Editorial Standards
Last updated: 10 August 2026
This page describes how we actually work. It is a description, not an aspiration, and every rule on it is one you can hold a published article against.
We check the authority's own page, not the reporting about it
Before we state a fee, a deadline, a rate or a rule as fact, we try to read it on the page of the body responsible for it. A ministry, a regulator, a provincial authority, a court, a board.
News reports are a lead. They tell us something happened. They are not the evidence that it happened in the way described, and reporting frequently narrows or rounds an official figure without saying so.
Where a document exists, we read the document. That has meant downloading policy PDFs and extracting the text, parsing rate tables as tables rather than as flattened text, and going to a parent department's homepage when a remembered address turns out to be dead.
Reported and verified are different words and we use them differently
If we read it at source, we state it.
If we could not, we write that it is reported and we say why. That is a weaker claim and we would rather publish the weaker claim than dress it up.
Two recent examples. A penalty range for Punjab restaurant receipts was consistent across several outlets, but the authority's own site did not carry the notification, so we labelled it reported. Hajj 2027 package prices were announced by a minister at a press conference, but the policy document says dues are notified separately, so we described them as announced rather than notified.
Where sources disagree, we publish the disagreement
Picking one number silently is guessing dressed as reporting.
When gold prices differed across outlets all citing the same association, we published the range. When price websites showed three different rates within the same few minutes, we published all three. When two reports gave different breakdowns of postponed seats in an election, we gave both and said the total was the part that held.
An announcement is not a law
Cabinet approval, passage, assent, gazette publication, a regulator's notification and commencement are separate stages. We do not treat them as interchangeable, and we say which stage something has reached.
We also separate federal from provincial. Licensing, health, education, domicile and many taxes are provincial or district subjects, and a notification in one province does not apply across Pakistan. That is why our piece on Punjab's electronic receipt rules distinguishes the provincial authority from the federal one rather than blurring them.
When we test something ourselves, we say how
Some of our work is original testing. We open official portals, record what happens and publish the results.
The method is always stated: one machine, on a named date, using ordinary browser requests. Every failure is retried over plain http, with and without www, and on alternative addresses before anything is described as not working.
One rule matters more than the rest here. A refused automated request is not an outage. Several Pakistani government sites and news sites block automation and work perfectly in a browser. Reporting those as down would tell readers a live service is dead, so we never do it, and we say when a block is what we hit.
We report observations and attribute judgement
When we write about an institution, we report what we observed and when we observed it. We do not allege wrongdoing or negligence, and we do not characterise why anyone did anything.
Where a judgement is warranted, it comes from a named source with its own standing, such as a court record, a regulator, an official document or a body like the World Health Organization, and we attribute it plainly rather than adopting it as our own view.
Claims about people are attributed in the body of the article, not implied.
What we do not publish
- Invented anything. No made up quotes, sources, statistics, studies, dates or URLs, ever.
- Predictions that cause the harm they describe. During a transport strike we refused to forecast fuel shortages, because the forecast is what empties the pumps.
- Investment advice. We report prices and explain mechanics. We do not tell anyone what to buy.
- Rankings promises. Neither to readers nor to anyone else.
- Facts we could not stand up. If it is not verified and not attributable, it does not go in.
How our articles are written
Most of our readers do not speak English as a first language, so we write in short sentences with common words, explain a term the first time it appears, and let the numbers do the persuading.
Headlines state the thing. They are not puzzles, and they do not withhold the story to earn a click.
Every article carries a named writer and a link to that writer's page. Publication and update times are shown on the article, and an update date appears only where the revision was substantive.
Corrections
We fix errors in the open and record what changed. The procedure, including how to report something, is on the corrections policy page.
Independence and who we are
Pakistan Era is published through pakera.pk and operated by Umer Kureshi. More about the publication is on the about page.
The site carries advertising. Advertisers see nothing before publication and have no say in what we cover or how we cover it. Sponsored work, where it appears, is labelled as such. The limits of what we publish are set out in the disclaimer.
If you think we have fallen short of anything on this page, we would rather you told us. Use the contact page.