Editorial standards

An Independent Business Journal profile is journalism, not advertising. Readers trust a profile because nobody paid for it and nobody wrote it to sell something. No business pays to appear in IBJ, and no business can buy a change to a story. The rules below are the same for every business we cover, so we do not make exceptions to them.

What owners can correct. Before a profile is published, we send the owner a draft to check. We fix factual errors: names and spellings, dates, what the business does and where it works, a misheard quote, a detail that is out of date, a photo of the wrong person or someone else’s work. Owners can also ask us to leave out anything they meant to be off the record.

What a profile does not include. We do not add phone numbers, email addresses or booking details; prices, rates, discounts, coupons, financing or other offers; calls to action such as “call today” or “free estimates”; slogans, taglines or claims to be the best, the first or the only; lists of services or service areas; awards, ratings, review counts or credentials we cannot check ourselves; or customer testimonials. Mentions of suppliers, partners or other companies appear only when they are part of the story.

How a profile ends. Every profile ends the same way: the name of the business, where it is based and, if it has one, a link to its own website. That is the only contact information we publish.

Quotes and sources. Quotes are the words of the owners and their staff, from our conversations with them or from what they wrote to us or published themselves. We do not print quotes written for the story after the fact or polish a quote into something nobody said. Other facts come from public records, such as state business registries and license lookups, and from the business’s own published work.

Headlines, structure and photos. The headline, the summary under it, the order of the story and the choice of photos are decisions for our editors. The picture at the top of a profile shows a person or the work, never a logo; a logo, when we use one, appears only beside the note at the end.

What we leave out. We do not write about revenue or personal finances, health, family matters, legal disputes or home addresses, and we do not compare a business with its competitors.

Corrections. If something in a published profile is wrong, tell us and we will correct it.