Newspapers Editing and Proofreading Services

A newspaper's reputation is made in the reporting and lost in the furniture. The story can be accurate, sourced and fair, and the headline written over it by someone who had ninety seconds and a fixed character count can assert something the reporter carefully did not. Readers do not distinguish; the headline is what they saw, what they shared, and what they remember. In a market where most people encounter the headline alone, the gap between it and the article underneath has become the main way a careful newsroom damages itself.

We edit what newspapers and their staff produce — news copy and features, headlines, standfirsts, subheadings and captions, live coverage and rolling updates, comment and editorial columns, letters and reader correspondence, obituary and announcement copy, style guides and house conventions, sourcing and anonymity policies, corrections and clarifications policies and their published notices, legal read and pre-publication check procedures, freelance contributor guidelines and rate cards, complaints handling and regulator correspondence, and reader-facing explanations of how the newsroom works. Our editors work to your house style and are conscious that the same story runs in print, online and social with different constraints.

The headline is where accuracy is most often surrendered, and the failure is usually a category error rather than a lie. A story reporting that a review found no evidence of wrongdoing becomes a headline saying the person was cleared, which is a different claim; a story attributing a figure to a campaign group becomes a headline stating it as fact; a question mark is added to a claim the article does not support, on the theory that a question asserts nothing, which no reader has ever believed. We work on headline conventions so an attribution that is load-bearing in the copy survives into the display text, so the headline claims no more than the strongest sentence the article can stand behind, so the online and print versions are checked against each other rather than written independently, and so nothing in the sell or the social card contradicts the correction that may later be applied to the article. This costs a few minutes per story and prevents the complaint that arrives with a screenshot.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished copy, source material and matters subject to legal or regulatory process. We are editors rather than lawyers and offer no view on defamation, contempt, privacy or regulatory compliance. What we can do is make copy clean, headlines accurate to the story, and house policies clear enough that a new subeditor applies them the same way at eleven at night.