Editorial Guidelines

Editorial standards

All content published on Your Mortgage is bound by the following principals:

Accuracy

All factual material on Your Mortgage must be accurate, based on credible sources, and not misleading. News material should also be distinguishable from opinion material. In articles where the author is expressing their personal opinion, this is signalled with a clear label on the piece such as ‘OPINION’ or ‘COMMENT.’

Your Mortgage will immediately rectify any inaccuracies or instances of misleading content that are discovered in published articles, and where necessary, provide a correction note.

Impartiality and fairness

Your Mortgage’s news content must avoid undue bias and should provide a reasonable level of balance when reporting debatable issues. Selective reporting, omission of facts, and use of loaded language are not acceptable. To provide readers with the full context, all key facts relevant to the story should be reported, not just those that suit a particular angle or narrative.

In news stories that potentially reflect negatively on people or organisations, Your Mortgage journalists should give fair right of reply to those involved. If no reply is received, Your Mortgage journalists are encouraged to make it clear in the article that contact was made e.g. by saying ‘x was approached for comment’.

Privacy and harm avoidance

Your Mortgage must respect individual rights to privacy, and seek permission from individuals where necessary. Your Mortgage must take great care to ensure its content does not cause substantial harm, particularly when reporting about topics relating to financial stress or mental illness. In such articles, Your Mortgage reporters are obliged to inform readers of organisations they can contact for help.

Integrity and transparency

Your Mortgage journalists must ensure they get their information via reputable sources and do not use deceptive means to source material. When interviewing talent for a story, Your Mortgage journalists are encouraged to be upfront and honest about what is on or off the record and to seek permission prior to using recording equipment. Your Mortgage should also be transparent about potential conflicts of interest, and be sure to highlight this in disclaimers within articles that mention its parent company, related brands, or paid partners. Any articles that have been sponsored must be clearly labelled as such.

Fact-checking

All articles on Your Mortgage are rigorously reviewed and fact-checked by senior editors before being published, with some content subjected to even further scrutiny via qualified legal compliance staff and finance professionals. It’s important that readers of Your Mortgage are given the most up-to-date, accurate financial information, so this fact-checking process is paramount to the website’s credibility. As such, fact-checking is taken very seriously and is conducted with great care. Inaccuracies uncovered via a routine fact-check are not taken lightly, with corrections swiftly applied and strong feedback given to the individual/s responsible to ensure errors are not repeated.

Complaints about news content

If you feel there has been a circumstance where these editorial standards have not been met, you may send feedback or a complaint to editor@yourmortgage.com.au or by calling Your Mortgage on 07 3017 8803.

Our policy is to immediately acknowledge receipt of a complaint, after which we will investigate the complaint and decide what action (if any) to take. Depending on the seriousness of the breach in our standards, this action may include:

• Amendment of the published content: The content in question is updated in accordance with the complaint. Articles that have been updated because of a complaint are to disclose the amendment via a discernible note at the end of the piece providing the relevant dates and context of the update.
• Unpublishing the content: Content may be unpublished from Your Mortgage and its associated platforms (e.g. social media) for more serious breaches of standards.
• Publishing an apology: In some serious circumstances that warrant one, it may be deemed appropriate for Your Mortgage to publish a formal apology to the complainant on the website.

Our decision will be communicated to you within 21 days.

Separating the editorial and commercial elements

Your Mortgage content will always be researched, written, and appropriately approved according to regulatory requirements, journalistic methods and in an objective manner in order to identify the money-saving opportunities and products that it judges are worthy of consideration for its audience, consistent with its purpose of helping people to make more informed financial decisions about property.

Content is curated on which people in the community are searching for answers. If this content generates opportunities for the Your Mortgage team to connect the ensuing audience to products that it believes align with the contextual purpose of the content, then it will publish information on those products and consider a commercial relationship. Importantly, Your Mortgage often publishes information on products offered by providers that it has no commercial relationship with.

Additionally, products provided by the Firstmac Group - an associate of Your Mortgage - shall be assessed using the same journalistic methods as those of any other product provider and, like any other third party, shall only be included within Your Mortgage editorial content where those products are judged by the non-commercial teams as good savings options for the audience.

Your Mortgage’s regulatory responsibilities and obligations

Your Mortgage operates as an Australian Financial Services Licensee and an Australian Credit Licensee, Number 515843, of Level 40, 123 Eagle Street, Brisbane Qld 4000. These licensing regimes require material effort to ensure that Your Mortgage remains within their strict compliance frameworks – a responsibility that Your Mortgage takes very seriously.

Any information provided by Your Mortgage is intended to be general in nature. It is not intended to be specific to any individual’s personal circumstances. And whilst we will create and provide access to handy tools such as calculators, infographics, and succinct tables to help the audience make better decisions to help them save money, Your Mortgage will never recommend a single product as being appropriate for an individual’s specific and personal needs and circumstances.

Members of the Your Mortgage audience are encouraged to speak with a financial adviser should they wish to discuss their own personal circumstances and needs.