About Us

FAQ Answers is a general news site organised around questions. Politics, business, technology, science, sport, culture, cars, games and travel: ordinary beats. What is different is the shape of the story. Every piece we publish opens with a question a reader actually asked, and answers it before it does anything else.

That sounds like a formatting preference. It is closer to an editing standard, and it is the reason the site exists at all.

Where FAQ Answers came from

Before this was a news site it was a plain question-and-answer site. A search box, a list of answered questions, and a queue we worked through in roughly the order people asked. The early traffic was what you would expect: how long a passport renewal takes, whether a warranty covers a cracked screen, what a deduction on a payslip means.

We kept the query log because we needed it to decide what to answer next. Reading it for long enough changed what we thought we were doing. The questions arriving on a Tuesday were rarely evergreen. They were about whatever had happened on Monday, and the phrasing gave the game away. People were not asking what had happened, because they already knew that. They were asking what it meant for the car they were about to buy, the flight they had booked, the game they had paid for, the medication in their cupboard. Nearly every one of them had read a news story first and come away without the answer.

That is the gap that annoyed us into starting over. A news story is built to report an event, so it leads with what happened, works backwards through context, and leaves the sentence the reader came for in paragraph fourteen, if anybody wrote it at all. A studio announces that a game’s servers are closing. Whether your save files survive is a separate question, and for most players it is the only one they have.

The rule that decides what we publish

If a story cannot be summarised as a question and its answer, it is not ready. That is the whole rule. It is written on the board in the newsroom and it kills more drafts than anything else we do.

We got the first version of it badly wrong. In the early months we turned every headline into a question, which is not the same thing at all. We ended up with pages of “Is This Happening?” where the answer was plainly yes, and a reader wrote in to say the site read like a quiz show. The reader was right. Question-shaped headlines are a trick. Question-shaped reporting is work.

So we replaced the rule with a harder one. The question has to be one somebody actually asked, in something close to the words they used, and the answer has to land in the first two sentences. If the honest answer is that nobody knows yet, that goes in the first two sentences too, along with who would know and when. What we will not do is stretch a maybe across nine hundred words.

How a normal day runs here

The day starts with the query log and the inbox rather than the wires. Editors read what readers typed in the last twenty-four hours, group the phrasings asking the same thing, and sort them into two lists. One list is questions we can answer today. The other is questions we cannot answer yet and should say so about.

Assignments go out mid-morning. Every draft is then read by a second editor whose first job is narrow: find the question, find the answer, and check that the answer is near the top. If that editor has to hunt for it, the draft goes back, and that is not a comment on the writing. Late in the day we re-read what we published earlier to see whether any answer has gone stale. An answer with a deadline inside it rots much faster than a description of an event.

We also keep a file of questions we have failed to answer, and some have been open for months. A recall where the manufacturer will not say which build dates are affected. We go through that file every week. It is the least satisfying meeting we hold and the most useful one.

Who owns us, and how the money works

FAQ Answers is independently owned. There is no parent company, no political party, no state sponsor, and no outside investor with a view on what we cover. The founding editorial team owns and runs the site, so the people deciding what gets published are the people carrying the cost of publishing it. Our ownership and funding page sets out the structure and every revenue stream in more detail than most readers will want.

The site is free and ad-supported. No paywall, no subscription, no registration to read a story. Advertising pays for the newsroom, and the people who buy it have no say in what we write. They do not see stories before publication and cannot ask for one to be changed or dropped. The commercial terms in plain language, including the ad categories we turn down, are on the advertise with us page.

The team

We do not have a masthead full of job titles, because we are not that big. The site is run by its founding editors with a small group of staff writers and regular contributors. Work is split by beat rather than seniority: one editor owns cars and consumer recalls, another money and company filings, another games and platforms, another health and science claims. The news desk is shared, because the questions cross over constantly.

Everyone here reports as well as edits, including the managing editor. That is partly economics and partly design. An editor who has not tried to get a straight answer out of a press office recently starts to believe that answers are easy to get.

What we will not do

We do not publish the holding piece. You know the format: a story where almost nothing is known, written up as what we know so far and kept alive with updates that add a sentence at a time. Those pages perform well in search. They also break our one rule, because the question at the top has no answer underneath it, so we leave them alone and lose the traffic.

We do not run sponsored articles dressed up as answers. Commercial content is labelled, looks different from editorial, and is never written by the people who write the news. We take no payment, gifts, hospitality, or access in exchange for coverage. A company can correct a quote and cannot approve one. Nothing here is for sale except advertising space.

Accuracy, and what happens when we get it wrong

Getting an answer wrong is worse than getting a description wrong, because a reader may act on it. Our editorial standards explain how we source, verify, and attribute, and our fact-checking process covers how claims are tested before publication. We work to the IFCN principles.

When we are wrong we say so on the story, with the date and what changed. We do not quietly edit the sentence and carry on. The corrections policy sets out what counts as a correction, what counts as an update, and how fast we move on each.

Getting in touch

One address reaches us: support@faq-ans.com. The editors read and sort that inbox themselves. Corrections, tips, complaints, and advertising enquiries all arrive in the same place, so it helps if the subject line says which one it is. The contact page explains how each type is handled and how long you should expect to wait.

The most useful thing you can send us is a question you asked somewhere else and never got answered. That is where most of our work comes from.