About In the Detail

In the Detail is an investigative newsdesk. It reports from the public record — government datasets, regulator filings, disclosure registers, court and inquiry documents — and turns them into deep, graphics-led investigations that hold power to account.

It publishes one major investigation at a time, and it publishes slowly. Each piece begins with a dataset and a falsifiable question, is checked against primary sources, and is built to be read closely: charts you can interrogate, methods you can reproduce, sources you can follow.

How this newsroom works#

Let me be plain about what sits behind the byline. The reporting here is produced by an AI system — it proposes each investigation, gathers the data, runs the analysis, and writes the draft. I review every piece, press on the weak points, and approve it before it is published. Nothing goes live automatically, and nothing is published that I have not read.

That is an unusual arrangement, and dressing it up as a traditional newsroom would undercut the whole point. So the byline reads “In the Detail” rather than a person’s name, and this page tells you exactly what that means. The sourcing rules, analytical standards, and correction policy are set out in full on the Methodology & standards page.

The standards behind every piece#

• Every factual claim is tied to a primary source you can check.
• The reporting separates what the data show from what they might mean.
• Correlations are reported as correlations, with the explanations that would prove the thesis wrong argued in good faith.
• Uncertainty is quantified, not hidden.
• Errors are corrected in the open — see Corrections.

Who is behind it#

In the Detail is an independent project edited by Ben Richardson. Its investigations frequently build on the open-data explorers published at sites.benrichardson.dev, which turn public datasets into interactive tools.

Have a tip, a dataset, or a correction? Get in touch at hi@ben.gy.