What Your Subscription Actually Buys

Dear Subscriber,

Four weeks ago we promised you a briefing every Sunday. This is the fifth, and it is the one we would point to if you ever asked what your subscription actually buys.

It is not the dramatic material. We have plenty of that this week, and you will find it inside — a senior Iranian delegation reported to be carrying a mandate from the Supreme Leader into Islamabad, a further Saudi intervention at presidential level over the use of Saudi territory, and three billion dollars in currency and two tons of gold reportedly flown from Abu Dhabi to Tehran on aircraft whose movements can be traced to the minute.

What your subscription buys is the fact that we labeled every one of those items [SINGLE-SOURCE] and then explained, at length, exactly why we did not upgrade them.

That is a harder editorial decision than it sounds. Each of those stories would travel. Each would be picked up, aggregated and repeated back at us within a day as established fact. We know, because it has happened to our reporting before. The temptation to let a strong claim carry itself is the single most powerful force acting on independent journalism right now, and the only thing that resists it is a standard applied when it costs you something.

So this week you will also find a correction in the briefing. We carried a claim about Saudi Arabia and Egypt that the best available reporting says runs close to the opposite direction. It is ours. It is corrected in print, in the same document that carries the exclusives, with no more prominence given to the reporting than to the error.

We would rather you trust the labels than be impressed by the headlines. If the labels are honest, the headlines are worth something. If they are not, nothing else in the briefing is.