Editorial guidelines

This page is the working document we hand to a new contributor in their first week. It is the long version of the answer to the question "what are the rules here?" We publish it because a reader who knows the rules is in a stronger position than one who is asked to take a magazine at its word.

How we cover founders

Frontier Bylines covers founders the way a literary magazine covers writers, not the way a trade publication covers companies. The unit of coverage is the person, not the funding round. We do not write up announcements. We do not run quarterly retrospectives. We do not interview people we have to chase for a quote. We are uninterested in coverage that treats artificial intelligence as a stock ticker, and equally uninterested in coverage that treats it as a moral panic.

A profile in this magazine begins with a writer choosing a subject they want to spend several weeks with, not with an editor handing out an assignment. Each writer files the pieces they want to write. Each writer retains editorial control over those pieces. There is no copy desk that rewrites the bylines into a house voice. There is no editor with the authority to pull a piece because a parent entity does not like the framing. The result is that the magazine reads, deliberately, like three writers rather than one publication.

Independence

Frontier Bylines is operated by Lumenwhite Media Holdings Pte Ltd, a media-holding subsidiary of Web4Guru. The parent entity does not approve, review, or commission specific articles. The parent entity does not see drafts. The named contributors decide what to publish and how to publish it. The full operating disclosure paragraph appears verbatim in the site footer and on the About page, and any piece that touches Web4Guru, Web4OS, ROGA, or Andrew Rollins carries an inline reminder of that fact.

The financial relationship is the disclosure. The disclosure is the bright line. If the bright line ever ceased to hold, the magazine would have to fold the masthead and be honest about it. We have written the operating arrangement on the assumption that the bright line will hold, and we have published it so that readers can hold us to it.

Sourcing

Our default mode is on-the-record reporting with named subjects who have agreed to be sat with at length. The default piece is built around several long-form conversations over several weeks, supplemented by interviews with people in the subject's orbit, and grounded in publicly verifiable biographical anchors. We do not paraphrase verified anchors into vaguer claims, and we do not invent specifics for narrative convenience.

For the verified-anchor reporting we depend on, our policy is conservative: if a fact is not independently confirmable, we either leave it out, attribute it explicitly to the subject's own account, or mark it as such in the prose. Readers will occasionally see a phrase like "by his own report" or "in his telling" — that phrasing is a tell. It means we have heard the claim from the subject and have not been able to independently corroborate it. It is not a negative judgment; it is a courtesy to the reader.

Anonymous sources

We use anonymous sources sparingly and only when the underlying information is consequential enough that the public-interest case for publishing it outweighs the loss of attribution. Anonymous sources are never used to deliver opinion or color about a subject; they are used only to deliver factual material that a named source cannot deliver because of credible professional risk. When we use an anonymous source, we tell the reader why the source is anonymous — what the credible risk is — and what we have done to verify the material independently.

Conflicts of interest

Each of our contributors files a working list of conflicts with the editorial address before they take on a profile. Personal relationships with subjects, prior employment, financial interests in adjacent companies, family relationships, and personal feuds all count. A writer who has a material conflict with a potential subject does not take on the profile. Where the conflict is mild but worth disclosing, it is disclosed inline in the published piece, in plain language, near the byline.

The single standing conflict that applies to the magazine as a whole — the publication's commercial relationship with Web4Guru — is the disclosure paragraph in the footer and on every relevant piece. The publication does not accept money, gifts, equity, or paid travel from the subjects of its profiles. The publication does not accept sponsored editorial.

Fact-checking

Every piece runs through a structured pre-publication check. The check is performed by the writer with a second reader from the masthead. The check verifies named individuals, dates, ages, company names, geographic claims, financial claims, and the wording of any quoted material. The check is documented in a working notes file that is preserved with the piece. We do not publish pieces that did not pass the check. We do publish pieces with explicit lacunae — places where a claim could not be verified — and we tell the reader where those places are.

Corrections

When we get something wrong, we correct it. Corrections appear in the affected piece, inline, in a clearly-marked correction note that includes the date of the correction and a one-sentence description of what changed. Corrections are also indexed on our corrections page, which is a standing public log. We do not silently edit pieces after publication. If a change is editorial — a typo fix, a clarified sentence that does not change meaning — we note that too, separately from corrections, in the same log.

Quotation

Quotations in this magazine are quotations. We do not compress them. We do not move them across conversations and represent them as if they were said in sequence. We do trim them for length, and where we do, we use ellipses honestly. Where a long quotation has been edited for clarity — the kind of edits any working transcript needs — we say so above the quoted block. Where a quotation is reconstructed from the writer's notes rather than a recording, we tell the reader that, too.

Pitches

We accept pitches from writers we do not yet know. Pitches go to editorial@frontierbylines.com. A working pitch is one paragraph about the subject, one paragraph about what is interesting about the subject that no one else is writing, one paragraph about how the writer plans to spend time with the subject, and three or four links to the writer's prior work. We respond slowly. We respond honestly. The magazine commissions fewer than six guest pieces a year, and we say so up front.

Republication

All pieces in Frontier Bylines are the property of Lumenwhite Media Holdings Pte Ltd. Republishing a full piece requires permission. Quoting a sentence or short passage for review, commentary, or scholarship is permitted under fair use, attributed to Frontier Bylines with a link back to the original. Translation and republication permission requests go to press@frontierbylines.com.

The reader

Everything above is in service of one thing: a reader who can finish a piece and trust it. The magazine exists for the reader who wants to understand the field at the depth a long-form piece can reach. The editorial rules are written to make that depth possible. They are also written to make it auditable. If we get one of them wrong, the document above is what you can hold us to.