Editorial principles

Accuracy

• We publish nothing we cannot trace to a named, linked source.
• Where sources disagree, we say so in the article rather than quietly picking one. Where something important is unknown, we write that it is unknown.
• Reporting too poorly sourced to stand behind is not published at all, regardless of how interesting the story would be.

Attribution

• Every article lists the original reports it was written from, with working links.
• We write from facts, not sentences. Drafts are checked mechanically against their sources and rejected if they read as paraphrase — see the methodology.
• Direct quotes are reproduced only when marked as quotes and attributed to the person who said them and the outlet that reported them.
• We do not re-host other outlets' photography. Images on this site are generated by us or licensed.

Ethics

• Independence. No political party, campaign, council, developer or advertiser has any say in what we cover or how. Advertising is labelled as advertising.
• Transparency about production. This is an AI-assisted newsroom and every page says so. We do not invent bylines or imply reporting we did not do.
• Proportionality. We publish a Hype Score on other outlets, so our own headlines are held to it: a headline may not read as more hyped than the coverage it describes.
• Privacy and harm. We do not identify children, victims of sexual offences, or people whose naming would serve curiosity rather than public interest. We follow reporting restrictions in active legal proceedings.
• Right of reply. Anyone criticised in a story may respond, and a substantive response is added to the story itself, not buried elsewhere.

Corrections

Errors are corrected promptly and logged publicly at /corrections, including the date and what changed. We do not silently edit a published article to remove a mistake.

Published scores can also be corrected. If a score was wrong — because a source was missed, or the assessment misread the coverage — we change it and record the change in the same log, with the reason.

Diversity of coverage

We aggregate across 19 outlets specifically so that no single newsroom's priorities decide what the borough hears about. Our source list mixes independent local titles, regional publishers and national broadcasters, and we keep it published at /about so anyone can see whose account we are working from — and tell us who is missing.

Where a story concerns a community, we look for coverage from outlets rooted in it rather than only those reporting on it from outside.

Complaints

Write to editor@barnetpress.co.uk with the URL and what you believe is wrong. We aim to respond within three working days. If we got it wrong, the correction and the log entry follow immediately.