Wire Services Editing and Proofreading Services

A wire story is written once and published by hundreds of outlets, in different countries, under different legal regimes, often with no further editing. That is a form of leverage no other journalism has and a form of exposure to match: an error does not appear once, it appears everywhere simultaneously, and the correction reaches a fraction of the places the original did. Wire copy has to be right, neutral enough to run in outlets that disagree with each other, and self-contained enough to make sense to a reader who has seen none of the coverage leading up to it.

We edit what news agencies and wire services produce — breaking news alerts and urgent copy, running stories and writethrus, background and context files, explainers and factboxes, corrections, kills and advisories, style guides and their global application, sourcing and verification standards, guidance on datelines and attribution, subscriber advisories and embargo notices, translated and multilingual versions of the same story, picture and video captions accompanying text, and editorial standards on neutrality and contested terminology. Our editors work to your stylebook and are conscious that copy must run unchanged in markets with different assumptions and different law.

The writethru discipline is what separates a wire from a website, and it is the thing least understood outside agencies. A story is filed, developed, corrected and expanded through the day, and every subscriber must be able to tell which version they hold, what changed, and whether their earlier publication needs correcting. We work on these conventions so each writethru states what is new in it rather than leaving desks to diff two versions under deadline; so a correction is issued as a correction with the erroneous element named explicitly, never folded silently into an update, since a subscriber who published the error needs to know they did; so a kill notice says plainly what must not be used and why, in language a desk can act on in seconds; and so the top of the story is rewritten as the story develops rather than having new material appended, because the outlet publishing at hour six is not going to restructure it. Agencies that maintain this discipline are trusted to run unedited, which is the entire product.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished copy, embargoed material and subscriber correspondence. We are editors rather than journalists or lawyers, and we offer no view on verification, neutrality judgements or legal risk in any jurisdiction. What we can do is make copy clean, self-contained and consistent with your stylebook at volume.