About Us

A newsroom with ten desks and no favourite

THUNDER TIGER is an independent general news publication, written in English for readers wherever they happen to open it. Ten sections carry the day and they carry it in equal measure: news, business, technology, science, sports, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, auto and gaming. None of them is the flagship and none of them is filler. The masthead is a name and nothing more. There is no city behind it, no regional edition, no bureau in one capital whose weather and politics quietly set the agenda for everybody else.

We are a small independent team, and the size is a decision rather than a stage we are trying to grow out of. No group owns us. No investor has a second business we would have to write around. Nobody upstairs needs a story timed to suit a meeting. Being small costs us reach, and it buys us a very short distance between deciding that something is true and putting it in front of you.

What international actually means here

Plenty of sites call themselves global and then write as though one country’s morning is the world’s morning. We try to catch ourselves doing that. A price on this site carries the currency and the market it was quoted in. A kick off time carries its zone. A story about a ruling names the country and the court in the opening lines instead of assuming you already know which parliament, which regulator, which league. Seasons run opposite ways depending on where you are standing, and a story about heat, harvests or fixtures should not pretend otherwise.

The same rule applies to what we consider newsworthy. An outage that takes out payments across one region matters as much as a launch in a wealthier one. A study out of a lab that rarely gets attention is judged by its method, not by its postcode. We do not run local desks and we do not send correspondents to sit in one place; what we do instead is read widely, check against the record, and write for someone who did not grow up with the same assumptions we did.

How a story gets onto the list

A general news site can chase everything and end up carrying nothing well. Before a story goes on the list we ask a narrow question: can this be checked, and will a reader who acts on our version be better off than a reader who acts on the loudest version? That pushes us towards stories with a document, a dataset, a record or a person who was in the room behind them. It pushes us away from stories that are only ever mood dressed as reporting.

It also pushes us towards the paragraph after the headline. Anyone can tell you a thing happened. The useful part is what the number is measured against, who is actually touched by it, what the affected organisation says when asked directly, and which part of the story nobody yet knows. If we cannot get past the first paragraph, the story usually was not one.

Updating and correcting are not the same job

When a story is still moving, the easy route is to publish the largest available version and quietly reconcile with reality later. We do the opposite, and we do it with a rule instead of a resolution. A developing story is labelled as developing. Every change to it carries a time. An early figure is published as provisional, with the source and the moment it was given. When a detail we published turns out to be wrong, the update says that it was wrong rather than swallowing it silently.

How the checking works before publication is set out in our fact-checking policy, and what happens when an error survives it is in our corrections policy. Both apply identically to every desk. A misreported final score is fixed with the same seriousness as a misreported casualty count, because a reader trusted us for both.

Reporting, analysis and opinion stay in separate lanes

We report and we also argue, and the reader should never have to guess which one they are holding. A news report says what happened and attributes every claim inside it. Analysis is built from reporting, carries the reasoning in the open, and is labelled. A review or a column is one writer’s verdict, marked as such, and it is kept clear of the news coverage of the same subject. The headline is part of the report and is held to the same standard, since for a great many readers the headline is the only sentence they will ever see.

The rules on review units, press trips, embargoes, anonymous sourcing and what our writers may not own or bet on are written out on our editorial standards page.

What pays for this

THUNDER TIGER is free to read and funded by display advertising served through an advertising network. There is no subscription, no paywall, no affiliate shop, no paid link and no article bought by anyone. We say that here rather than in small print, because how a publication earns its money shapes what it can afford to publish. The known weakness of this model is the pull of the advertiser, and we handle it with rules: no advertiser is shown a story before it runs, no advertiser is promised coverage or shielded from it, and a company that buys inventory through the network is written about exactly as though it never had. The detail sits on our ownership and funding page, and the terms we hold advertisers to are on our advertise page.

The reader we are writing for

We picture someone curious, short of time and tired of being sold to. They might open a market story before work in one country and a match report after dinner in another, and they are perfectly capable of caring about a recall notice and a film release on the same afternoon. We do not assume they share our nationality, our calendar, our currency or our season.

We also assume they will check us, and we build the pages so they can. Where a document exists, we say which one and point to it, so a reader who wants the filing rather than our summary of the filing can go and read it.

How to hold us to this page

The quickest way to improve this publication is to tell us where it has fallen short of what is written above. If a figure is wrong, if a headline promises more than the story delivers, if an advertisement is dressed up to look like an article, write to us and say so plainly. Every route into the newsroom is listed on our contact page, along with what to put in the subject line so your message lands in the right queue.

A page of promises is cheap to write. THUNDER TIGER should be judged on whether the reporting keeps them on an ordinary Tuesday, under deadline, across ten sections at once. That is the test we are asking to be measured against.