How a Business Story Is Checked Before It Runs

A business story fails in small ways. A decimal in the wrong place. A subsidiary named as its parent. An adjective that does the work of a fact. None of these is dramatic, and each can sink a reputation, ours or somebody else's.

So every story on this desk goes through four checks before it runs. Here they are, using an invented example: a draft that says Brannock Textile Works "slashed its workforce by a third" and "posted a disastrous quarter".

Check one: recompute every number

We don't copy numbers. We rebuild them. The reporter hands over the source documents, and a second person with a calculator derives each figure from scratch.

In the draft, the workforce fell from 240 to 168. That is a drop of 72, and 72 divided by 240 is 0.3. A third would have been 80. So "a third" is wrong, and "30 percent" is right. A small error, and the kind a company's lawyer will quote back to us for a year.

Check two: confirm every name

Names are checked against a registry, not against memory. Is it Brannock Textile Works Ltd or the Brannock Group? Is the chief executive still the chief executive? Is the plant in the city or just on the city's mailing address?

A wrong name does damage in both directions. It libels the wrong party, and it lets the right one off.

Check three: test the adjectives

"Disastrous" is not a measurement. It is a judgement, and a judgement needs a yardstick. If revenue fell 11 percent when the sector fell 14, "disastrous" is hard to defend. We ask the reporter: compared to what?

Where we can't find a yardstick, the adjective goes. A plain number and a plain comparison let readers do their own adjectiving, which they will anyway.

Check four: the right of reply

Every named company or person gets the claims about them, in writing, with a deadline. The deadline is at least one working day, and longer for anything complicated. If the company replies, we print the reply. If it declines, we say it declined and when we asked.

A reply that arrives after the deadline is still a reply. It goes online and, if it matters, into tomorrow's paper.

What happens to the draft

By the end, the sentence about Brannock reads: "The company cut its workforce from 240 to 168, a fall of 30 percent, and reported revenue down 11 percent in a quarter when the sector fell 14." It is less exciting than the first version. It is also something nobody can argue with, and in this trade that matters more than excitement.

None of the four checks is heroic. They are repetitive and a little dull, and they are why a reader can trust the third paragraph without reading the sources.

Names, places and events in this demo are fictional.