Foundry’s B2B editorial team serves a global audience of enterprise IT leaders and professionals. We produce timely and relevant news, insightful analysis and opinion, detailed how-tos, and deeply reported feature stories to help these sophisticated readers make informed technology purchasing decisions and run efficient, effective, and innovative IT organizations.
While most of what is outlined here is considered good practice for all content-creators, this policy applies specifically to the English language editorial staff and freelance contributors who write for CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. We believe they are fundamental to maintaining editorial independence and journalistic integrity.
We adhere to ASBPE’s Code of Journalism Ethics, and that document is worth reading in its entirety. Following are some key points that define our editorial approach.
In brief:
- The editorial staff is solely responsible for making decisions about editorial coverage. We do not give preferential treatment to advertisers, partners, or sources.
- We do not allow stories to be reviewed prior to publication by sources, PR or marketing reps, etc. We do allow sources to review quotes for accuracy.
- We don’t accept any gifts of significance from any party outside of Foundry.
- Editorial staff should not invest in individual stocks of companies they cover.
The Foundry employee handbook outlines specific rules around stock ownership. - Freelance and other contributors of editorial content must clearly disclose within the body of their articles anything that might bias their perspective (for example, prior employment with a company that is the subject of an article).
- Sources are assumed to be on the record unless other arrangements are explicitly agreed to in advance. For further details, see the section on “Anonymous sources“ below.
- When a factual correction needs to be made to an article, the editor will update the article online and include a brief note explaining what was corrected. Minor wording changes, spelling corrections, or changes to job titles and the like do not need to be noted.
- We do not publish AI-generated articles under the guise of journalism. We do use AI tools to aid our work.
Conflicts of interest
Gifts. Foundry employees are prohibited from accepting any gifts of significance from any party outside of Foundry. T-shirts, mugs, chocolate, lunch, drinks, shrimp at the buffet are fair game. But any gift worth more than $100 must be declined, as per company policy.
We may borrow products to write about them, photograph them, or shoot them in videos. If a reporter acquires any product in this way, they must inform their editor and they must pre-arrange with the vendor involved exactly how and when the product will be returned.
Stock ownership. Company policy requires all employees to notify HR if they or any member of their immediate family own any non-public or publicly traded interest in any business that they are aware is a competitor of, supplier to, or advertiser or other type of customer of Foundry. As a prerequisite to employment or continued employment, staff members may be asked that any such shares be divested in situations in which such ownership may conflict with the Foundry’s interests. Employees may not accept or purchase “Friends & Family” shares or options from Foundry clients or vendors.
Anonymous sources
Reporters should make every effort to obtain information from sources on the record, that is, the source agrees to be fully identified in having information attributed to him or her. When we cannot obtain that agreement from a source, we must in each case agree explicitly to the terms under which the source is agreeing to speak with us: If a source uses shorthand such as “on background” or even “off the record,” it is the reporter’s responsibility to define exactly what that means to the source.
When an anonymous source is used, the reporter must make clear the level of confidentiality they are promising, that is, that the source will not be named in the article, but the journalist must tell their editor. We cannot promise anonymous sources that their identity will never be revealed because we do not have the power to do so.
Information from anonymous sources should meet the following criteria:
- It is factual. Speculation and opinion must always be attributed to a named source. (When gathering opinionated comments from users, reporters can only use those from people willing to let us print at least their name and title and describe the company they work for: “said Joe Smith, IS manager at a Michigan auto parts manufacturer”.)
- It is essential to the story and there is no way to get the information elsewhere on the record.
- The source has first-hand knowledge of the information.
- We can explain in the story why the source cannot be named and what promises we may have made to the source for him/her to disclose the information.
Use of AI in editorial
Foundry does not use AI to do the work of trained reporters and editors. Passing off someone else’s work as your own, even if that someone else is AI, is considered plagiarism.
This does not mean there is no place for AI in editorial.
Foundry editorial staff today may use such tools to aid initial research, for brainstorming interview questions, to record and transcribe interviews, for translation, for basic grammar and spelling checks, and similar aspects of editorial work. AI tools may also be used when writing about AI tools. A story about how to use Microsoft Copilot, for example, wouldn’t be very useful if the author hadn’t actually used Microsoft Copilot.
In addition, AI is used today in certain derivative works (summaries, collections, video transcripts, social media promotions, and the like), all reviewed by humans and disclosed as being AI-generated.