Editorial standards

Editorial decisions are made by our newsroom and our editor, Bill Alena. No advertiser, sponsor, listed company or investor has approval rights over what we publish, when we publish it or how a story is framed, and none sees a story before publication.

DII is published by High Intent Media Inc. Its owners are connected to businesses in the industry we cover: Venntro, Fortitude, DatingAPI, WhichDating, Smooch and WhiteLabelDating. A story that mentions one of them says so in the story itself, and it is held for the editor rather than published automatically. We do not use DII to promote them. The detail is on our ownership and funding page.

• Every factual claim is attributed: to a named person, a primary document, filed accounts, a regulator or a court.
• Results for listed companies come from their filings and earnings releases. Figures for private companies are given with their source and date.
• Regulatory and legal claims are checked against the legislation, the regulator's decision or the court record.
• Where no original document exists or can be read, such as a private analyst note or a court filing that is not online, a story may rest on the reporting of a major news organisation (for example Reuters, Bloomberg or the Financial Times). The story names that outlet and keeps its claims attributed. A lead with neither an original document nor credible reporting behind it is dropped.
• The sources for each story are listed with it, so readers, and the search and AI tools that cite us, can check them.

Where a company has responded publicly to something we report, we include its response. Anyone named in a story can reply by writing to the editor, and a substantive reply is added to the story.

DII's newsroom uses AI at each stage of a news story, under rules that do not change:

1. Finding. It watches company press rooms, SEC filings, regulators, courts, wires and the trade press, and searches the web every two hours for new developments.
2. Reading at source. Before anything is written, it reads the original documents, or, where none can be read, a major news organisation's own reporting, which the story then names. A lead with neither is dropped.
3. Drafting. It drafts the story from those documents, in our house style.
4. Checking. A separate check compares every figure, name and date in the draft with the documents. It corrects what it can and holds back what it cannot confirm.
5. Publishing or holding. A story that passes is published with its sources. One the check is unsure of, or that mentions a business connected to our owners, waits for the editor.

AI is never used to invent a quote, a source or a figure. Every quote and figure must appear in a source we link to. The editor is responsible for everything DII publishes, whichever route it took.

News stories say what happened and why it matters to people in the business. Where a piece is analysis or opinion, it is labelled as such. Our headlines are direct, and a headline must be supported by the story under it. We write in British English.

We prefer named sources. We grant anonymity only when a source would face professional or legal risk if named, when the information matters to the public or the industry, and when it can be corroborated. The story says why the source was not named.

Story photos are licensed stock photography, chiefly from Pexels, or images supplied by the company concerned and credited to it. A stock photo illustrates a story; it does not show the people or events in it unless the caption says so. We do not present AI-generated images as photographs of real events.

DII does not publish sponsored articles at present. If it does, each will be labelled "Sponsored" at the top, kept out of our news feeds, and its links marked as sponsored. Our newsroom will not write it, and a sponsor will get no say over our news coverage.

When we get something wrong we correct it on the story and add a dated note at the foot saying what was wrong. If the headline or the top of the story changes, the note is mentioned there too. Every correction is listed in our corrections log.

Email hello@datingindustryinsights.com about anything on this page. To send us news, see send us news; for interviews and media requests, see press.