Editorial standards and corrections

What Widnes Life aims to do, and what to do when we fall short of it.

Accuracy

We check before we publish. Where a claim comes from a single source we say so. Where we have asked someone for a response and not had one, we say that too, rather than leaving the silence unexplained.

When we report on official material — council papers, court listings, police appeals — we link to or name the source so you can read it yourself. If we have summarised something, the summary is ours and any error in it is ours.

Corrections

If we get something wrong we correct it, and we say that we have. A correction is added to the foot of the story with the date, and it stays there. We do not quietly edit a story and leave it looking as though it always said the new thing.

To ask for a correction, email enquiries@widneslife.co.uk with the link and what is wrong. We aim to respond within two working days.

Right of reply

If we report something critical about a person, business or organisation, we approach them for comment before publishing wherever it is practical to do so, and we publish their response alongside the story.

Crime and court reporting

Crime is the largest single subject in our archive. We follow a few rules on it.

• We report charges as charges and convictions as convictions, and we do not treat the first as the second.
• We do not name people who have not been charged.
• Appeals for information, missing person appeals and witness appeals are updated or taken down once the police confirm the matter is resolved. If you spot one of ours that is out of date, please tell us.
• We do not report details that would identify a victim, or a child, where the law or basic decency says we should not.

Requests about older stories

Our archive goes back to 2018. Accurate reporting of something that genuinely happened is not something we remove on request as a matter of course — a news archive that can be edited by the people in it is not much of an archive. But there are circumstances where we will update, annotate or de-index a story, including where a case was later dropped, a conviction is now spent, or the story is a police appeal that has since been resolved.

Email us with the link and the circumstances and we will look at it properly.

Conflicts of interest

Our Local Business directory includes write-ups of businesses that are customers of the company behind Widnes Life. Those are editorial write-ups — nothing was paid for the coverage or for the links in it. [Confirm this wording is how you want the relationship described.]

If that ever changes — if coverage or a link becomes part of what a client pays for — the story will say so plainly and the links in it will be marked as paid, which is what Google’s guidelines require and what readers deserve regardless.

Complaints

If you have raised something with us and you are not satisfied with how it was handled, say so in writing to enquiries@widneslife.co.uk and it will be looked at again.