What you can hold us to
Publishing about the subject without saying how you work is asking for trust you have not earned. This is how we work.
Standards
Sourcing, checking, bylines, dates and commercial links, set out so you can judge what you read on Committee of 500 Years.
Publishing about the subject without saying how you work is asking for trust you have not earned. This is how we work.
We do not plan an editorial calendar. Articles appear when a question has come up often enough to be worth answering properly.
Bylines are real people with real archives attached. If you disagree with a piece, you can see what else the same person has written and judge accordingly.
James Reed, Indigenous history and policy writer. James has written about Indigenous history, land rights and policy for over a decade. He focuses on the long arc of colonisation and its continuing effects on Native communities across North America.
Sarah Okafor, Advocacy and rights writer. Sarah covers Indigenous rights movements, treaty law and political advocacy. She has reported on campaigns from Standing Rock to mascot reform and writes about the practical work of building coalitions.
Michael Clark, Culture and education writer. Michael writes about Indigenous culture, language revitalisation and community education. He approaches every subject from the perspective of what understanding costs and what it makes possible.
A draft goes through four hands worth of work. The writer separates what they know from what they assume. The assumptions are either checked against something nameable or deleted. What is left gets written up. Then a second person reads it looking only for overconfidence, which is the failure this subject invites most.
Published means published. We do not bump dates to look active, and an edit only changes the modified date when it changes what the article actually tells you to do.
A minority of outbound links are commercial. None of them have ever changed a sentence that was written before the link existed.
Requests to soften a verdict are declined, and we keep them on file. More than one has become the subject of its own paragraph later.
Send the page and the problem to [email protected]. Typos are fixed silently. Facts are fixed quickly. Conclusions that turn out to be wrong are corrected in the open, with a note saying what we previously said.