Writing a Methodology Panel Four Newsrooms Can Sign

Every joint project at Montrex carries a methodology panel — a short, plainly written statement of how the reporting was done, signed by every partner newsroom involved. It sounds like a formality until you try to write one with four editors who have never worked together and each bring a slightly different definition of "confirmed."

The panel for a recent regional health-supply investigation took longer to draft than any single section of the story itself. One newsroom's standard required two independent sources for any factual claim about a named individual. Another worked from a single-source threshold when the source held documentary proof. Neither was wrong, but the piece needed one shared rule, not four.

Finding the common floor

Rather than asking any newsroom to abandon its own standard, the editors settled on a floor: whatever the joint piece asserted had to meet the strictest of the four thresholds already in use. That meant a few claims that would have run under a looser house standard were softened to reflect what could be jointly supported, and everyone accepted the trade.

• Two independent sources, or one source with primary documentation, for any factual claim.
• Named individuals given a right of reply before publication, tracked in the ledger.
• Any claim only one partner could verify flagged clearly as single-sourced within the piece.

Why the panel is published, not filed away

Once the standard was agreed, the harder question was whether to publish it. Some editors were used to keeping internal standards private. The eventual decision — to publish the panel alongside the story, signed by name — came from a simple argument: readers who could see exactly what standard a claim had to clear were more likely to trust the claim itself.

That panel now sits in the Montrex archive as a working template. Newer partner newsrooms joining a project don't start from a blank page; they start from a document that's already been tested and revised through disagreement, which tends to hold up better than one written in agreement from the start.