The desk
Iron City Dispatch is written by its desks, and material is credited to a desk rather than to a named correspondent. This page explains what that means, and what used to be at this address.
Why there are no names here
Inventing a masthead of correspondents is the cheapest way for a small publication to look like a large one, and it is a lie told on the first page a sceptical reader opens. We would rather say plainly how the work is divided and let the material carry the credibility. Accountability does not require a photograph: every page cites its sources, every correction is dated on the page it corrects, and one address reaches a person who answers — [email protected].
How the work is divided
| Desk | Scope | |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms & Engineering | Architecture, transports, latency and delivery. Reads the specification before the vendor’s blog post. | Desk |
| Payments, Privacy & Trust | Money across borders, data protection, authentication rules and card scheme requirements. Keeps the compliance calendar. | Desk |
| Audience & Growth | Measurement, attribution, consent-dependent data and the plumbing of acquisition. | Desk |
| Markets & Regions | Regional reporting, published in the language of the market it describes. | Desk |
| Work & Leadership | On-call rotations, hiring, incident review and the habits of technical teams. | Desk |
| The Wire | The general desk: dispatches and the long tail of industry news that belongs to no single beat. | Desk |
Outside contributors
When material comes from outside the desks, it is a commissioned placement and it is marked as one at the top of the page, with its outbound links live by agreement. We do not run outside material under a desk credit, and we do not run it as a review or a recommendation by the publication. The terms are in the editorial policy, section 3.
Corrections reach the desk directly
There is no press office in front of the editorial address, and correction requests are read before anything else. The procedure — what we check, what we change, and what we print about the change — is set out in How we work.