Why we publish our working, not just our conclusions

Most reporting that involves numbers gives you the number and asks you to trust it. We've tried to build Morvian around a different habit: showing the steps between a source record and a published figure, so a reader who wants to check our arithmetic actually can.

This isn't a stylistic choice. Figures drawn from public records often require judgment calls — which rows to exclude, how to handle a missing quarter, whether to annualise a partial year. Two analysts working from the same source can reach different totals for entirely defensible reasons, and the only way to make that visible is to write the reasoning down alongside the number.

What a reproducibility note actually contains

Each note names the source file or dataset, the date it was pulled, any rows excluded and why, and the formula or method used to reach the final figure. It also states, plainly, what we were unable to verify. This last part matters as much as the calculation itself, since an unstated limitation is easy to mistake for a settled fact.

We keep these notes alongside the working files themselves, so a subscriber to our Analysis Companion Plan can open the same spreadsheet we did and follow the same path from raw data to headline number.

The cost of doing it this way

Publishing the working slows us down. A figure that could be reported in a sentence often needs a paragraph of method notes to stand behind it properly, and that additional step means fewer stories per week than a newsroom working from press releases alone. We think the trade is worth it, and we'd rather a reader trust one figure fully than take ten on faith.