Editorial standards
How pieces are written, checked, and what we refuse to publish.
Three kinds of thing appear here and they are never presented as one another: reporting from other outlets, carried as a headline and a link; incident records, which come from agencies and carry their status and the time it was set; and pieces written here under our own byline.
Some pieces are written with machine assistance under editorial direction. Where that is so the piece still carries our byline and our responsibility, and every rule below applies to it identically. Line-of-duty death coverage, memorials, interviews and investigations are written by a person, always.
We label an unconfirmed incident as unconfirmed, in the first sentence. Radio traffic is not confirmation. Early reports are wrong often enough that repeating them as fact is its own hazard, and we would rather be slower than be part of that.
We do not give a casualty figure without naming the agency that gave it. Early counts change, usually downward, and an unattributed number becomes the number everyone repeats.
We do not publish staging locations, entry points, unit positions or evacuation routes for an incident that is still running. A public page has no business carrying them while people are working them.
We do not publish drug doses, defibrillation energies, oxygen rates, flow rates or pump pressures. Protocols are set by your medical director and pump charts by your department; both differ between jurisdictions, so a published figure would be out of scope even when it is correct.
Anything touching a death, a casualty count, an ongoing incident, a specification or a conduct matter is read by a person before it publishes.