Editorial policy

This page describes how 120sec decides what to show and how we handle the things we are not sure about.

Mission and coverage priorities

Our job is to let a reader in the United Kingdom understand the day in two minutes. We prioritise stories by what people are actually searching for and reading, not by what is loudest. We do not cover health, personal finance, elections or crime as separate beats: those need depth we do not offer, and we would rather send you to the specialists.

Sourcing and verification

Every brief is written from one or more named publications and links to them. Before a brief is published, an automated check confirms that every number, name and date in it appears in the source reporting; a brief that fails the check is not published. A share of published briefs is re-read by a person.

Unnamed sources

We do not use unnamed sources. We do not do original reporting; we summarise reporting that other publications have put their name to, and we name them.

AI assistance

We use AI tooling to draft briefs and headlines from source text. A brief cannot contain anything that is not in the sources, and the verification step above is enforced in software, not by habit. Responsibility for what appears here is ours, not a model's.

Headlines

A headline states what happened. No questions, no teasers, no outrage bait, nothing the story does not deliver. Where we show a publication's own headline, it is theirs and labelled with their name.

What we will not do

• Republish an article or reproduce more than a short quoted phrase.
• Make a claim about a named living person that the sources do not make.
• Backdate or re-date a story, or update a date without changing the story.
• Present a summary as original reporting.
• Accept payment for coverage.

Independence

Advertising is served programmatically and has no influence on what we show. If that ever changes, this page changes first.