Frequently Asked Questions

We consider Europe to be all members of the Council of Europe plus all countries west of the Ural and north of the Mediterranean.

We support the choice of some media to use paywalls to pay their journalists and be less dependent on advertising revenue. If we link to an article behind a paywall that means we find the article valuable. If that medium gets a new subscriber we consider that a win.

Credibility, reliability and quality are important to us. We do not use AI to find, analyse, or produce any of the content we publish. We do not link to articles that are noticeably produced by AI.

We use intermediate pages to send higher quality previews to social media. Your browser should be redirected to the original link in a second. Using that intermediate page allows us to create more appropriate previews for all different types of social media.

• We don’t publish headlines only so we have more space for clarity.
• It allows us to add some context to an article for a foreign audience.
• It allows us to create valuable and descriptive Alt Text for images, for instance for people using screen readers.
• It allows us to credit all authors of the article, not just the main author.
• It allows us to credit the photographer or illustrator where possible.

General criteria

Geography

The source medium we link to needs to be based in Europe. Very occasionally we may make an exception for non-European owned media that have a significant reporting operation based in Europe and publish quality articles relevant to Europe.

Track record

Any source needs to have been publishing for at least one year so we can review their track record before we consider it a source.

News and analysis media criteria

Any potential news and analysis source is immediately disqualified if it:

• appears on the Wikipedia’s list of Potentially Unreliable Sources
• is rated less than ‘Generally reliable’ on Wikipedia’s list of Reliable sources
• scores below ‘Generally Credible’ at NewsGuard's Website Rating Process and Criteria

We consider it a plus if a medium is a member or partner of one or more of the following initiatives:

• the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI)
• The Trust Project
• the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN)
• the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)

Fact Checker criteria

Any source that we recognise as a Fact Checker needs to meet the following requirements:

• it needs to be recognised by the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO)
• it needs to adhere to the European Code of Standards for Independent Fact-Checking Organisations maintained by the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN) and/or the Code of Principles of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN)