Editorial policy

This page explains how Asean Coverage finds, writes, checks and corrects its stories, so that you know what you are reading.

Where stories come from

Every story starts from a published report, an official announcement or a press release. The editorial team chooses the sources and sets the rules that every story follows. A story must be about at least one country of the region: Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar or Timor-Leste, or ASEAN as a whole.

How we write a story

We write our own short account of the facts in the source. We do not copy the source's wording. We skip pages behind a paywall and pages that a publisher has asked us not to use. If a publisher asks us to remove a story or an image, we remove it.

Some sources are written in Indonesian, Malay, Thai or Vietnamese. The story is always written in English, and the checks below compare it with the source in the source's own language.

Checks before publishing

Before a story is published, its text is compared with the source text. The checks cover:

• numbers, amounts, percentages, currencies, dates and units;
• names of people, companies, agencies, places and job titles;
• quotes, which must appear in the source and stay short;
• claims, causes and forecasts, which must be stated in the source;
• tone, so that a story does not promote a company or give investment advice.

A story that fails a check is not published. Checks reduce mistakes but cannot remove them. If you find a mistake, please tell us.

Countries and sections

Each story has one topic, which belongs to one of the five sections, and one or two country tags. The first tag is the country the story is mainly about: where the event happened or who it is about, not where the source is based.

Names on stories

Each story carries the name of a member of the editorial team, who answers for it. Meet the team on the team page.

Withdrawn stories

If a story should not have been published, or cannot be fixed, we withdraw it. A withdrawn story keeps its web address, so an old link never leads to a different story. The address shows a notice and answers with HTTP status 410, which tells search engines that the page is gone for good.

Advertising and company announcements

Advertising, where it appears, is separate from stories and does not change what we write. Company announcements are published as their issuers provided them, under their own heading, and are not written by the editorial team.