Adafruit Editorial Standards

Adafruit Editorial Standards

tl;dr: Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. This document is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community.

Disclosure
Adafruit Industries is a for-profit business with an interest in many of the subjects we cover. As such, it would be irresponsible to claim the impartiality of not-for-profit journalism, therefore we be responsible for what and how we publish. Adafruit designs, manufactures, and sells electronics. Since Adafruit may cover subjects including our own products, suppliers, and direct competitors, we will make every reasonable effort to disclose:

The identity of our writers and presenters, and their relationship to subjects under discussion.
Our interests in the subject under discussion.
Our relationship to products, vendors, services, and technologies.

Our Goals
Fairness - Our goal is to be fair, and to extend our platform to voices that otherwise might not be heard.

Truthfulness, optimism, and good-faith engagement - We will only cover subjects and topics we believe we have expertise in and can fairly evaluate. When we present problems, we will work to frame them as solvable.

References and good practices
http://www.nytco.com/who-we-are/culture/standards-and-ethics/
http://www.nytco.com/wp-content/uploads/NYT_Ethical_Journalism_0904-1.pdf
http://www.nytco.com/wp-content/uploads/Guidelines-on-Integrity-updated-2008.pdf
http://asne.org/content.asp?contentid=236
http://www.recode.net/authors/kara-swisher

Integrity - “To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.” - Edward R. Murrow.

Sources and Quotes
Adafruit will publish full block quotes with a link to the source URL, non-paywalled wherever possible. For video material, Adafruit will include a time-coded link. Adafruit will include screenshots and https://archive.org URLs (or other archival sources) where possible.

Adafruit will generally avoid publishing anonymous sources, except in unusual circumstances (for example, if a source is a member of a vulnerable community that might be harmed by exposure and/or specifically requests anonymity, we may redact identifying details). When using PACER Adafruit uses RECAP https://free.law/recap/ and will post the full PDF/source document.

Rebuttals and Comment - Adafruit will provide 3 business days (midnight ET) for review/comment, entire email posted in full with email address removed, however, verified via key and/or phone voice message / text with caller ID, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram...

Corrections and Edits - Time indicated, in full, audit-able via logs in Wordpress. Adafruit will make a good-faith effort to correct our articles as new facts come to light. Adafruit will clearly indicate the time and content of edits to existing articles.

Commenting on Editorial Articles - For editorial articles Adafruit may choose to disable comments, or moderate comments with confirmed email addresses or verification. Adafruit has a "be excellent to each other" comment policy. “Help us keep the community here positive and helpful. Stick to the topic, be respectful of makers of all ages and skill levels. Be kind, and don't spam.” Additionally Adafruit may choose to remove/block comments on the social media platforms it manages.

Publishing - Adafruit’s aim is to make content available to a wide audience and enable them to access content on their own terms. This means that we publish content at the Adafruit domains at adafruit.com rather than solely on third-party sites like Medium or Facebook, though we may also syndicate our content to these platforms. Additionally, Adafruit will strive to make our content widely accessible, supporting screen readers, full-content RSS feeds, media embeds without Flash, and more. The Adafruit editorial “feed” is located here: https://blog.adafruit.com/category/editorial/feed/ . Adafruit’s articles appear on https://www.adafruit.com and Tweeted from the verified @adafruit Twitter account by human editors - https://twitter.com/adafruit & Mastodon https://mastodon.cloud/@adafruit .

Tracking and Advertising - Adafruit engages in advertising and makes use of tracking technologies such as cookies and third-party tracking services to understand user behavior and evaluate the effectiveness of our advertising. You can learn more about our practices and policies, including how to opt-out of much of our tracking, at our Privacy Policy: https://www.adafruit.com/privacy

When Adafruit is interviewed - When Adafruit’s team, Ladyada and others are interviewed, Adafruit will inform the interviewer that we may choose to post the full text and/or audio and video of the the interview on adafruit.com. Adafruit will request any articles, videos and talks be publicly available when possible.

Financial Disclosures - Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone are not on any boards of companies, they have no investors, they have no loans, no VC (venture capital), they are not part of any organization, they have 401ks via Adafruit at the same benefit level as all other Adafruit employees (and conversely, all Adafruit employees have access to the same company 401k offerings as Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone). Adafruit does not take ads, "sponsored / pay for coverage", any forms of any partnerships are clearly indicated.

NFTs & "Crypto currency" - Adafruit does not endorse or do NFTs, there is nothing on Adafruit about NFTs, we do not have any ETH, we have never purchased a NFT or ETH, we have never minted a NFT. Adafruit does not do partnerships or sponsorships with NFTs in any way and NEVER HAVE.

Adafruit has been asked many times to participate in NFTs, we have always said no, politely. Adafruit has published text to use to help protect speaker's rights to avoid being used in NFT, holograms, AI.

The Speaker specifically reserves her rights of publicity and privacy, and expressly prohibits the use of her name, image, and likeness apart from use in the Live session, and works created to promote the Live session. Videographer / Photographer / Streamer may not license the Content for use in advertising or marketing of a unrelated party’s products and services without prior written consent.

AI - "ChatGPT" AI tools, and other text generation - Adafruit does not use AI tools for content on Adafruit. If any AI is used, the policy is to: 1) Prominently disclose when any content is primarily "written" by Al. 2) Specify which Al tool or tools were used. 3) Link to the site(s) that offers basic information about the Al tools used, including the sources of their training data, how recently that data has been updated, and what mitigations are in place to limit bias and misinformation. This policy is based on Casey Newton's proposed principles for publishers to consider & Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content. Wired published its editorial AI policy as well. The U.S. Copyright Office, Library of Congress now has some guidance on AI and copyright. The Copyright Office is also putting together a series of "listening sessions" about AI generated work. The AP has also released how/what they're doing with Generative AI. US Copyright Office is opening a public comment around AI and copyright issues - PDF (Aug 30, 2023).

Usage - If these values are useful, this document is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) and (MIT license) on GitHub (https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Editorial-Standards) for ongoing updates and improvements.

Last updated: August 21, 2023.