Editorial standards

What we check before a story runs

Every story is placed on a four-step ladder before it is written, and the bottom two rungs do not get published as fact.

• Documented. A primary record exists: a court filing, a government record, a police statement, a peer-reviewed paper, an official announcement. We link it and write it plainly.
• Independently reported. Two or more credible outlets that are not copying each other, ideally including a local one. On a local story, local reporting outranks international aggregation every time.
• Single-source. One outlet or one first-hand account. This runs only when the article itself says so, in the body, naming who reported it and stating that we could not confirm it independently.
• Unverified. Viral posts, screenshots, someone's cousin who works there. Not publishable here, and not publishable with a disclaimer either. A disclaimer does not make an unverified claim true, it just moves the blame.

How we avoid printing satire as news

The single most common way a site like this embarrasses itself is repeating a joke that somebody else wrote. So before anything sourced from an aggregator or a forum gets written up, we open the original outlet rather than the thing quoting it, and we read its About page looking for the words satire, parody, or humor.

We check the date too. A story from years ago doing the rounds again is not news, and recirculated old reporting is the second most common trap after satire.

For a story from a non-English source we read the original-language report rather than a machine translation of the headline. Translated idioms are where most of the internet's strangest headlines actually come from, and they are usually mistranslations rather than events.

The people in the stories

Someone who did something odd is not a public figure, and being written about here is not something they signed up for.

• We follow the source on names. A private individual is named only if the primary source named them, and we never add identifying detail the source deliberately withheld. Minors are never named.
• Crime is reported as charged, not as done. We do not identify victims who are not already public, and we do not write about an ongoing case in language that presumes guilt.
• The joke is never the person. Nothing here is funny because of somebody's disability, poverty, grief, or death. A person having the worst day of their life is not material.
• Right of reply. If a piece is critical of a named private person, we try to reach them first, and the piece says that we did.

Writing about places we do not live in

Much of what we cover happens in countries most of our readers have never been to. This is where a weird-news site turns into a bad one, usually by treating somewhere else as inherently absurd rather than reporting what actually happened there.

So a story has to be strange on its own terms, not strange because it is foreign. We use local reporting where it exists, we name the place precisely rather than gesturing at a region, and we do not reach for the framing that makes a whole country the punchline.

Money and disclosure

If we have any relationship to something we are writing about, the piece says so. Sponsored content is labeled as sponsored, at the top, before you read it, and never as anything softer.

Nobody pays us for coverage that is not labeled. That is not a policy we would consider trading away for a good week.

Who owns this, and how it is paid for

Top Kek News is independently owned. There are no investors, no parent company, no grants, and no outside funding of any kind. Nobody outside this publication has a claim on what it covers or what it concludes.

The money comes from affiliate commissions on store links, and that is the whole of it. No display advertising, no sponsored posts, no paid placements, and no arrangement anywhere in which coverage is the product being sold.

This is worth saying plainly, because who pays for a publication is a fair thing to ask before trusting one, and on a beat built out of other people's strange days it is a fairer question than usual. Ours is short: readers who choose to buy something through a link, and nobody else.

Who writes this

Top Kek News publishes in a collective voice, so there is no byline on a story. The publication stands behind all of them rather than splitting responsibility between names.

That puts the weight of trust on the publication, which is why this page is written this plainly. If we fall short of any of it, tell us at contact@topkeknews.com and it becomes a correction rather than an argument.