How the paper conducts itself
Ethics
- Provenance before prose. Every fact the paper prints carries its source, and the source is on the record. Nothing prints from a model's recall — a date the paper cannot source is a date the paper does not print.
- The machine is named. Compiled by machine; signed reports by named correspondents. Every story declares which it is — the label is per-story, in the copy and in the metadata, not a disclaimer in a footer.
- Held is held. The gates' verdicts are permanent. No machine story is rescued by hand; a human stamp exists only where a human judgment is the missing check. The machine verifies provenance; the human verifies the world.
- Corrections in public. The paper never deletes. It corrects in place, retracts in place, and keeps the record reachable — a reader who follows an old link finds the correction, not a hole.
- No opinion. The paper reports. There is no opinion category, and there never will be.
- Open doors only. The paper's readers take facts from openly published, unreserved sources. A machine-readable reservation is a statutory boundary, not a courtesy — reserved houses reach the paper through the press inbox, their own voluntary door.
- The reader is not the product. No third-party scripts, no trackers, self-hosted type, no geo-profiling — a reader's country never sets their language. Account deletion is real; what remains of a departed correspondent is the byline on the permanent record, nothing more.
- The news is never paywalled. The wire is open to all, for humans and machines, forever. What is sold is the edited paper — selection, ordering, the note — never the news itself.
Declared interests
The Editor in Chief holds roles in the live music industry, and the paper covers that industry. The remedy is not recusal — the machinery is the recusal: a Wacken announcement is scored by the same authority table as anyone’s, by code that does not know whose name is on the masthead. The remedy is disclosure, standing and automatic:
- The Editor in Chief is Head of International Business at ICS, the company behind Wacken Open Air, and its Global Brand Representative.
- The Editor in Chief is a Director and founder of Bangalore Open Air.
- The Editor in Chief operates Livebiz Inc., a software venture serving the live music industry.
Any story whose subject is one of these houses prints the relevant line above its sources, every time, by rule. The same applies to the sector Livebiz serves: readers of The Trade should weigh coverage of live-music software knowing the Editor in Chief operates a vendor in that market.