Before you trust anything we tell you, you deserve to know where we get it. This page is our standing promise about how information makes its way into our reporting — and it stays published so you can hold us to it.

We go to people who actually know.

Our reporting is built on interviews with people who have direct knowledge of what we’re covering: scientists and researchers, university faculty, state and federal agency staff, and the people in our communities who live the story firsthand — the farmer watching the water table, the nurse seeing what’s coming through the clinic doors, the librarian who knows what people are asking about. Expertise doesn’t only wear a lab coat, and lived experience doesn’t need a title. What matters is that our sources are close to the facts, and that we tell you who they are and how they know what they know.

For science and health reporting, we regularly connect with vetted researchers through SciLine, a free service of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that matches journalists with scientists in their field. When an expert appears in our work, we’ll tell you their name, their credentials, and their institution — on screen, in the text, or both.

We use numbers you can check.

When we cite statistics, they come from sources with transparent methods and no product to sell: the Pew Research Center, the U.S. Census Bureau, USDA, CDC, Iowa state agencies, and peer-reviewed research. We name the source and the year every time, and where we publish online, we link straight to it. If a number can’t be traced to its origin, it doesn’t go in our story.

We cultivate sources, and we protect them.

Some of our best reporting starts with a phone call from someone who trusts us. We maintain relationships with people inside institutions, industries, and communities who help us understand what’s happening beneath the surface — for investigations, and for fast, accurate answers when news breaks. We verify what they tell us before we publish it, and when a source needs protection to speak honestly, we grant it carefully and say so in the story.

We know that every source has a vantage point.

Officials, agencies, and advocacy groups are all legitimate sources — and all of them see the world from where they stand. Governments can be wrong. Organizations have agendas. Part of our job is telling you not just what a source said, but where they’re coming from, so you can weigh it yourself.

We show our work, and we own our mistakes.

You’ll see attribution in everything we make: named in the script, printed on the screen, linked in the text. When we get something wrong, we correct it in place, tell you what changed, and keep the record public. No quiet edits.

And we’d like your help.

If something’s circulating in your feed or around town and you’re not sure it’s true, send it to us — and tell us where you saw it. We’ll run it down and report back.