Editorial Policy

The standard we hold ourselves to

Publishing about smart home technology without saying how you work is asking for trust you have not earned. This is how we work.

Picking subjects

Topics come from three places: reader mail, our own notes, and gaps we notice while reading what else is published. Nothing gets written because a keyword tool suggested it.

Named writers

Every article carries the name of the person who wrote it and links to their profile. We do not publish under a house byline, because a house cannot be asked to explain itself.

Milo Fenwick, Smart home reviewer and early adopter. Milo buys new smart home devices the week they launch and keeps an unglamorous spreadsheet of exactly which ones have failed him and how long they lasted. He writes about gear the way he would warn a friend before they buy it.

Ada Kessler, Home security and privacy writer. Ada installed physical security systems professionally for six years before switching to writing about the smart version of the same job. She reads a device's privacy policy before she reads its feature list.

Jonah Pryce, Automation and integration writer. Jonah builds home automations far more complicated than any household actually needs, purely for the challenge, then writes the stripped down version that works for everyone else without the troubleshooting headaches.

Paid and unpaid links

A minority of outbound links are commercial. None of them have ever changed a sentence that was written before the link existed.

Requests to soften a verdict are declined, and we keep them on file. More than one has become the subject of its own paragraph later.

From notes to published page

• Dump first. Everything the writer believes goes down, unsorted.
• Mark the soft parts. Anything held on memory rather than evidence gets flagged.
• Check or cut. A flagged claim is either supported or removed. There is no third option.
• Second reader. Somebody else hunts for sentences that sound more certain than the evidence allows.

Publication dates

Published means published. We do not bump dates to look active, and an edit only changes the modified date when it changes what the article actually tells you to do.

Things you will not find here

• Claims about outcomes that nobody can verify.
• Content produced only to fill a keyword slot.
• Recommendations we would not give a friend who asked in person.

How mistakes are handled

Corrections go to [email protected]. Include the address and the sentence. Anything factual is fixed without argument. Anything that changes what the article recommends gets a dated note underneath, so the change is visible.