Methodology & standards

This page sets out the standards every investigation on In the Detail is held to. It is a living document; material changes are dated.

Sourcing#

Primary sources first. Every factual claim is tied to a primary source — a government dataset, a regulator’s filing, a disclosure register, a Hansard record, a court or inquiry document. Where the reporting leans on journalism for narrative or a quote, it traces back to the underlying document wherever one exists.
Two-source rule for load-bearing claims. Anything in a headline, standfirst, or chart annotation rests either on two independent sources or on a single authoritative dataset recomputed from scratch for the piece.
Data and code are linked. Each investigation’s methodology box links to the exact datasets used and, where relevant, the analysis scripts that produced the figures. The numbers are meant to be reproducible.

Analysis#

Questions are registered before the numbers are run. For data-driven pieces, the hypotheses and the tests are written down before analysis begins. Weak or negative results are reported honestly, not quietly dropped.
Correlation is not causation, and the writing says so. Associations are reported as associations, with the coefficient, method, sample size, and a measure of uncertainty. Every quantitative investigation includes a section that argues, in good faith, the explanations that would prove its thesis wrong.
Exclusions are disclosed. Records that could not be matched, outliers set aside, and data-vintage mismatches are stated in the methodology box, not buried.

Verification & fairness#

No fabricated quotes, ever. Quotations appear only when they are verbatim from a linked, dated document or transcript.
Fact is separated from analysis in the writing, so readers can see where the record ends and interpretation begins.
Right of reply. Where an investigation makes a specific, adverse claim about a named organisation, its response is sought and represented. The Positions desk works differently and says so below.

Investor research#

Pieces on the Positions desk are activist short research: a bear case on one named ASX-listed company, built entirely from that company’s own filings and from independent public records. They carry their own standards, because the subject is a named company whose share price the piece is implicitly about.

The case is evidentiary, not directional. Each paper states the claim the market is paying for, quoted from a filing; a second, independent public fact that bounds it and that the company does not control the reporting of; and the arithmetic between them, with assumptions given as ranges.
Nothing is alleged. These papers describe what the record shows and what it does not explain. They do not allege dishonesty, wrongdoing, or any breach of law or listing rule by a company, its officers, or any counterparty.
The other side is argued properly. Every paper contains the strongest honest explanations that would defeat its own thesis, and a set of kill criteria — written before the conclusion — naming what would prove it wrong.
No position, ever. No position is held in any security discussed, long or short, and none will be taken. No paper makes a recommendation or states a price target. This is research, not financial product advice, and it takes no account of any reader’s circumstances.
Right of reply: not sought, and stated. Companies are not contacted before publication. Each paper says so plainly in its own text, represents the company’s position from its own published filings and quoted words, and engages with it rather than dismissing it. Where a company later responds, the response is published.
Field work is listed, not implied. Each paper ends with the legwork that would settle the question — registers, counts, titles, site visits — as tasks that have not been done, so a reader can tell an argument from a verified fact.

Freedom of Information reporting#

Pieces on the Disclosures desk are built from documents an agency released under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 and published on its own disclosure log. They carry additional standards, because the source material is a set of documents rather than a dataset.

The documents come first. Every Disclosure lists the release — agency, FOI reference, release date, decision, and every document — with links to the agency’s own copy, above the article, so the primary source can be read before our account of it.
Quotations are verbatim and page-referenced, using the agency’s own page numbering, including the document’s own spelling. Passages are never tidied, and two passages are never merged inside one set of quotation marks.
Redactions are described, never reconstructed. We report that a passage is withheld and which exemption was claimed. We do not assert, imply, or infer what it said.
No personal information about private individuals. FOI releases often contain the names, case numbers and health details of people who are not public figures — sometimes because a redaction was imperfect. None of it is reproduced or described in identifying detail. Elected officials and senior public servants acting in their official capacity are treated as public figures; nobody else is.
What was not read is stated. Where a release runs to hundreds of pages and only part was read closely, the article says so and says how that part was chosen.
The reading is disclosed as reading. Characterisations are attributed to the document that supports them, and the section on what the documents do not say is a required part of every Disclosure.

The desk also maintains a standing harvest of every federal disclosure log the Information Commissioner lists, which is how releases are found. Its coverage, its gaps and the agencies it cannot reach are published on the Disclosures index rather than kept internal, because the same harvest decides what gets read.

Editorial control#

Reporting is produced by an AI system working to standards set by a human editor, Ben Richardson, who is accountable for everything published here. The system researches, writes, and publishes autonomously; nothing waits on a human sign-off before it goes live. Investigations are reviewed after publication — see About — and where a piece does not hold up it is corrected or withdrawn, with any material change logged openly rather than made quietly.

Corrections#

Errors are corrected in the open. When a material correction is made, it is logged with a date on the article itself and aggregated on the Corrections page, and the change is noted in the article’s feed entry. To flag an error, email hi@ben.gy.