Corrections Policy
When we get something wrong we fix it on the page where it appeared, we say what was wrong, and we date the change. Nothing is quietly swapped out and left to look as though it was always right.
The reason we are strict about this is the reader we write for. Somebody who reads a news site every morning catches a wrong figure themselves, because it fails to match what they read yesterday. Ours has been away five days, has nothing to check us against, and will carry our error out of the building intact.
Correction, clarification, update
Those three words mean different things and we use them precisely. A correction means we published something that was not true. The note says what the article said before, what it says now, and when we changed it.
A clarification means every fact was accurate but the wording let a reader walk away with something untrue, usually through a missing piece of context or a headline that outran the story. It gets the same visible note under its own label, because calling it a factual error would itself be inaccurate.
An update means the story moved. A figure was revised by the body that issued it, a court ruled, a company confirmed what it had refused to confirm. That gets a dated line saying what was added, and it is not dressed up as an admission of error, since pretending news is a mistake devalues the notes that really are corrections.
What changes on the page, and what never does
The note goes on the article itself. A corrections column elsewhere on the site is a place errors go to be forgotten, and the reader who was misled is reading the story, not the column. If the headline was wrong, it is fixed and the note records that it changed, because a silently rewritten headline is the most common way an outlet hides a bad call.
The address stays the same. We do not republish a fixed version at a new URL and leave the record behind, and we do not remove the note after a decent interval. Spelling, punctuation and formatting are tidied without ceremony, with one line drawn: a misspelled name is not a typo. It is a factual error about a person, and it gets a note.
Telling us, and how quickly we move
Write to support@thelittlebinger.com with the word correction in the subject line. What helps is which article, which sentence, and what the right version is if you know it. A document or a link we can check is worth considerably more to us than an argument about tone.
You get an acknowledgement inside one working day. A plain factual error is usually decided the same day, and anything needing us to go back to a source or a dataset takes longer, in which case we say it is taking longer rather than going silent. You get an answer when the answer is no, with what we rechecked and why the line stands. Reports land at the single inbox described on our contact page, and corrections are the one category that jumps the queue.
Who decides
Our managing editor owns the corrections queue and makes the call. Not the writer, and not the section editor who commissioned the piece, because nobody is a reliable judge of their own copy under challenge. Where the disputed claim is central to the story, a second editor redoes the checking from the source material rather than rereading the article.
If the writer disagrees with the decision, the managing editor decides anyway and the reasoning is recorded. Material corrections are logged with the date, the article and what was wrong, and that log gets read periodically to find the patterns. The last read of it told us that most of our factual errors came from numbers picked up in the first day of a developing story, which is why the rule about tracing a figure back to its original source now sits in our fact-checking policy.
Chasing the error off every other surface
A correction that only exists on the article has half finished the job, because the wrong version has already travelled. Any post we published carrying the bad claim is corrected or taken down with the reason stated, and never left standing quietly while the article behind it is fixed.
Newsletter errors are corrected at the top of the next send rather than at the bottom, in the same place a reader would have seen the original claim. Where a publisher licensed the story from us, we tell them what changed and ask them to correct their copy, and we say in our own note that the request was made. We cannot force an aggregator or a scraper to update. We can make certain the version at our address is right and that nothing we control is still repeating the bad line.
Taking a page down, and when we will not
Articles get corrected or updated. They do not get deleted, because an unpublished article is a record of an error that nobody can inspect, including us.
There are narrow exceptions and they are worth naming. A legal order we are bound by. A detail that puts a source at risk of physical harm, which is normally answered by removing the detail rather than the story. And the rare piece whose foundation is wrong in a way no correction can repair, in which case the page stays at its address carrying an explanation of what happened, rather than becoming a dead link.
What does not move us is embarrassment, a lawyer’s letter that contains no factual complaint, or an advertiser’s spend. The arrangement that makes the last of those automatic is described in our editorial standards. We are asked for removals often enough to have stopped negotiating each one and to publish the rule instead, and turning them down costs us money we can count.
Last updated: August 2026.
