Uncut Poppy Back to the magazine
The rules we work to

Editorial standards

Every publication claims to have standards, and most of them turn out to mean a style guide with a view on the Oxford comma. These are the decisions we made in advance, on a quiet day, so that when a story gets difficult or a subject gets upset or somebody offers us money, we are not working out what we believe at eleven at night.

Version 1.0 Published by Annette Densham / ABN 82 941 971 960 Review: annually
01

What we are

Uncut Poppy is a magazine rather than a platform, which sounds like a distinction only publishers care about and is in fact the whole thing. Nobody publishes here directly. Every piece is chosen, edited and stood behind by an editor, and if something in it is wrong then that is our problem before it is the writer's.

It matters legally and it matters to you as a reader, because it means there is someone to hold responsible and it means a story appearing here comes with an implied promise. Somebody checked this.

02

What earns a place

A story gets in on four things, and on nothing else whatsoever.

What does not get a story in: your status, your follower count, your funding round, your book launch, or the fact that we get on well. If a piece would only interest people who already know the subject then it is not a story, it is a press release with feelings.

03

What we verify

If a reader could act on it, or somebody could be hurt by it being wrong, we check it before it goes anywhere near the site.

Where we cannot verify something the story depends on, we either make plain that this is the subject's account of it or we do not run the piece. What we do not do is split the difference with vague wording and hope nobody looks too closely.

04

What subjects can expect

People hand us their stories, and often the ones they have not told anybody. The least we can do is be clear about what happens next before the interview starts, rather than after it, when clarity is a good deal less useful.

You get

  • To know the angle before you talk
  • Your direct quotes read back for accuracy
  • Factual corrections made, always
  • To decline any question
  • To set something off the record before you say it
  • A publication date, or an honest no

You do not get

  • Copy approval over the finished piece
  • Control of the headline or the framing
  • Removal of accurate material you regret
  • A veto on other people's accounts
  • Retrospective off the record after publication
  • A guarantee of publication

The line between checking your quotes and approving the article is where this whole thing lives or dies. We will read your words back so we know we have them right. We will not send you the finished piece for sign-off, because the moment a subject can edit the conclusions the magazine stops being journalism and becomes a service you bought.

05

Money, and what it buys

We publish commissioned profiles and we say so loudly, because the alternative is pretending we do not, and readers work that out eventually and never quite forgive it.

Payment buys

  • Production: interviews, writing, photography, video
  • Placement and a publication date
  • Professional craft applied to your story
  • Factual accuracy checked properly

Payment never buys

  • A predetermined conclusion
  • Removal of inconvenient facts
  • Publication of unverified claims
  • Control of the headline or the ending
  • The removal of the disclosure label
06

Conflicts of interest

This is the sharpest risk we carry, so here it is in plain sight rather than buried where we could argue we had mentioned it.

The standing declaration

Uncut Poppy's editor also runs Award Writing Services, a business that writes award submissions and builds profiles for clients. Some people who appear in this magazine may be, may have been, or may become clients of that business.

Where that is the case, it is disclosed on the article itself. Not in a policy page nobody reads. On the piece.

A magazine run by somebody in the visibility business is going to be read with a raised eyebrow by anyone paying attention, and rightly so. The only answer that holds up over time is to disclose more than anybody expects and to keep doing it on the days it is inconvenient.

07

Difficult stories

We run stories about illness, grief, caring for someone, money running out, being dismissed by a doctor and businesses going under. Those come with obligations that a cheerful profile about a growing company does not.

08

How we use AI

Every publisher is using it and pretending otherwise fools nobody, so here is exactly where the line sits.

09

Images

10

Credit and links

Writers get their name on their work, and that name links to their LinkedIn profile so a reader who finishes a piece and wants to find them can do it in one click.

11

Corrections

We will get things wrong, because everybody does. The measure of a publication is not whether it makes mistakes but what it does in the twenty-four hours after somebody points one out.

12

What we will not publish

13

Inherited work

Some of what is on this site was published under different ownership and a different set of rules, mostly written by the people it is about rather than reported by us. Pretending otherwise would be a strange way to open a page about honesty.

Hold us to it

Think we have broken one?

Tell us which one and what happened. Anything about accuracy, disclosure or how somebody was treated goes straight to the editor and gets an answer inside five working days. Being unhappy with what a story concluded is not a complaint so much as a disagreement, and we are perfectly comfortable having those in public.

We look at these once a year, and rewrite them whenever we find a gap the hard way, which is usually how gaps get found. The version at the top tells you which one you are looking at.

Contact the editor