Start with the rule that everything else depends on.
A story never earns a listing. A listing never earns a story. They are two entirely separate things and neither is a route to the other. Talking to us cannot improve a business's position against the entry bar, and being in the register does not put anyone in a queue to be asked.
That is stated first because it is the rule most likely to be doubted, and because someone deciding whether to spend an hour talking to a publication deserves to know at the outset that nothing is being traded.
What this is, and who it is for
This is the interview policy. It is written for anyone who might one day be asked to talk to us and wants to know what happens to their words before they say any.
It has to open with a plain statement of fact. No interviews have taken place. There are no operator stories, and the stories page says so with nothing under it. Nothing on this site is a first-person account, because no first-person account exists.
That is also why this exists now rather than later. A policy written after the first conversation tends to describe whatever happened in that conversation, and the person being asked has to take the interviewer's word for the terms. Publishing it in advance means the first person we ever ask can read the whole thing before answering, without our having any stake in how it reads.
There is a second reason, and it is worth being blunt about. A fabricated operator story on a site whose entire claim is that somebody checked would be the worst single thing we could publish, and it would be undetectable to a reader. So the prohibition has to be absolute rather than a matter of judgement: no composite, no illustrative example, no model-generated voice, not even clearly labelled as such. Where there are no stories, the page says there are none.
The firewall, in detail
The rule at the top has two directions and both have to be closed, because closing only one leaves the more tempting route open.
A story cannot earn a listing. Being interviewed has no effect on whether a business is listed, when it is reviewed, or how the bar is applied to it. The bar is applied by a reviewer against a published document, and "we talked to them" is not one of its criteria. The entry bar, which this does not affect sets out every criterion that does count. Nor does it work in the other direction: agreeing to an interview and then being refused a listing is a perfectly ordinary outcome, and it will happen.
A listing cannot earn a story. There is no queue that being listed puts you into. There is no rotation through the register looking for subjects. The two systems do not read each other.
Two consequences follow that make the separation checkable rather than merely stated.
- We will interview people who are not in the register and would not pass the bar. A story about someone we would not list is a reasonable thing to publish, and the fact that it can happen is what proves the two are separate.
- Declining an interview has no consequence of any kind. Not a soft one, not a delayed one. An entry is unaffected, a submission is unaffected, and nobody is asked twice about the same piece.
Money does not enter either side of this. Nothing on this site can be bought, and an interview is not an exception dressed differently.
How we ask, and what we tell you first
Before any question is asked, five things get said. Not in the follow-up email. First.
- Who we are, what the piece is for, and where it will appear.
- That you can stop at any point, including during, including afterwards, including after publication.
- What is on the record, agreed before we start rather than negotiated afterwards. If something is off the record, it is off the record from the moment you say so, not from the moment we agree it was reasonable.
- Whether we would like to record, and what happens to the recording. Recording only ever happens with permission.
- That nothing is published until you have seen your quotes.
If any of those has not been said, the conversation has not properly started, and that is our failure to fix rather than something for the interviewee to notice.
Recording, notes and what we keep
Recording happens only with permission, asked for in advance and re-askable at any point. If the answer is no, we take notes instead and the accuracy burden shifts to us, which is a good reason for us to prefer recording and no reason at all for you to agree to it.
What is kept is the minimum needed to check a quote against what was said: the recording or the notes, and the transcript if one was made. What is not kept is anything else. We do not build a file on people we have spoken to, we do not pass recordings to anyone, and we do not use an interview as research material for a different piece without asking again.
If you ask for the recording to be deleted, it is deleted. If quotes from it have already been published, they stay attributable to a capture date and the material behind them is gone, which is a trade we accept rather than a reason to argue.
Quote approval: what you get to change
Concretely, because "you will see it first" is the vaguest promise in journalism and can mean almost anything.
| You can | We can |
|---|---|
| Correct anything you said, including changing your mind about it after the fact. | Edit for length, and for the ordinary repetitions and hesitations of speech. |
| Withdraw any individual quote, for any reason or for none. | Ask you to reconsider a withdrawal once, then accept the answer without pressing. |
| Withdraw the whole piece before publication. | Decline to run a piece that has become misleading through withdrawals, rather than run a distorted version of it. |
| Ask for the piece to be removed after publication. | Say plainly, in the piece, where you declined to answer something. |
| Be anonymous, where being named would cost you something. | Never attribute a quote to anyone who did not agree to it. |
The boundary that matters is this: approval covers your words, not ours. You can change, correct or remove anything attributed to you. You do not get approval over the surrounding article, the headline, the framing, or what else appears in the piece. Offering that would be offering editorial control we would not actually hand over, and a promise like that is worth less than a clear no.
If the piece is about you and you disagree with how it reads, the honest options are to withdraw your quotes or to have your objection stated in the piece. Both are available. Neither is a negotiation about our sentences.
Capture dates, and why every quote carries one
Every quote is published with the date it was said. No exceptions, and an undated quote is not published at all.
This looks pedantic and is not. Businesses change. Somebody describing how they run their workshop is describing how they ran it that week, and a year later it may be entirely untrue through no fault of theirs. Without a date, a quote quietly stops being a record of something said and becomes a claim about the present, and the person who has to live with that claim is the interviewee rather than us.
The date is also what makes a quote checkable in the way everything else on this site is checkable. Every factual claim here is either something we checked with a date and a method, or something somebody said, quoted and attributed and dated. There is no third category. Our correction process treats a misattributed or misdated quote as exactly the kind of factual error it logs.
What we will never do to your words
- Never rewrite them. Not by an editor tidying a sentence, and not by a model at all. Drafting elsewhere on this site is AI-assisted and we say so plainly. Anybody's quoted words are handled by a person, from the recording to the page.
- Never composite two people into one voice. A quote is one person saying one thing on one date, or it does not run.
- Never invent a speaker. No illustrative operator, no representative small business owner, no "one maker told us". If nobody said it, nobody said it.
- Never lift a quote from somewhere else and present it as though it were said to us. A quote taken from a published source is cited as such with where it came from.
- Never publish undated. See above.
- Never use an interview to build an argument you did not know you were part of. If the piece changes shape after we speak, we come back and say so.
- Never publish what the Line says we never publish, whoever said it. That includes residential addresses, personal contact details and the names of family or staff, and it applies even when the interviewee volunteers them. What we won't publish about a business covers that list in full.
Withdrawing, before or after publication
Unconditional, in both directions of time.
Before publication: withdraw a quote or the whole piece, no reason required. We will ask once whether you are sure, because occasionally people withdraw over something we can fix. Then we accept it and stop.
After publication: ask for it to be taken down and it comes down. No reason required, no attempt to talk you out of it, no waiting period, no editorial argument about the merit of the piece. The route is request removal, the same free and immediate route that applies to a register entry.
A piece someone regrets is not worth keeping, whatever we think of it as writing. That has a real cost, since a publication that can be unpublished on request is one that loses work, and it is a cost we would rather carry than acquire the habit of arguing with people about their own words.
What we pay, and what we ask for
We do not pay for interviews.
We also do not ask for anything in return. No link back, no badge, no mention, no share, no reciprocal anything, no submission to the register, no favour later. Nothing is expected and nothing is implied.
Both halves matter. A publication that pays has to say so. A publication that asks for a link in exchange has arranged a trade and should say that too. This one does neither, and if either ever changes, this page and the stories page say so before the first piece affected by it runs.
In Plain English
What it means. Interviews and listings are separate systems with no route between them. You see your quotes before publication and can change or remove any of them. Every quote carries the date it was said. Nobody, and no software, rewrites your words. You can withdraw at any point, before or after, without giving a reason. We do not pay and we ask for nothing.
Who it helps. Anyone deciding whether to talk to a publication they do not know, and anyone weighing up whether an interview is a disguised transaction.
When to use it. Read it before answering the first question, not after. That is why it is here before any interview exists.
What to do next. Nothing, unless somebody asks you. If they do, this page is what you hold them to, and the stories page is where the same terms live permanently.
Common questions
Why publish an interview policy before doing any interviews?
So the terms are not being explained by the person who wants the interview, at the moment they want it. A policy written in advance has no particular conversation to protect.
Can I ask to be interviewed?
You can. There is no queue to move up, because there is not one, and asking has no effect on register consideration in either direction.
What if I say something I regret?
Correct it when you see the quotes, or withdraw it later. Neither requires a reason and neither will be argued with beyond a single question about whether you are sure.
Would a model ever touch my words?
No. Drafting elsewhere on this site is AI-assisted and disclosed. Quoted words are handled by a person at every stage.
Is anonymity actually available?
Yes, where being named would cost someone something. We would rather run a piece without a name than not run it, and much rather that than run it and cause somebody a problem.
Read what we refuse to publish
The interview rules above are a specific case of a general list. The Line is the permanent record of what this site will not publish and why, including the parts that apply whether or not anybody agreed to them in an interview.