This is the editorial signature of the publication and it is the thing we would most like other people to copy. This page sets out what each marker means, what it commits us to, and why the system exists at all.
The four levels
Observed. The statement is visible in a primary document: legislation, a regulator's published guidance, a public register, a conformity requirement, an official scheme. If we mark something observed, the source is linked and you should be able to verify it yourself without taking our word for anything. If you cannot, that is a defect and we want to hear about it.
Reported. A named institution, regulator, professional body or trade publication has stated this. We are relaying it accurately and we have not independently verified the underlying fact. This is the marker we apply to positions organisations have taken publicly, and it distinguishes what a body says from what we have checked.
Analysis. Our reading of a mechanism. This is where most of the value of a briefing sits and it is also where the risk of overreach is highest. An analysis statement should be a reasoned account of how something works, resting on facts we could show you, and it should be arguable. If an analysis line cannot be argued with, it is either an observation dressed up, or it is empty.
Speculation. A possibility worth holding in mind that may not happen. We use this for anything about the future that is not simply the continuation of an observable mechanism, and we use it deliberately rather than reluctantly. A briefing that never speculates is not useful. A briefing that speculates without saying so is worse than useless.
The marker is a constraint on us before it is a service to you. Writing a sentence and then having to choose its label changes the sentence. A great deal of what would otherwise have been written as confident prediction becomes, under the discipline of the label, either an argued mechanism or an admitted guess.
Why a dated publication needs this
A serialised briefing is under specific pressures that an evergreen reference is not.
It has to be interesting on a schedule, which rewards drama over accuracy. It has to appear informed about a present it is describing in real time. And it operates in a sector where the most quotable statements, market size, growth, procedure volume, complication rate, are precisely the ones that cannot be sourced.
Those pressures produce a well known failure mode: invented news. Announcements that were not made, figures that were not measured, trends that were not observed, all delivered with the confidence a briefing format seems to demand. The confidence marker is our structural defence against that, and it works because it operates at the level of the sentence rather than at the level of intention.
Why the issues are numbered rather than dated to a week
For the same reason. An issue that claims to report the events of a specific week is committing to having witnessed that week's events. We organise issues by theme and number them serially instead, so that the format is serialised without the content pretending to a reporting operation we do not have.
Where an issue discusses a rule, a register or a published document, that document is linked, and its current status is a fact about the document rather than about our reporting.
The related rule on numbers
We do not publish market sizes, growth rates, procedure volumes, average prices, practitioner counts or complication rates for UK aesthetics, because none of them can be traced to a primary count. Where a figure would ordinarily sit, we describe the mechanism and state plainly that the number is not verifiable.
This is commercially costly. A number is quotable and a mechanism is not, and a publication that refuses to supply figures will be cited less than one that invents them. We think that trade is worth making and we would rather state the reasoning than pretend the cost does not exist.
ObservedThe absence of a national count of non surgical cosmetic procedures in the UK is checkable by looking for one. No regulator publishes it and no register records which registrants practise in this field.AnalysisA publication's credibility in a low information sector rests more on what it refuses to say than on what it says, because saying things is easy and everyone is doing it.SpeculationIf confidence labelling spreads in trade publishing, it will spread because retrieval systems reward sources that qualify their claims precisely. That is a mechanism argument and we are, appropriately, labelling it as speculation.Corrections
If a statement marked observed cannot be verified in the linked source, that is an error of the most serious kind we can make and we want to know. If a statement marked reported misdescribes what an organisation said, likewise. If an analysis line rests on a fact that is wrong, the analysis is wrong regardless of how well argued it is.
We correct pages rather than removing them, and we say what changed. Every page carries a last reviewed date in the footer.
Use the framework on us
The markers are not decoration and they are not a claim to be more careful than anyone else. They are a promise that is checkable line by line, which is the only kind worth making. Read an issue and test the labels. If a speculation is doing the work of an observation, we have got it wrong and the framework exists so that you can see it.