About
Methodology
How a page gets built here, from first note to publication — and what each status on a page actually means.
The pipeline
Every piece of content is a typed record in one registry. That registry decides what appears on the site, what appears in the sitemap, what appears in the feeds, and what search can find. There is no second list that can drift out of step with the first.
A record moves through three states:
| Status | What it means | Public? |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | Being researched or written. Body text is not shipped to the browser at all. | No |
| Review | Complete but with an editor or subject reviewer. | No |
| Published | Cleared, sourced and dated. Has a URL, a canonical and a sitemap entry. | Yes |
Separately, each published record carries a review status: reviewed means a subject reviewer has read it; review pending means editorial work is done but that reading has not happened yet. Both are shown on the page itself.
Dates
We record two dates: first publication, and the last substantive change to the argument or the evidence. Fixing a typo does not move the second date, and a deploy does not move it either. Where we do not know a date, we leave it out rather than stamp today's.
Empty sections
Sections with no verified records stay visibly empty, are marked noindex, and are kept out of the sitemap until they hold real work. There are no placeholder listings, no sample restaurants, no invented statistics standing in for research.
Photographs
Every photograph carries a caption that says what it actually shows, and a credit naming the photographer or source where we have one. Rights and licence status are tracked in our own records, and a picture whose rights are unresolved is held back rather than published with a disclaimer. A photograph of a mosque, a prayer or a plate of barbecue is illustrative unless the caption names the place, and we never present a generic image as a named Texas institution or as evidence of a halal supply chain.
The backlog
Topics we intend to cover are kept as private editorial briefs that never reach the public site, the feeds or the machine-readable files. A brief is a plan to report something, not a claim about it, and publishing plans as if they were findings is how publications lose readers.
Machine-readable output
We publish an RSS feed, a JSON feed, a content index and an entity graph, all generated from the same registry as the pages. They contain nothing the HTML does not, and there is no hidden text written for machines. If you are quoting us automatically, the page and the data will agree. See the sitemap for the full map.