I am not a journalist. I am Simon Townsend's son, and I am the person who built and maintains this site. That distinction matters for a page about editorial standards, so I am putting it first.
Simon was the journalist. He spent five decades at the trade and his factsheets are the substance of this site. The standards below describe how those factsheets get to you, and what I will and will not do to them along the way.
Where the writing comes from
Roughly 270 of the articles on this site are Simon's original factsheets, written between the late 1970s and his death in January 2025. Most started as email replies to a younger journalist's question. They were never collected, never indexed, never published. They sat on hard drives and in old Gmail threads. I gathered them, cleaned them up, and put them online.
About 17 of the longer pieces on this site were written by me, in Simon's voice, to fill gaps in his archive. Where I have done that, the article is labelled at the top so you can tell. Simon's original writing is not labelled, because that would be patronising; if it is not flagged as mine, it is his.
What I do to Simon's writing
Mechanical cleanup only. Double spaces, old course references he was advertising in 1989, "email me for the factsheet" lines that no longer mean anything, broken links. The prose itself is untouched. His rhythms, his caps lock, his exclamation marks, his em dashes (he loved them, I dislike them, his win), his strong opinions about people I have never heard of. None of that gets sanded down. He would have hated a tidied-up version of himself and I am not going to publish one.
Accuracy
Simon wrote these to be useful in the year he wrote them. Some of the advice has aged perfectly. Some is very much of its time. Where a factsheet says something that is now factually wrong (a phone number, a publication that has folded, a piece of law that has been amended), I either add a dated note at the top, or leave it untouched as a snapshot, depending on whether someone could be misled. I do not pretend Simon wrote something he did not.
If you spot something that is wrong, please tell me. The contact page goes to my real Gmail inbox.
Corrections
When I correct a factual error, I update the page and I add a dated correction note at the bottom of the article. Original wording goes in a strikethrough where the correction matters editorially. Where it does not matter (a typo, a broken link), I just fix it.
I do not silently delete or rewrite articles. If something has to come down (an article that has aged badly, a piece I no longer want associated with the site), I either explain why on the page or redirect the URL to a related article.
Sources and attribution
Most of Simon's factsheets are first-person craft advice. He was not citing studies; he was telling you what he had learned from doing the work. Where he quotes another journalist or refers to a specific case, the name and year are in the text.
For external research and biographical detail, I lean on the National Film and Sound Archive, the State Library of NSW, Trove, and the published record. Wonder World episode counts and ratings details come from the NFSA's curated collection and Network Ten's archive. The conscientious objector case is documented in the contemporaneous reporting in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun.
AI policy
None of Simon's factsheets are AI-generated. They are his writing, decades old in most cases, scanned and transcribed where necessary.
The 17 flagship articles I wrote in his voice were drafted with help from a large language model and then edited heavily by me. Each of those pages is labelled at the top. If a piece is not labelled, no AI wrote it.
I do not allow AI training crawlers (GPTBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, anthropic-ai and a handful of others) to scrape this site. AI retrieval crawlers that send traffic back when they cite Simon (ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and similar) are welcome. The robots.txt at the site root has the current list.
Conflict of interest
Simon was my father. I built this site as a tribute to him. Every editorial choice I make is downstream of that fact. I do not pretend otherwise, and any reader should weigh the writing accordingly.
I have not solicited or accepted payment, sponsorship, or affiliate income from anyone in the journalism trade in exchange for coverage on this site. If that changes I will say so on this page first.
Advertising
The site may carry Google AdSense advertising, which contributes to the cost of keeping the archive online. Ads are served algorithmically by Google. I do not choose which advertisers appear and I do not let ad considerations shape what Simon's factsheets say. The privacy page covers what cookies that involves.
What this site does not do
This is not a working newsroom. I do not break news, I do not cover current events, and I do not take story tips on contemporary journalism stories. If you have a Simon Townsend story to share, a Wonder World memory, a correction, or you worked with him and want to be quoted, I am interested. Anything else is probably not for me.
Standards I borrow from
Simon was a member of the Australian Journalists' Association (AJA) in his time, the union that became the journalism arm of the MEAA. The MEAA Journalist Code of Ethics is the standard he worked to, and it is the standard I borrow from for editorial decisions on this site: accuracy, fairness, attribution, transparency, and a duty to correct.
Get in touch
Corrections, complaints, or anything else: contact me here. I am one person and I do not always reply quickly, but I read everything.