1. What the Wire is trying to be
A record of the business of entertainment that a professional can check rather than trust.
Everything else in this document follows from that sentence. The Wire is not trying to break news, and it is not trying to have opinions about films. It reports deals, filings, numbers and the movement of companies — never reviews. Its claim on your attention is not that it knows things first; it is that every claim it makes carries the report and the sentence it came from, so that you can go and look.
2. What we publish, and what we do not
We publish: transactions and their terms; regulatory and merger-register activity; company filings and the figures in them; appointments and departures; litigation with a commercial dimension; market data on listed constituents; and a register of the companies that make up the sector.
We do not publish: reviews, criticism, or ratings of creative work; gossip; anything about a person's private life; anything sourced only to an anonymous claim we cannot corroborate; or anything we cannot point at a source for.
Absence is not evidence. A thing missing from the Wire has not been checked and found false. It has usually just not been reported by a source we read, or has not parsed as the kind of event the ledger admits. We say this in the Terms too, because it is the single most common way a reader of any wire misleads themselves.
3. Sourcing
3.1 Every claim carries its source. A story links the report it summarises. A ledger row carries, per claim, the report and the sentence the claim was taken from. Where a deal has a filing or a merger-register entry, the row links the register, not a report about the register.
3.2 Primary over secondary. Where a regulator, court or registry has published the document, we cite that in preference to reporting about it.
3.3 Corroboration. A transaction reaches the ledger on the strength of the reporting behind it. Where reports disagree — on price, on structure, on whether a thing has happened at all — the row is flagged as disputed and shows the disagreement rather than picking a winner.
3.4 We do not launder attribution. We do not present a summary of somebody else's reporting as our own reporting. The byline on a summarised story is the publication that did the work, and the link goes to them.
3.5 Market data is supplied by a third party, may be delayed, and is labelled as such.
4. Machine assistance
Clustering, summarisation, extraction of deal terms and the desk memo are produced with the assistance of automated and AI systems, under human editorial oversight. This is disclosed on every page and is described in full in AI Use and Transparency, which sets out what is machine-written, what a human checks, and where the failure modes are.
5. Corrections
5.1 Tell us and it gets fixed. Every deal row carries a correction link that names the row and the field, and every page carries a Report a bug control in its footer. By email: wire-feedback@axiom.vc for the Wire, index-feedback@axiom.vc for the Index.
5.2 We correct against the source, not against the person complaining and not against our own previous wording. If the source was wrong, we correct and say the source was wrong. If we misread a correct source, we correct and say we misread it.
5.3 The record keeps its history. Where a published figure changes, the row records what it said before and when it changed. The ledger does not quietly rewrite itself. This is deliberate and it is not negotiable: a register whose past can be edited is not a register.
5.4 Speed. We aim to act on a correction request within [2 working days], and on a clear factual error the same day where we can. Enterprise customers have priority.
5.5 Significant corrections are visible. Where an error was material — a wrong price, a wrong party, a deal reported as done that was not — the correction is shown on the row, not made silently.
5.6 We will tell you the outcome, including when we conclude the original was right. A correction request that we decline gets a reason.
6. Right of reply
If the Wire has reported on you or your company and you believe the report is unfair, incomplete or wrong, write to wire-feedback@axiom.vc. We will:
- read it properly and check it against the source;
- correct anything that is wrong;
- where the disagreement is about interpretation rather than fact, offer to record your position on the row, attributed to you;
- tell you what we have decided and why.
We will not remove accurate, lawfully published reporting because it is unwelcome. We will say so plainly rather than going quiet.
7. Conflicts of interest
7.1 The Wire is published by Colibri Holdings Ltd, which also trades as AXIOM Venture Capital and has other media and entertainment interests. Where the Wire reports on a company in which the publisher, or a person connected with the publisher, has a financial interest, that interest is disclosed on the row.
7.2 The publisher does not trade on the basis of unpublished Wire content and does not permit anyone with access to unpublished content to do so.
7.3 Sponsorship and commercial content. The Wire carries no advertising. If commercially supported content is ever introduced, it will be labelled as such, marked rel="sponsored" where it links out, and will not enter the ledger or the register.
7.4 The AXIOM Global Entertainment Index and the Wire share a publisher. Index membership is decided by the published Index methodology, not by anything in the Wire, and coverage in the Wire has no bearing on it.
8. Complaints about the Wire's journalism
Use our Complaints procedure. We are not currently a member of a press regulator. [CONFIRM: whether to join IMPRESS or apply to IPSO. Membership of an approved regulator carries costs-protection benefits under section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 that a small publisher may want.]
9. This policy binds us
If the Wire has not done what this document says it does, that is a failure and we want to hear about it. wire-feedback@axiom.vc.
End of Editorial Standards and Corrections Policy.