Corrections
We will get things wrong. What matters is what happens next.
The rule
Published history is not rewritten. A post people have already read stays where it is. Corrections are added, not applied retroactively, because a quietly edited post is a worse problem than the original error — it removes any way for a reader to know what they read.
What counts as what
Typo or formatting
A spelling slip, a broken line break, a wrong emoji.
Fixed in place where the platform allows it. No note.
Factual correction
A date, number, name or sequence is wrong.
The post is updated where the platform allows, with a visible note saying what changed. Where it cannot be edited, a reply or comment carries the correction.
Unsupported quote
Words attributed to a real person that we cannot trace to a source.
Treated as material. The quotation marks come off in all future use, and we say so. We do not delete the original.
Dynamic value moved
A valuation, price, headcount or spend figure has changed since publication.
Not a correction. The figure was true at its date and published with it. Future pieces use a current, dated figure.
Material error
The central claim of a piece does not hold.
A standalone correction is published on the same channel, and the piece is not re-run. If a follow-up is warranted, the correction is the follow-up.
This has already happened
One of our earliest posts told a well-known founder story. We went back and traced every number in it afterwards, and three of the four did not hold — including a line we had put inside quotation marks and attributed to a named person.
The original post is still up. We published the correction as its own piece, made the failure the subject rather than a footnote, and changed the process so the same class of error is caught before publication rather than after.
Telling us
If something here is wrong, reply to any post or to the newsletter. A correction with a source attached will always get a faster response than a correction without one — that is the same standard we hold ourselves to, described in how we source.