Advertising and sponsored content disclosure policy

Most of what Wall Street Ledger publishes is independent reporting produced by the desk. A small amount is not. Anything in the second category carries a labelled disclosure box directly above its headline, on the article page itself, naming the relationship in plain language.

If an article has no disclosure box, no money or affiliation was involved in its publication.

Company Spotlight. A profile of a company that is affiliated with this publication, or whose coverage was arranged commercially. The article is built from material the company has published or supplied, it is not independently verified, and the company's own performance figures are attributed to the company rather than stated as fact.

Sponsored. A placement paid for by an advertiser. Same handling as above.

No label. Independent newsroom reporting. Section names such as Markets or Fintech are navigation, not disclosures.

A visible label is the minimum. On its own it can still be undermined by the machine-readable signals a site sends out, so labelled articles are also handled differently in four ways.

They are excluded from our Google News sitemap, which is reserved for editorial content. Submitting commercial placements as news would misrepresent them to an audience that never sees our markup.

Their structured data declares the sponsorship. The article's schema.org record names the sponsor and repeats the disclosure, so we are not telling search engines "independent news article" while telling readers something else.

Outbound links to the subject are marked rel="sponsored nofollow", so they pass no search ranking credit. Selling ranking signals without marking them is against search engine guidelines and, more to the point, is a way of being paid to distort results.

The byline reads Partner Content rather than a reporter's name, and the source list is headed "Company material cited" instead of "Reporting drawn from".

Advertisers and affiliated companies have no input into independent coverage: not into whether a story runs, what it says, or when it publishes. Commercial relationships do not suppress reporting either. If a company that pays us becomes the subject of a news story, the story runs on the same terms as any other, and the relationship is disclosed inside it.

Sponsored articles cannot be presented without a label, cannot use a staff reporter's byline, and cannot state unverified performance claims as established fact. Where a sponsor's figures are self-reported, the article says so.

We do not accept placements for products we believe cannot be described accurately to readers, and the editor in chief can refuse or withdraw any placement.

Wall Street Ledger does not currently run affiliate links. If that changes, the arrangement will be disclosed on the article carrying them and this policy will be updated before the first one publishes.

If you think something commercial went out unlabelled, or a label was not prominent enough, tell us and we will correct it and log the change. See corrections for how that process works, or contact the desk directly.