Online News Outlets Editing and Proofreading Services

Online news publishes continuously into a situation nobody understands yet. During a breaking story the outlet knows less than its audience assumes, competitors are publishing claims it cannot confirm, and the pressure to match them is immediate and quantified. Everything published in the first hour is retrievable forever, including the paragraph that turned out to be wrong, and increasingly the screenshot of that paragraph outlives the corrected version of the article entirely.

We edit what digital newsrooms produce — breaking news copy and live blogs, rolling updates and their timestamping conventions, verification and sourcing policies for user-generated and social material, standards for reporting unconfirmed claims, correction, update and unpublishing policies, article versioning and change-log conventions, headline and social card copy, newsletter and push notification text, comment moderation policies, transparency and ownership disclosures, editorial guidelines and staff social media policy, reader funding and membership copy, and archive and takedown request handling. Our editors check that what the outlet knows is distinguishable from what it has been told.

Reporting an unconfirmed claim is the decision that defines a digital newsroom's standards, and the wording is the whole of it. "Reports suggest" and "it is understood that" attribute to nobody and commit the outlet to everything; a claim carried from a competitor with no independent check becomes, in the reader's mind, this outlet's reporting. We write conventions so every unconfirmed element states who is saying it and how they would know, so the outlet's own verification status is explicit — confirmed by us, reported by a named outlet we have not matched, circulating on social media and unverified — and so a live blog entry that is later contradicted is struck through and corrected in place rather than quietly disappearing, with the time of both the original and the correction. We also insist the push notification and the social card carry the same qualification as the article, because those are the versions most people receive and they are routinely written without one. Newsrooms that hold this line publish slightly slower and are quoted rather than screenshotted.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished copy, source material and takedown correspondence. We are editors rather than lawyers and offer no view on verification of any claim, or on defamation, contempt or privacy risk. What we can do is make sourcing language precise and correction practice consistent under speed.