Contact the newsroom
Two ways in, and both land on the same desk: the form on this page, and the address [email protected]. The form is quicker for a correction, because it asks for the page and the sentence in one go; the address is the one to use when something has to be attached, since the form takes text only. What the form does with what you type — where it goes, who handles it and how long it is kept — is set out in Cookies, forms and measurement.
What to send where
| Enquiry | What to include | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| A factual error on a page | Name the page and quote the sentence. If you have the primary source, send the article or section number. | Checked against the cited source, then corrected in place with a dated note |
| A commissioned placement | Say which desk, and what the material would cover. | Answered with the disclosure terms; the plate on the page is not negotiable |
| A takedown of personal data | Name the page and the detail. You do not need to explain why. | Removed on sight where the person is not acting in a public professional capacity |
| Press and embargoed material | Send the document, not a pitch deck about the document. | Read; no guarantee of coverage, and embargoes are respected or declined in writing |
What makes a message easy to act on
A correction is quickest to handle when it names the page and quotes the sentence as printed, because the desk can then go to the source that was used and compare the two without having to guess which claim is being disputed. If the primary document is to hand — an article of a regulation, a section of a specification, a line in a vendor’s changelog — sending the reference with the message removes the slowest step in the whole procedure. A message that says only that a page is wrong somewhere gets read, but it gets read last, because checking an entire piece against every source behind it is the same work as reporting it again.
For a commissioned placement, say which desk the material belongs to and what it would actually cover before asking about terms. The disclosure plate at the top of such a page is not a point of negotiation and never has been, so a message that opens by asking whether the marking can be dropped, softened or moved below the fold is answered in one line. Requests to insert a link into a piece that has already been published are declined for the same reason: the page carried no disclosure when it was published, and adding a paid link to it later would make that page a lie about itself.
What we cannot help with
- Anything to do with the former occupant of this domain. A Pittsburgh marketing and promotions company used this address until 2018. We are not that company, we hold no records of it, and we cannot forward employment enquiries, pay queries or client correspondence to it. Its published material is kept in the archive for reference only.
- Link insertions into archived pages. Published material is not edited to add links.
- Removal of a correctly sourced fact. A correction request has to name the sentence and the error; see How we work.
Response times
Correction requests are looked at first. Everything else is answered in the order it arrives. There is no telephone line and no postal desk: this is a small publication, and an address nobody answers would be worse than no address at all.