How we work — editorial standards

How we work — our editorial standards

This page is the editorial standards document for ampag.com.au. We publish it because anyone reading our coverage should know how we make decisions — what we choose to cover, what we decline to cover, what conflicts of interest we have, what conflicts we don’t, and how we handle the relationship between the editorial side of the site and the commercial side.

Who we are

We are a small editorial team of four. Margaret Chen edits; David Pemberton writes theatre; Anna Lavrenchuk writes dance and festivals; James Wakefield writes symphony, opera and the regional touring circuit. Our combined background is in print arts journalism, ABC arts producing, festival publicity, programme notes and regional reviewing — we have collectively spent something close to fifty years working in and around the Australian arts sector. We are independent of any major performing arts company, peak body, government department, or commercial promoter.

What we cover

We cover the major performing arts companies, the venues they perform in, the festivals that frame their seasons, and the cultural-tourism trip-planning that makes it possible to travel for a performance. The “majors” framing of the site is deliberate — we focus on the companies that the federal cultural funding framework recognises as the country’s anchor cultural institutions, plus the closely-adjacent independent companies that sit in the same artistic conversation.

We do not cover commercial musical theatre touring (the West End and Broadway transfers handled by commercial promoters) unless it is produced by one of the major companies. We do not cover film, television or commercial music — there are excellent dedicated outlets for each. We do not cover the small-to-medium independent theatre and dance scenes in any depth, though we will note significant work and we follow specialist publications that do cover them.

Our standing on independence

We pay our own way to performances we review. We do not accept gifts from companies we cover. We do not accept paid junkets or tours from arts organisations or tourism boards. Where a company offers complimentary tickets to working press, we either decline or we declare the comp ticket clearly in the published piece. The ticket-buying budget is part of the site’s operating costs.

We have personal relationships with people who work in the major performing arts companies — that is unavoidable in a country with a small arts sector and a small arts press. Where a relationship is close enough to constitute a real conflict, we either decline to write about that company or we declare the relationship in the piece. The team’s individual relationships are documented internally and we do not assign coverage that would create a conflict.

Affiliate links and commercial relationships

Some of the links on this site are commission-bearing. Where we link to a ticket seller (the company’s own website, Ticketek, Ticketmaster, TodayTix), or to an accommodation partner (Booking, Expedia, hotel direct booking pages), the link may pay us a small commission if you book through it. These commissions help fund the site.

We label these links clearly and the commission relationship does not influence which productions, venues or festivals we cover, or what we write about them. The editorial side of the site is independent of the commercial side. We will not recommend a production, venue, festival or trip based on commission incentives — we recommend based on what we believe the audience will get value from.

We do run paid features for travel partners (regional tourism boards, hotels, ticketing platforms) that we have evaluated for editorial fit before quoting. Paid features are labelled “Sponsored” or “In partnership with [name]” — they do not appear in our standard coverage feed and they are not subject to our editorial discretion in the same way. We will not run a paid feature for a partner whose offering we wouldn’t recommend on its merits.

How we handle reviews

Reviews on this site are written from attendance. We do not write reviews based on press releases, official photography, or second-hand accounts. Where we revisit a production we did not see live (because it has finished its run before we got to it, or because it played in a city the writer wasn’t in), we frame the piece as historical or retrospective rather than as a review.

Negative reviews are part of the site. We do not run productions that we found weak just because the company is friendly with us, and we do not soften our assessments because the company is institutionally important to the sector. Where a piece is critical, we will tell the company before publication if there is something the company should be aware of (a factual error, a misrepresentation), but we will not change the assessment in response to company feedback.

Corrections

If we get something factually wrong, we correct the piece, mark the correction at the bottom of the article, and where the error is substantive, we publish a separate correction note. Substantive errors include named-individual factual errors, production-history errors, dates and venues, and quotation errors. Stylistic differences and arguable judgements are not subject to correction.

If you have spotted a factual error or want to raise a concern, please contact us. We respond to every correction request and we publish corrections promptly.

Comments and external linking

We do not run open comments on articles — our team is too small to moderate comments to the standard we’d want to maintain. We do publish reader correspondence selectively as separate pieces in the Industry category when the correspondence raises something we think the wider audience benefits from seeing. We will publish reader letters with the writer’s permission.

External links go to original sources, official sites of the companies and venues we cover, the Wayback Machine for archived material, and partner ticket and accommodation sites. We do not link to spam directories, low-quality content farms, or aggregators.

Privacy

We use Google Analytics 4 for traffic measurement (the privacy-respecting consented configuration). We do not use cross-site tracking pixels, behavioural advertising networks, or third-party data brokers. The site does not set non-essential cookies before consent. The detail on cookie use and privacy is in the standard privacy policy, which we will publish separately.

Reach us

Tips, corrections, partnerships and general correspondence: contact us here. We read everything; we respond to most.