How we work

Where our numbers come from, how pages are signed, what happens when we get something wrong, and which pages were paid for. Every figure on this site is traceable to a named source, every archived page keeps the text and the date it was published with, and anything bought is marked as bought on the page itself.

This page is the standing answer to four questions: where a number came from, who wrote a page, what gets changed after publication, and what we refuse to do.

Numbers, dates and quotes

A figure appears on this site only when it can be traced to the document it came from. If a source cannot be named, the sentence is cut rather than hedged. We do not round a number up to make a point, we do not convert a rate into a count without saying what the base was, and we do not reuse a statistic whose original definition we cannot find. Where a page carries a table, the line under it says what was counted.

The archive

Pages published before the magazine widened its subject are kept exactly where they were, in the language they were written in. The German corpus stays German; nothing here was machine-translated and re-published as if it were new. Author archives were written by named contributors whose work we are not claiming as our own — those pages list what they wrote and say so.

Bylines

Pages written after the relaunch are signed Forty-One staff unless a named contributor wrote them. A staff byline means a named editor is accountable for the page, not that nobody is.

Commercial pages

Some pages in Market and some links elsewhere on this site were paid for. They sit at their original addresses, they are not mixed into editorial sections, and no amount of money moves a page into The Court, Numbers or Media. Nothing in those three sections is for sale, and editorial pages are never rewritten at an advertiser's request.

Corrections

A factual error is fixed on the page and the change is described at the foot of it. Small typographic fixes are made silently. We do not remove a published page to make an error disappear; if a page should no longer be read, it says so and stays up.

What we will not publish

Predictions dressed as analysis. Odds presented as the chance of something happening. Numbers without a source. Anything that tells a reader a wager is a way to make money.