Our Editorial Standards

Creating content worthy of your attention and trust is our mission. Let us show you how we want to fulfill that promise.

Portrait of Konstantin Bikos, Lead Editor

Message from the Lead Editor

As AI-generated content floods the internet, we’re doubling down on our commitment to quality journalism, genuine expertise, and real human experience. Now more than ever, I’m proud to be able to say: You can trust us.

Everything you read on timeanddate.com has been crafted by trained journalists and researchers and subjected to a stringent QA procedure (more details below).

Do we use AI? Yes, we do—but only as a tool like any other. Let me explain.

We believe AI tools hold great promise for quality journalism. They’re fantastic for speeding up research, drawing inspiration, or finding mistakes. That’s how we use them—not unlike a spellchecker.

But the moment you outsource knowledge, experience, or editorial judgment to AI, you start producing “slop:” recycled snippets of text that sound plausible and polished, but that provide nothing original, nothing newsworthy, and nothing that resonates or inspires. At timeanddate, we never want to cross that line.

The reason is simple: Trustworthy, human-created editorial content is the foundation of our business. On a more personal level, we love what we do and simply don’t want to hand it over to a machine.

Learn more about our editors’ and researchers’ expertise and background via the image carousel below. Or read on to find out more about the eight principles guiding our work.

Finally, if you like what we do, please consider becoming a Supporter. Your help truly matters—now more than ever.

— Konstantin Bikos, Lead Editor at timeanddate.com

Get to know all our writers and researchers

Our Eight Guiding Principles

We may be a small publisher, but our work is guided by the same fundamental principles that drive the most reputable newsrooms around the world. Earning your trust with every text we publish is at the heart of it all—but we also want to inspire, engage, educate, and connect with you as our reader.

Learn about our eight guiding principles below to get a sense of how we work day-to-day to reach these goals.

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Illustration of person reviewing documents with a magnifying glass.

1. Getting the Facts Right

Adherence to universal journalistic principles and ethics is at the heart of our work, and that starts with ensuring the accuracy and timeliness of the information we provide.

Before pen hits paper, we gather the relevant information from trustworthy sources and verify it using other trustworthy sources. Depending on the topic, we may draw on government announcements, law texts, scientific papers, or other types of publications by experts in the field.

On top of that, we have a dedicated, in-house team of researchers who thoroughly and independently fact-check every claim. (They also maintain our vast holiday database, which is trusted and used by some of the world’s biggest publishers.)

2. Being Sticklers for Quality

Every piece of editorial content that appears on timeanddate.com has undergone a stringent quality assurance procedure consisting of four review stages:

  1. An editorial review to create a text that is clear, engaging, and a joy to read. Here, we discuss angles, wordings, tone of voice, and the choice of images.
  2. A fact check to verify all of the central claims and to double-check the most error-prone elements, such as numbers.
  3. A QA round to weed out any leftover typos, grammatical errors, or functionality issues on the page.
  4. An adherence check to ensure the article reflects our core values, principles, and strategies.

At the end of this grueling process, we publish a text that we hope will sail through the fifth review stage, which is really the biggest of them all: presenting it to you, our reader. Listening to and reflecting on feedback is a central part of what we do, and we’re fortunate to have readers who are incredibly generous with their comments and suggestions. If there is ever anything you’d like to say to us, please let us know.

Illustration of someone polishing an enormous diamond.
Illustration of a small team of people with a globe, an hourglass, and a pencil.

3. Offering Human Expertise and Experience

When you read our articles, we want you to come away with something new and genuinely useful, and something that resonates with you. We believe two basic ingredients are essential to make that happen: human expertise and human experience.

Over the years, we have carefully developed a team with immense collective expertise, and where we lack the necessary knowledge or credentials, we let external experts do the talking.

At the same time, we feel simply presenting interesting insights is only half the deal. The real magic happens when we connect them with your reality, your experience of looking up at the sky or using a calendar.

4. Adding Something New to the Landscape

Since its inception in the late 1990s, timeanddate.com has always been a bit of an outlier on the World Wide Web. There aren’t many other websites that provide a mix of information and tools, and an experience, quite like ours.

That concept also informs how we approach our work. We aim for offering something new and unique with every bit of content we publish.

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Illustration of someone on a computer screen explaining astronomy to a reader.

5. Taking Your Side

Asking what’s in it for you, our reader, is a central part of our editorial agenda setting and framing. That’s why we try to write about topics you can experience. For example, we cover eclipses and meteor showers but usually steer clear of exoplanets or black holes.

Another facet of this ideal is simply being useful and inviting. We know that you usually visit our page to solve a problem, and our articles are designed to help you find the answer you are looking for with ease—without having to scroll through walls of text.

6. Sharing the Love for Science

We genuinely love what we do and want to not only pass on our enthusiasm to you but also inspire you to action. We want you to go out to see the next eclipse, dive into a rabbit hole about calendar systems, or talk to your kids about the science behind leap seconds.

In short, we love science, and we want you to love it, too!

Illustration of someone guiding another person through a universe of dates, times, and planets.
Illustration of someone and their dog riding a rocket through space.

7. Making It Fun

Enjoyment is one of our company values—along with collaboration, trust, respect, and evolution—and our aim is to pass that on to you. We strongly believe that fun and science go together and that we learn and understand best when we’re enjoying ourselves.

8. Staying Neutral

As trained journalists, keeping to verified facts and reflecting reality in a non-biased way is part of our DNA. Our company policy is to be politically neutral. Where there is a dispute, we defer to internationally accepted decisions and standards.

Illustration of someone balancing, surrounded by planets, an hourglass, a clock, and a calendar.