary about events others have reported add to the volume of commentary but rarely to the reader's understanding.
3. Verifiable specifics. Are the load-bearing specifics in the argument traceable to documents, observations, or named sources? If the piece requires invention to make its point, we do not publish it. We have left drafts on the shelf for this reason; sometimes the source eventually agreed to be named and the piece ran.
4. Editorial timing. Is the piece responsive to a development the reader needs the publication to address now, or is it a piece that will be better for some additional research? "Now" is not a value in itself; we do not chase a news cycle. But timing affects what the piece can do, and a piece that misses the window for which it was designed reads as untimely even when it is well-argued.

The standing departments and what they imply

• Cornerstone commissions a piece when a piece of vocabulary in the field has done enough rhetorical work without a definition that the publication is willing to fix one. These pieces appear roughly twice a year. They run long.
• Notes commissions a piece when a single recent event in the auditability conversation rewards careful reading. They appear at a roughly fortnightly cadence and are the publication's working column.
• Field Reports commissions a piece when a contributor with hands-on access to a working audit is willing to describe what they saw within the publication's editorial standards. They are rarer than Notes because hands-on access is rarer.
• Regulation Watch commissions on the calendar of the regulatory machinery: implementation milestones, comment-period closures, working-party publications. These pieces are timed to the regulator rather than to the press cycle.
• Conversations commissions when a working operator, auditor, or regulator is willing to sit for a long-form on-the-record interview. We do not commission a Conversation to follow up on a recent news event in another publication.
• Corrections commissions when the publication has corrected itself substantively enough that a piece-length account is owed to the reader.

The standing reasons we decline

1. The piece would be sourced from a press kit

We do not commission product reviews based on a vendor's pre-launch briefing. We do not commission "explainer" pieces whose function is to make a vendor's narrative easier to defend. A vendor's framing is a starting point for analysis; it is not the piece.

2. The piece would re-tread the publication's prior analysis

We do not commission pieces whose argument is materially the publication's argument from an earlier piece, told in different words. We do commission follow-ups where the situation has materially changed or where a previous claim deserves revisiting.

3. The piece would name an individual the publication cannot verify on

We do not commission profiles of individuals whose biographical anchors we cannot verify against documents in our possession. The standing rule is that pieces about individuals cite from a verified-anchor set; pieces that need an unverified specific either acquire one or are not commissioned.

4. The piece would materially overlap with the contributor's paid consulting

We do not commission pieces whose argument materially overlaps with the contributor's active paid consulting engagements unless the conflict is disclosed in the byline block. We have commissioned pieces with such disclosures; the disclosure is the condition.

5. The piece would require the publication to participate in a vendor's launch

We do not commission pieces timed to a vendor's launch announcement, embargo, or managed-press window. We will commission a piece on the technical content of a launch — the released paper, the released model, the released artefact — when those are available outside the launch's communications strategy.

6. The piece would deliver a verdict the publication has not actually reached

We do not commission pieces whose argument outruns the evidence. A piece whose framing is "the situation is worse than reported" without specific access to evidence that supports the framing is a piece we have read before in every other publication. We will commission a piece whose framing is "the situation is more complicated than reported, and here is the documented complication."

What this implies for pitch volume

The publication commissions less than it could. The reading volume is much larger than the publication volume — we read every paper that touches the beat, every regulatory filing that arrives in our inbox, every transparency report in the publication's running review set. The publication's output is the residue of that reading after the four criteria above have done their work.

For pitchers

Pitches that meet all four criteria typically receive a commissioning conversation within ten business days. Pitches that meet two or three receive a substantive response. Pitches that meet none — by far the most common — receive a polite no, or no response at all if the pitch shows no engagement with the publication's standing beat.

Changelog

• 2026-05-22. Initial publication.