Editorial independence
Construction Marketbook runs both a marketplace and a newsroom. That is a genuine conflict of interest. This page names it and sets out the rules we hold ourselves to — specifically enough that you could catch us breaking them.
The conflict, stated plainly
Construction Marketbook is a construction marketplace. Contractors, suppliers and professionals pay us for visibility, leads and subscriptions. The newsroom is funded by that business and reports on the same industry those customers work in.
That is a real conflict and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What follows is what we do about it. Judge us on whether our coverage matches it.
Paying us buys nothing editorial
Being a paying customer does not earn favourable coverage, and it does not prevent critical coverage. Advertisers and marketplace customers see no story before publication, and they have no right of review over anything except quotes attributed to them.
Nobody on the commercial side of the business can require a story to be written, changed, delayed or withdrawn. Where a commercial relationship is relevant to a story about a company, we disclose it in the story.
Sponsored content is labelled and separated
We publish sponsored articles and press releases. They are labelled as such at the top of the page, in listings, and everywhere else they appear — not in small print at the bottom.
Sponsored content is excluded from our news feeds and from the Google News sitemap, and its outbound links carry attributes that stop them passing search authority. It is not written by the reporters who cover that company, and it is never presented as reported journalism.
Covering ourselves and our own customers
When a story concerns Construction Marketbook itself, we say so in the story. We hold ourselves to the same standard of evidence we apply to anyone else, and we do not use the newsroom to attack competitors.
Our reporters do not hold undisclosed financial interests in the companies they cover. Where a writer has a relationship with a company in a story — as an employee, a shareholder, a client or a competitor — it is disclosed on the story.
Prices, indices and the data we sell
Our price and index data is collected under a published methodology and is not adjusted to suit a commercial outcome. A supplier cannot pay to have its prices excluded from an average, or to have a bad week smoothed.
Where a week has too few submissions to be reliable, we mark the figure as an estimate or withhold it rather than publish a number we do not stand behind. The threshold is in the methodology, set in advance.
What we will not do
We will not run a story because a customer asked us to, kill one because a customer objected, or offer coverage as part of a commercial negotiation. We will not accept payment to remove a published story.
If any of that happens, this page is the standard we have failed against, and we would rather be measured against it than never have written it down.
Think we have broken this?
Tell us which story and what you think happened. A policy nobody can complain against is not a policy.
Raise it with the newsroom