1. Mission

The mission of Beehive News is to make rigorously crafted information easily available to the general public and financially sustainable to publishers. Our primary commitment is to provide accurate, fair, and impartial information to promote transparency, accountability, and informed decision-making through rigorous ratings and assessments, helping the public navigate complex and nuanced issues.

2. Independence, neutrality and non-partisanship

We maintain complete independence and neutrality. None of the shareholders, staff or wider team at Beehive News are affiliated with or acting on behalf of media conglomerates, the State, politicians, or political parties. Nor do they have any commercial, financial, or institutional relationships with them. Additionally, they do not engage in advocacy or take policy positions on issues that Beehive News assesses, ensuring our work is not perceived as potentially biased. Our decisions are guided solely by our mission and professional standards, ensuring the integrity and objectivity of our content.

3. Safeguards

• Governance: Every member of the team is independent, and has mechanisms to anonymously report ethical breaches, such as undue interference. Senior members of the team are also encouraged to participate in governance and decision-making, and are consulted on key business decisions.
• Conscience clause: Members of the team may refuse assignments that conflict with their professional integrity, without fear of reprisal.
• Accountability: Ratings and assessments are reviewed on a daily basis by the Ratings Auditing team. The Senior Members of the Ratings Auditing team are independent, non-UK nationals, with proven expertise in the fields of behavioural psychology and misinformation. Anyone can raise a complaint about those ratings and assessments, and those are published in the Complaints & Corrections section of the Beehive News website.
• Ratings transparency: The explanations behind each of our thousand in-depth daily ratings is easily available to the public, empowering readers to agree or disagree with the Beehive News conclusions.
• Management transparency: Names and roles of Beehive News senior members are listed publicly for transparency.
• Ownership transparency: Beehive News is an independent organisation registered under the Companies House of England and Wales 13450907, and has only one shareholder with more than 5% of equity: Rafael Cossi.
• Funding transparency: Beehive News discloses all funding sources and avoid conflicts of interest by maintaining independence from donors, sponsors, and advertisers. Beehive News is currently funded by its user subscriptions and shareholders. It can also provide marketing intelligence to publishers at a fee, in order to help them understand their performance and improve their journalistic standards.

4. Principles for ratings and assessments

Our ratings and assessments adhere to the following principles:

• Accuracy: The journalistic standards of each news article are rigorously assessed against an objective list of criteria, and any gaps are explicitly disclosed, explained and illustrated in assessments.
• Objectivity: Assessments are based on objective criteria which analyse the process and the form, rather than the content or the opinions in each news article. They are planned and coded in such manner that the article’s content (e.g. what the viewpoints are, or what the sources are) is less relevant than the article’s approach (e.g. whether it present opposing viewpoints, and the sources are appropriate primary sources). This ensures the results are entirely logical, unbiased and almost mathematical, free from the influence of potential personal or political biases of the humans behind the algorithms.
• Impartiality: The exact same rigorous and objective technology is applied to all article ratings and assessments, across political positionings and publications, ensuring they are free of political or ideological biases, fair and non-partisan. Beehive News rates all available articles of the assessed publications, ensuring no political, social, or commercial affiliations can influence the content that is assessed.
• Transparency: Criteria and reasoning are clearly explained, allowing readers to understand how conclusions were reached.
• Public feedback: Input from the Beehive News audience are welcome, including challenges to its findings. This can be done through the Smart Rating User system, the Feedback section of the app, or direct contact with the Beehive News team at info@beehive.news
• Accessibility: Reports are crafted in language that avoids sensationalism or bias and is not overly complex, ensuring clarity, objectivity and universal accessibility. Language use and excessive complexity are also key criteria in news articles’ ratings.
• Respect and dignity: Beehive News upholds respect and dignity in its assessments, particularly when addressing sensitive topics.
• Corrections: Errors are corrected transparently and promptly. A log of all corrections is maintained on our website for accountability in the Complaints & Corrections section of the Beehive News website.

5. Ethical standards

We adhere to the highest ethical standards, guided by codes of practice such as those of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) and the European Comission’s Recommendations (EU) 2022/1634 on Editorial Independence.

6. Commitment to improvement

The Beehive News team and all its members are continuously reviewing and improving practices and processes to uphold the values in this Charter. Feedback from the audience, staff, and publishers is integral to this process.

7. Contact

Beehive News encourages open dialogue with its audience. If you have questions about the ratings, assessments, methods, or standards, please reach out via info@beehive.news