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Standards

Editorial Policy

Sourcing, checking, bylines, dates and commercial links, set out so you can judge what you read on Couch Box Sports.

What you can hold us to

This page describes how Couch Box Sports is made. It is here so that you can decide how much weight to give anything else on the site.

How we choose what to write

The list of what to cover writes itself from the inbox and from our own dead ends. When the same gap turns up a second or third time, it stops being a note and becomes an article.

Some links on this site are commercial. They never buy a rewrite of the surrounding paragraph.

Nobody has ever bought the removal of a fair criticism here, and the ones who try mostly hand us the material for the next article.

How we date articles

The date you see is real. A tidy up of wording leaves it alone; only a change to what the piece recommends moves the modified date, along with a note saying so.

From notes to published page

  • Dump first. Everything the writer believes goes down, unsorted.
  • Mark the soft parts. Anything held on memory rather than evidence gets flagged.
  • Check or cut. A flagged claim is either supported or removed. There is no third option.
  • Second reader. Somebody else hunts for sentences that sound more certain than the evidence allows.

Accountability

We attach a person to every article on purpose. It means a mistake costs the writer something, which is the strongest quality control a site this size has.

Dwayne Pruitt, NBA and fantasy writer. Dwayne has run the same fantasy league with friends since college and still argues about every trade.

Hollis Garner, Football editor. Hollis grew up on Sunday double headers and writes about football strategy without the jargon.

Teddy Okonjo, Sports gaming writer. Teddy plays every new sports title on release week and compares the virtual game with the real one.

How mistakes are handled

Send the page and the problem to info@cbstvsports.com. Typos are fixed silently. Facts are fixed quickly. Conclusions that turn out to be wrong are corrected in the open, with a note saying what we previously said.