Editorial policy
The Podium Post covers individual sports and the athletes, coaches and founders in them. This page explains how we work, so readers can judge what they read here.
Our standards
- Accuracy first. Every factual claim is checked against a source: official results, an organiser’s statement, a published report, or the person we’re writing about. If we can’t verify something, we attribute it (“she said”) or leave it out.
- Attribution. We say where information comes from and link to it when we can.
- Fairness. We don’t publish claims about people we can’t support, and we don’t use anonymous sources for personal criticism.
- Clear sourcing for news. When we report news first published elsewhere, we write it in our own words, build on at least two sources where possible, add context of our own, and list the sources at the end of the article. We don’t copy other publications’ text or photos.
Sponsored content
Some articles on The Podium Post are paid for by the person or brand featured. We call these sponsored features.
- Every sponsored feature carries a “Sponsored” label above the headline, a note at the top naming who paid for it, and the same label wherever it appears on the site.
- All sponsored features are also listed in one place: Sponsored features.
- Links in sponsored features are marked as sponsored (
rel="sponsored"), so they pass no search-ranking value. - Sponsored features are written by our team to our house style. The subject can check facts, but we keep final say over the wording, and we don’t publish claims we can’t support.
- Payment buys a feature article. It does not buy positive coverage elsewhere on the site, awards, rankings, or a place in editorial lists such as Ones to Watch, which are chosen by our editors and never sold.
Find out how to get featured.
How we use AI
We use AI tools in our newsroom. They help us research public information, draft questionnaires, transcribe answers, and produce first drafts of articles.
Every article is reviewed by a member of our editorial team before it is published. That review checks facts against sources, removes anything we can’t verify, and confirms that sponsored features are labelled correctly. AI tools do not decide what we publish.
We don’t use AI to invent quotes, people, results or events. Quotes in our features come from the person quoted, in their own written or recorded answers.
Bylines
Rachel Thornton is a house byline used by The Podium Post’s editorial team, a long-standing practice in publishing. Articles under this name are produced by our team, with the AI assistance described above, and reviewed before publication. The illustrated portrait on her author page is an illustration, not a photograph.
Images
We use photos supplied by the people we feature (with their permission), official media images with credit, our own images, or licensed stock. We credit images where the photographer is known.
Corrections
We correct errors promptly and say so at the bottom of the article. See our corrections policy.
Contact
Story tips and questions: editor@thepodiumpost.com.