WHO WE ARE

The people, and what we hold ourselves to

A publication that asks readers to trust its numbers owes them the names behind those numbers, the rules it works by, and a public record of when it got something wrong.


Bylines

  • Bio to come

    Founding editor

    Bio to come

    This byline is live and appears on published work. The biography has not been supplied yet — we would rather show an empty field than write one on someone's behalf.

    Beat
    Reconstruction finance, infrastructure, the Project Tracker
    Works in
    Arabic · English
  • Open role

    Arabic editor

    Open role

    Not yet filled. Until it is, Arabic copy is edited by the founding editor, which is a limitation we would rather name than paper over.

    Beat
    The Arabic edition, service journalism, translation standards
    Works in
    Arabic · English

Advisory circle

Forming

Five to seven people — an economist, an engineer, an educator, a lawyer, a diaspora investor and others — who let us use their names and check our numbers before publication. None is announced yet. When one joins, they appear here with their discipline and what they reviewed.

Disciplines we are looking for

  • Economist
  • Civil engineer
  • Educator
  • Property lawyer
  • Diaspora investor
  • Energy specialist
  • Statistician

Editorial standards

  1. Never a number without a source. Inline attribution, linked, dated. Every figure behind every chart also sits in a public file anyone can download and check.
  2. Uncertainty is stated, not smuggled. Where a source publishes a range we publish the range. Where a figure is a projection we draw it differently from a recorded value.
  3. Unverified means unverified, in public. A figure we could not confirm against a primary source is either published with a visible flag or not published. It is never quietly used.
  4. No anonymous officials for good news. If a positive claim is unnamed, it is a press release, and we treat it as one.
  5. Arabic is an edition, not a translation layer. We do not machine-translate and present the result as our Arabic edition. Where the Arabic original does not exist yet, the page says so.
  6. Politics only where it moves things. We cover political events where they change projects, services or daily life. We do not do factional scorekeeping.
  7. We say what we don't know. Every dataset on this site carries a published list of its gaps.

Corrections policy

If we publish something wrong, we correct it on the page where it appeared, with the date, and we log it publicly. We do not silently edit a figure and move on.

Three kinds of change, handled differently. A correction is a factual error: the article carries a dated correction notice and the entry appears in the public log. An update is new information that changes the picture: the piece is re-dated and the change is described. A clarification is wording that was accurate but misleading: we say what was unclear and what we now say instead.

If a figure we published turns out to be unverifiable rather than wrong, we do not delete it — we re-flag it as unverified and explain what we tried.

How to tell us

Email is fastest. Include the page, the figure and, if you have one, the source that contradicts us. We reply either way, and we say what we are going to do about it.

hello@umran.news Read the corrections log

Contact

Corrections, data, pitches, disagreements and requests to use our figures are all welcome at the same address.

hello@umran.news

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Want to write for us?

Reader proposals go through The Table, which has published guidelines and a submission form.

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