How we work

What we cover

Technology in Alberta and, where it bears on Alberta, across Canada. In practice that means artificial intelligence and the data centre buildout, startups and scaleups, energy and oil and gas technology, clean technology, agricultural technology, life sciences, robotics and advanced manufacturing, aerospace, cybersecurity, and the public programs and regulators shaping all of them.

We do not treat technology and energy as separate beats. In this province a story about compute is a story about electricity, and a story about electricity is a story about who pays for it. Coverage that separates the two tends to miss the actual constraint, which is why our data centre reporting spends as much time on interconnection queues as on chips.

We are a small publication and we would rather cover a narrow set of subjects properly than a wide set superficially. If a story requires expertise we do not have, we would rather point readers to whoever does have it than pretend otherwise.

Sourcing

Every article ends with the documents it was written from, listed in full rather than buried in a hyperlink. That list is not decoration. It is there so a reader can check our reading of a document against the document.

We prefer sources in roughly this order:

1. Primary regulatory and government documents. Interconnection queues, regulatory filings, legislation and regulation, published strategies, procurement records. These have the advantage of being produced by an institution with a duty to be accurate and a process for being challenged.
2. Company disclosures. Financial statements, prospectuses, formal announcements. Reliable about what a company has committed to, less reliable about what it expects.
3. Named expert comment. People with direct standing to speak on the subject, identified so readers can weigh who is speaking.
4. Reporting by other outlets. Used and credited by name where it is the origin of a fact. We do not present another newsroom’s work as our own, and we do not launder a single-source report into an established fact by omitting where it came from.

Verification

A figure reaches publication only if it can be traced to a named document or a named organisation. Where two credible sources disagree, we publish the disagreement and the range rather than picking the more dramatic number.

Where a claim is a projection, a target, a memorandum of understanding or an expression of interest rather than a committed and funded fact, the sentence carrying it says so. This is the single most common failure in technology coverage of Alberta, and it is the standard we most want to be held to.

When we cannot verify something, we say we cannot verify it. An article that reports an open question honestly is more useful than one that resolves it by guessing.

How we handle numbers

Most of what we cover is argued in figures, and figures are where readers are most often misled. Our rules:

• Announced is not committed. An announced capital figure is usually the full value of a site if built out over decades, underwritten by nobody at the time it is published. We report it as an announcement, with its timeframe, and we look for the numbers a third party had to agree to.
• Requested is not granted. Capacity requested from a regulator and capacity released by one are different quantities, frequently reported as though they were the same.
• Construction jobs are not operating jobs. Both are real; only one lasts. We separate them where a project reports a combined figure.
• Capital raised is an input. It measures money going in, not value coming out. We report it as a measure of investor conviction, not of company health.
• Units and baselines stated. A percentage without a baseline and a total without a period are not information.

How our work is labelled

• Analysis argues a position from sourced facts. The facts are checkable, the conclusion is ours, and you are entitled to reject it while accepting the evidence.
• Explainer sets out how a system, market, regulation or process works without arguing for an outcome.
• Market note gives context on listed companies and sectors. It is never investment advice and never a recommendation.

Our articles are researched and written from public documents and published reporting. Where we have not independently verified something ourselves, we do not write in a way that implies we have. Original reporting, when we do it, will be identifiable as such.

Language and framing

We try to write plainly and to avoid the vocabulary that makes technology coverage hard to evaluate. Revolutionary, game-changing, disruptive and world-class describe a writer’s enthusiasm rather than a company’s position, and they do not appear in our copy unless we are quoting someone.

We name the actor in a sentence. Concerns were raised and mistakes were made are constructions that conceal who did what, and we avoid them.

Technical terms are defined the first time they appear. A reader should not need a grid engineering background to follow a story about the grid, and a reader who has one should not find the explanation wrong.

Anonymous sources

We prefer named sources and will use an unnamed one only where the information is materially in the public interest, the person faces a real professional or legal risk in speaking, and the substance can be corroborated by a document or a second source.

Where we grant anonymity we say why in the article and describe the person’s standing as specifically as protection allows. We do not use anonymity to carry opinion, speculation or criticism of a competitor.

Writing about listed companies

Our market coverage exists to give context, not direction. We do not publish price targets, buy or sell language, or anything that could be read as a recommendation, and our market pages carry that statement plainly.

Market data on this site is supplied by a third-party provider and may be delayed. It is published for orientation, and readers should verify current prices and financial data against a licensed source before acting on anything.

The startup directory

Inclusion in our startup directory is editorial and free. Nobody pays to appear and nobody can pay to be removed. Each profile is a description written from public information, not an endorsement, and every entry links to the company’s own site so readers can go to the primary source.

Companies that have been acquired, merged or wound down stay listed with that outcome recorded. A directory that deletes companies when they stop being good news is not a record of anything.

Photography

Article photography is either openly licensed, supplied to us, or used with permission, and the credit and licence appear under the image. We do not use news agency or wire photography. We do not present illustrations or generated imagery as photographs of real events, and we do not alter the content of a photograph beyond cropping and standard tonal adjustment.

Company logos and product images in the startup directory remain the property of the companies concerned and are used to identify them.

Corrections

We correct errors in place and say what changed, with a dated note at the foot of the article. The full policy, including how to report an error and how each kind is handled, is on the corrections page.

Right of reply

If you are named in a story and believe it is inaccurate or incomplete, tell us. We will go back to the source documents, publish a correction where we got something wrong, and append your response where the disagreement is one of interpretation rather than fact.

We do not remove accurate reporting on request. Where a legal obligation requires a change, the page will record that a change was made.

Corrections policy →Contact the newsroom →About NorthwardAB →