About Us
What AKRON SCORE is
AKRON SCORE is an independent general-news publication. We cover the world as it moves: business and the economy, politics and world affairs, science, health, technology, entertainment and sport. We write for an English-speaking audience that is spread across time zones and does not want the day filtered through any single capital’s assumptions. The name is a masthead, not a place. What holds the operation together is a way of working, not a postcode.
We are a small independent editorial team, and we have kept it that way on purpose. There is no media conglomerate above us, no founder with a second career in politics, and no investor whose other holdings we would have to tiptoe around. That size costs us reach and it buys us something we value more, which is the freedom to publish a story on the day it is true rather than the day it is convenient.
How we decide what to cover
A general-news site can chase everything and end up reporting nothing well. We try to resist that. The question we ask before a story goes on the list is not whether it will travel, but whether a reader who acts on it will be better off for having read us rather than the loudest account of the same event. That filter pushes us toward stories where the facts are checkable and away from the ones that are only ever opinion wearing a headline.
Breaking news is where a newsroom either earns trust or spends it. When a story is still moving, the temptation is to publish the biggest version of it first and reconcile with the facts later. We do the opposite. We would rather be second with the correct number than first with a figure we cannot stand behind an hour later. How that discipline works in practice is set out in our fact-checking policy, and what we do when we still get it wrong is in our corrections policy.
The line between news and opinion
We report and we also comment, and we do not let the two blur into each other. A news report tells you what happened and attributes every claim in it. A column tells you what one writer makes of what happened, and it is labelled so you are never in doubt about which you are reading. Analysis sits between the two, and where we run it, it is built on reporting rather than on mood. The full account of how we separate these registers is in our editorial standards.
We think readers are perfectly capable of handling opinion when it announces itself. What insults them is opinion smuggled in as fact, or a headline that takes a side the story underneath never earns. We treat the headline as part of the report and hold it to the same standard, because for most readers the headline is the only part they will ever see.
Where our money comes from, and why that matters here
AKRON SCORE is free to read and paid for by advertising, with occasional clearly labelled sponsored content and, where we use them, affiliate links. We say this on an about page rather than burying it, because how a publication is funded shapes what it can afford to say. Ours is a model with a known weakness, which is the pull of the advertiser, and we manage that weakness with rules rather than good intentions. The full picture is on our ownership and funding page, and the rules advertisers agree to are on our advertise page.
The short version is that no advertiser sees a story before it publishes, no advertiser is promised coverage or protected from it, and a company that buys space here is reported on exactly as it would be if it had never sent us a cent. When a business we cover is also a customer, the story says so.
Who we write for
Our reader is curious, pressed for time, and sceptical of being sold to. They may open a market story before work in one country and a science story after dinner in another. We do not assume they share a nationality, a politics or a religion, and we try not to write as though they do. That is why our world coverage does not treat any one country as the default centre of events, and why we spell out context that a local outlet could take for granted.
We also assume our reader will check us. That assumption is healthy. Everything we publish carries its sources where we can show them, so that the reader who wants to go past our summary to the document underneath can do so.
How to reach us, and how to hold us to this
The fastest way to make this publication better is to tell us when we have fallen short of what this page promises. If a report is wrong, if a headline oversells, if a sponsored post is not clearly marked, write to support@akronscore.org and say so plainly. Every route to the newsroom, and what to put in the subject line, is on our contact page.
A page like this is easy to write and hard to live up to. The measure of AKRON SCORE is not the promises on this page but whether the reporting keeps them on an ordinary day, under deadline, when a story is moving faster than anyone would like. That is where we ask to be judged.
