Editorial Guidelines
These guidelines describe how the editorial team reports on venues, merchants, and deals. They are the written form of the process already shown on the articles hub: writers visit every venue, order, and pay the bill themselves; every article is checked by an editor before it publishes; every article lists its sources and carries the date it was last verified; and corrections are logged in the article. The people who do that work are named on the editorial team page.
How an article is made
Reporting starts on the ground. A writer visits the venue, places an order, and pays the bill. There are no free meals and no advance notice to the merchant. The visit is the primary source for what the article says about the place — what was served, what it cost, and whether the published deal matched what a customer actually received. Second-hand copy, press kits, and screenshots are not a substitute for that visit.
After the visit, the writer drafts the article with the original materials from the trip: receipts, timestamps, photos taken on site, and notes of what was observed. Claims that cannot be tied back to those materials, or to another named source, are cut. Each published article lists the sources it used and shows the date those facts were last verified, so a reader can see how current the reporting is.
Who checks the work before it publishes
Review is part of the process, not a badge added to the page after the fact. Mark Joseph Mantele, Marketing Supervisor and supervising editor, checks every article before it goes live. He has more than seven years in Philippine retail and mall marketing, including marketing roles at SM Supermalls and Vista Mall, and he writes about local deals, money-saving tips for Filipino shoppers, and growth strategies for SME merchants. His job on the desk is to catch unsupported claims, thin sourcing, and copy that reads like a promotion rather than a report.
Atty. Jansen Bernardo, JD, MBA, Legal Counsel, reviews articles before publication. He is the reviewedBy Person on article structured data. He is a Philippine corporate lawyer with twelve years of experience in corporate and commercial law, corporate governance, regulatory compliance, foreign investments, mergers and acquisitions, labor and employment, and legal risk management. That review is a gate: an article does not publish until it has passed the editor and the legal counsel named on the editorial team page.
Original materials, advertising, and PR
Editorial copy and advertising are separate. Merchants can buy placements elsewhere on the site; they cannot buy a visit, a complimentary meal, or a preview of what will be written. Because writers pay their own bills and do not announce the visit, a merchant press release is treated as a claim to verify, not as copy to republish. If a fact in a release cannot be confirmed on the visit or against the published deal, it does not run.
How merchant and store facts themselves are checked — the coupon approval path, the venue visit, and the last-verified date after publish — is on How we verify merchants. When something we published is wrong, the corrections policy explains how the correction is logged in the article and how to report it.