Editorial policy

What we publish

Whitehall Minute publishes its own reporting: stories written by our newsroom from primary, publicly available sources — official announcements and data, statements by public bodies and office-holders, written parliamentary answers, published research, and the official channels of governments and institutions. Every story links to the document it is based on. We do not republish official texts, press releases or other publications’ articles.

How we report

Every fact in a story comes from a source we have read ourselves, and the story says who that source is. Words inside quotation marks are reproduced exactly. When a statement was issued in another language, we say so and the translation is ours. We do not attribute to anyone words they did not say, and we present our own calculations as ours, not the source’s. We write our stories from primary sources. Where a statement is public but its original text cannot be accessed, we say who said it, where, and which publication reported it. This applies to information that is public but whose original text or recording we cannot open — remarks at a press conference, a post on a closed platform, a site we cannot reach, or a paper behind a paywall: we report it only when at least five established news organisations carry the same information, we say in the story that this is how we obtained it, we put inside quotation marks only the words those outlets share, and figures are taken from the official source wherever one is open to us.

Checks before publication

Every story is read a second time against its source before it is published — for accuracy, logic and language. Automated checks also confirm that the names, figures and quotations in a story appear in the source material.

Sensitive stories

Stories about deaths, crimes, accidents or court cases are written only from statements by the responsible authorities. We do not name suspects or victims unless the authorities have done so, and we do not carry advertising on these pages.

Headlines and images

Headlines state what the story says and nothing more. Images are freely licensed photographs that show the subject of the story or clearly illustrate its topic, credited to their author with a link to the licence, or our own graphics. Where we have no suitable photograph we use a graphic rather than an unrelated picture.

Corrections

When we get something wrong we correct it promptly and say that we have done so. See our corrections policy.