Public Broadcasting Editing and Proofreading Services

Nine words in a news bulletin, spoken at 6:04 p.m., name the wrong company as the subject of a federal investigation. The correction goes out eleven days later, at the foot of a web page, and it opens with a paragraph about how the error occurred. Viewers who heard the original never see it. Members of Congress who fund the network do see it, and so does the company's attorney. Every editorial decision at a public broadcaster is a potential hearing question, and the written apparatus around the journalism is what the organization has to defend itself with.

The documents we edit for Public Broadcasting

Editorial standards and journalistic guidelines reach us most often, together with guidance notes on impartiality, conflicts of interest, and staff use of social media. Complaint responses and appeal decisions follow, along with on-air and online correction wording, commissioning guidelines, and producer handbooks. The work also covers independence and governance documentation, annual reports, accountability filings to Congress and to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and license renewal submissions. Audience research and public value assessments come through as well, with accessibility standards covering captioning and audio description, Spanish-language and Indigenous-language service commitments, archives and rights documentation, and public explanations of editorial decisions. Our editors read this material as it will be read back to the organization, and they check that it commits only to what the organization can do every time.

What the editing involves

The correction is the smallest document a newsroom produces and the one that decides how much of the rest an audience believes. Broadcasters resist giving corrections prominence, and a buried, hedged notice reads as an organization protecting its reputation rather than the record. A correction opening "During our coverage of the March budget negotiations, an editing error led to a sequence of events we now wish to explain" has spent its first twenty-two words on the newsroom. A correction reading "We reported on March 4 that the company was under federal investigation, and it was not" gives the error and the fact in the order the audience needs them.

Prominence is the test every regulator applies, and it is the test most corrections fail. An error broadcast at 6 p.m. and corrected in a web footnote has not been corrected for the audience that heard it. The original claim has to be repeated plainly enough that a viewer who remembers the wrong version recognizes it, which a notice about "an inaccuracy in a recent report" does not manage. Where a person was wrongly described, the correction should say what was said about them and what the record now shows. A broadcaster that corrects quickly is not admitting unreliability; it is demonstrating the one thing that separates it from the sources its audience is comparing it against.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including editorial guidance in draft, complaint files, and material before broadcast. We are editors, not journalists, regulators, or legal advisors, and we offer no opinion on any editorial decision, complaint, or impartiality question. What we can do is make a standards document usable by a producer on deadline and a correction readable by the people who heard the error.