About Us

Significadopedia is a general news site with one rule sitting under everything we publish. Explain the thing, then report what happened to it. The name is Spanish and means something close to an encyclopedia of meanings, which is what this site was for years before it was a newsroom.

What we cover, and who we write it for

We publish across politics, business, technology, science, sport and culture, sorted into Auto, Business, Entertainment, Gaming, Lifestyle, News, Science, Sports, Tech and Travel. The range is ordinary. The treatment is not. In every story the meaning arrives before the reporting does, in the writer’s own sentences, near the top where a skimming reader will hit it.

Our reader is usually someone who has just finished a headline and is not sure what one word in it was doing there. A recall notice that hangs on a battery chemistry. A transfer story that turns out to be about squad cost rules. A market report resting entirely on the shape of a yield curve. A visa change written in the language of the regulation rather than of a person with a booked flight. We assume no prior knowledge, we assume the reader is in a hurry, and we assume nobody enjoys being made to feel slow. The third assumption does more work than the other two.

How a reference site turned into a newsroom

The people who started this were doing unglamorous work with words. One of the founders had spent years on a copy desk, mostly rewriting other people’s sentences until they said what the writer had meant. Another built and maintained a Spanish-language reference site: plain pages explaining what terms meant, everything from grammar and verb forms to bank charges and the offside rule. It earned a modest living from search traffic and was never going to be more than that.

What changed things was reading the traffic properly instead of counting it. The definition pages spiked in clusters, and the clusters were always shaped like news. A no-confidence motion somewhere sent a wave of readers to the page explaining what a no-confidence motion is. A utility announced rolling cuts and the load-shedding page lit up. A referee decision on a Sunday afternoon, and by Sunday evening the page on video review was the busiest thing on the site. Those readers had come from a headline that used a term without explaining it, and our page told them what the words meant and nothing about why. We were the footnote to somebody else’s story.

So we turned it around. Instead of a definition with the news linked off it, the news with the definition built into it. We kept the old Spanish glossary online rather than folding it into redirects, out of sentiment and because it still tells us what people cannot find elsewhere. We publish in English as well now, and the name stayed Spanish because it is accurate and because changing it would have been a lie about where we came from.

The things we got wrong before we got them right

Our first attempt at this was a glossary box at the foot of every article. It was tidy, it was easy to build, and almost nobody scrolled to it. The one thing a reader needed to follow paragraph two sat below paragraph thirty. We killed it within a couple of months.

The second attempt was worse. We auto-linked every defined term in the copy back to its reference page, so a single business story could contain a dozen links. Articles turned blue. Readers left mid-sentence to check one word and never came back to the sentence. What finally worked was duller and much harder: the writer explains the term themselves, in ordinary language, in the piece, and is not allowed to explain one unfamiliar term by leaning on a second one. That costs us time on every single story and we have never regretted it.

How a normal day runs here

The morning list meeting has one gate. Before a story gets a slot, somebody has to answer what has to be explained here before this makes sense, and then write that explanation in one sentence. It goes at the top of the draft before any intro is written. If nobody on the desk can produce it, the story waits, and yes, that sometimes means we are late on the biggest thing moving that hour. Being second and clear beats being first and decorative.

Every piece is then read by a second editor whose entire job on that read is to be the person who does not know the subject. They mark the first place the copy assumes something. Writers find this annoying, which is roughly the point. Last thing each day we read the on-site searches that returned nothing useful. That list of failures is where a good share of the next day’s commissions come from. It is the most direct instruction a reader ever gives a newsroom and it costs nothing to read.

Who owns us and how the bills get paid

Significadopedia is independently owned and run by its founding editorial team. There is no parent company above us, no outside shareholder, no political party, no campaign group and no state money anywhere in the accounts. The people who make the editorial decisions own the site. That is a small structure with an obvious weakness and one real strength: nobody upstairs can ask us for a favour. Our ownership and funding page sets out the revenue streams in detail.

The site is free to read, has no paywall and is paid for by advertising. The desk is a managing editor, section editors across the verticals, a small group of staff writers, regular freelances chosen for beat knowledge rather than volume, and one person who owns standards and corrections and can stop a story. Advertisers never see copy before publication and have no route to the desk. The rules we hold ourselves to when selling space are on the advertising page.

Accuracy, and what happens when we miss

We work to the IFCN principles on fact-checking without claiming membership of anything, and how we source, verify and attribute is written down in our editorial standards and our fact-checking process. When we get something wrong we fix it on the page in public with a note saying what changed. Quiet edits are not a correction, they are a cover-up with better manners.

We count one kind of error most newsrooms do not. An explanation that was technically accurate and practically useless is a failure here, and it gets rewritten and logged. If a reader finished the piece still unable to say what the term meant, the piece did not work, whatever the fact-checker signed off. Our corrections policy explains how to report one and what happens after you do.

What we will not do, including when it pays

We do not publish sponsored articles built to pass as news, and we do not take payment to write about a company or a product. The offer that arrives most often is the paid definition: a business would like its own jargon explained on our site in its own preferred framing, sometimes with a fee attached and sometimes with a link request tucked into the second email. The answer has been no every time and the refusal gets slightly shorter every year.

We also turn down link insertions into the reference pages, which is real money we could take tomorrow, and we do not rewrite a definition because it inconveniences somebody who spends with us. If you have a correction, a tip, or a story we should be looking at, write to support@significadopedia.com. Every route into the newsroom is listed on our contact page.