THE EDITORIAL CHARTER

What this is

Not a statement of values. Values are cheap and every paper has the same ones. This is the working rule for each decision a newsroom makes often enough to get wrong: what runs, what is held, whose name goes on it, what happens when it is wrong.

PT24 publishes for Nagpur and Vidarbha, in Hindi, Marathi and English. A city paper is read by the people it writes about, which is the whole of its discipline.

Who answers for what is published

One person. The chief editor named on Who we are answers for every word on this site, including the words on this page.

Every story carries the desk that filed it. The signed editorial publishes over the chief editor's name and nobody else's, and this is enforced rather than trusted: a piece arriving as an editorial under any other byline is demoted to an ordinary story before it reaches a reader, and the demotion is logged.

Before a story runs

The rules that gate publication here are the ones a small newsroom breaks first when it is in a hurry, so they are held by the system rather than by the person in the hurry.

Two sources

A story the desk claims as its own exclusive does not publish until two independent sources stand behind it. One source is a tip and not a story.

Two people

A reader's piece is read and cleared by two people at the desk before it appears, never by the one who took it in.

Named, or explained

A source we do not name is a decision the desk takes and can defend, not a convenience. Where a story rests on someone unnamed, the story says why they are unnamed.

Asked, before publication

Anyone accused of something in a PT24 story is asked about it before it runs. If we could not reach them, the story says so, and their answer is added when it comes.

Where the reporting comes from

Most of what PT24 carries today is not this desk's own reporting. It is filed by local publications and agencies, checked, rewritten for this paper's readers and published over a PT24 desk byline. That is an honest way to run a city paper and a dishonest thing to hide, so it is written here rather than left to be noticed.

Every such story records the publication it came from, and this paper's rule is that the name is printed with the story. Where you cannot see it on a page, ask the desk and we will tell you who reported it. We do not claim another newsroom's work as our own.

When several papers file the same event, the desk groups the filings and prints one, rather than the same news four times under four mastheads.

What we do not publish

A rumour that is going around, however fast it is going. A photograph or a video whose origin we cannot establish. The name of a survivor of sexual violence, or of a child in trouble with the law, or anything else the law keeps out of print. A person's caste or religion where it is not what the story is about. The method of a suicide.

Coverage that was paid for. There is no price at which a story runs on PT24, and no advertiser has ever been shown a story before a reader was.

Advertising and the desk

Advertisements on PT24 are sold and served by this house, not by an advertising network, and they are marked as advertisements. An advertiser buys a space on a page and never a word on it.

What an advertisement claims is the advertiser's claim. The desk will refuse one it believes to be false, and refusing costs the paper money, which is the only reason the rule is worth writing down.

Readers in the paper

PT24 Awaaz publishes readers' own pieces. A piece is edited for language, length and law and never for meaning, and where something substantial has to change the writer is asked first. A piece carries the writer's own view and not this paper's, and the page says so under every one.

Sawaal puts a question to the city and prints what it answers. Nukkad is reported from a street. Neither is a survey and neither is presented as one.

When we get it wrong

We correct it in the open. A correction is printed on the story it belongs to and carries the date it was logged rather than the date of the story, so a reader can see that the paper changed its mind and when. A story is not quietly edited and left looking as though it always said that.

Every correction this newsroom makes is collected in the corrections log, which is a page on this site and not a file in an office.

What a reader is owed

An answer

To a correction request, from the desk named on the story.

A reply in the paper

Where PT24 has criticised you by name, your answer belongs in the paper and not only in our inbox.

A named officer

A complaint that the desk has not settled goes to the grievance officer, who acknowledges it within 24 hours and decides it within 15 days.

A way out

Nothing here takes away a right you have under the law, and that is not a formality: the officer's answer is the paper's, not the last word available to you.

This charter itself

It is dated at the top and it will change, because a rule that never changes is one nobody is testing. When it changes, the date changes with it.

If the paper you are reading is not the paper described here, that is worth a complaint, and this page is the standard to hold it to.