Public Broadcasting Editing and Proofreading Services

A public broadcaster is held to a standard no commercial outlet faces: it must be accurate, impartial and independent, and it must be seen to be all three by audiences who disagree with each other about what impartiality looks like. Every editorial decision is potentially a parliamentary question. The written apparatus around the journalism — editorial standards, complaint responses, corrections, commissioning guidance — is what allows the organisation to defend itself, and it is chronically under-resourced compared with the programming it governs.

We edit what public broadcasters and their regulators produce — editorial policies and journalistic standards documents, guidance notes on impartiality, conflicts of interest and social media use, complaint responses and appeal decisions, on-air and online correction wording, commissioning guidelines and producer handbooks, independence and governance documentation, annual reports and accountability reporting to legislatures, licence renewal and regulatory submissions, audience research and public value assessments, accessibility standards including captioning and described video, official language and Indigenous language service commitments, archives and rights documentation, and public explanations of editorial decisions. Our editors are conscious that this material is quoted against the organisation and check that it commits only to what the organisation can consistently do.

The correction is the smallest document in this list and the one that most affects trust. Broadcasters resist making them prominent, and audiences read a buried, hedged correction as an admission that the organisation cares more about its reputation than about the record. We write these so the correction states what was wrong and what is correct in that order, without a preamble explaining how the error occurred, since the audience wants the fact rather than the excuse; so the original claim is repeated plainly enough that someone who remembers the wrong version recognises it; so any consequence to a person wrongly described is addressed directly; and so it carries the same prominence as the error, which is the test every regulator applies and most corrections fail. A broadcaster that corrects quickly and plainly is not admitting unreliability. It is demonstrating the one thing that distinguishes it from the sources its audience is comparing it against.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including editorial guidance in draft, complaint files and material before broadcast. We are editors rather than journalists, regulators or legal advisers, and we offer no view on any editorial decision, complaint or impartiality question. What we can do is make standards documents usable by producers under deadline and public-facing accountability writing clear.