About

About The Loupe

Most stories get filed with a headline and a verdict. The part in between, the mechanism, the trade-off, the number nobody checked twice, usually gets left on the newsroom floor. The Loupe goes back for that part.

We publish four kinds of pieces. News, for stories that need more context than a headline allows. Deep Dives, for the slow-moving policy and infrastructure questions that shape more than they get credit for. Overlooked, for angles that were sitting in plain sight the whole time. Fact-Check, for claims repeated so often they've stopped being questioned.

Who writes here

Manon Vasseur (Nantes) founded The Loupe and edits most of what runs on it. She pushes writers to show their work rather than just their conclusions, and spends a fair amount of her own time chasing down the original document behind a claim.

Tobias Rennik (Ghent) runs Fact-Check. He treats widely repeated numbers the way a mechanic treats a strange noise: something to trace back to its source rather than accept at face value, especially when the claim concerns health or the environment.

Priya Ashworth (Leeds) writes Deep Dives. She spends most of her reporting time in procurement records and budget documents rather than press conferences, and tries to make the unglamorous parts of governance legible to people who don't read budget documents for fun.