Sourcing standards

Order of preference

1. Official records: state WARN notices and logs, SEC filings, court and government records.
2. The employer’s own words: press releases, published statements, memos the company has made public.
3. Established news organizations that attribute the figures they report.

When a better source appears later (for example, a WARN notice after a news report), we add it and, if the facts differ, follow the better source and say so.

What we do not use

• Other layoff trackers, aggregators or social posts as the source of a fact. They can point us to a story; they cannot be the evidence for it.
• Unverified screenshots, rumors or anonymous posts.
• Anonymous human sources. If a news outlet relies on unnamed people, we say so plainly and attribute the claim to that outlet.

Attribution and links

• Every story lists its sources, with the publisher, the publication date and the date we accessed it.
• We link directly to the original document, not to a copy, wherever the original is public.
• Quotations are short, exact and attributed.

Numbers

We report the number the source gives, with the source’s own qualifier (“about”, “up to”, “more than”). We never estimate a count that a source has not given, and we never turn a percentage into a head count unless the source does. See how we count.

Images

We publish only images we have the right to use, always with a credit. An illustrative image is labeled as illustrative and is never presented as showing the event in the story. Today, most of our art is typographic and generated from our own data.

AI and automation

Software, including AI tools, helps us find and check sources and draft standard sentences from facts we have verified. It is never the source of a fact. See how we use AI.

Independence

We do not accept payment to add, remove or change a story. Employers may send corrections with evidence through our corrections process, like anyone else.