Contact the desk

Contact · operator, routes, response window

Who publishes this site

The four routes

All four routes use the same address. The subject line decides the queue, so please use one of the four words in bold below as the first word of your subject. A message with no route is read in the general queue, which is the slowest.

Write to the desk

The form below reaches the same desk as the email address, and it exists so that you do not have to open a mail client or work out which route to type in a subject line. Choosing a route from the list does the same job as the first word of a subject line. Everything is required, because a message without a name, a reply address or a route takes longer to answer than one that has them, and a message with an empty body cannot be answered at all.

The form asks for nothing beyond those five items. There is no telephone number field, no organisation field, no file upload and no box that quietly signs you up to anything, because the desk sends no mailing of any kind. Your address is used to reply to you and for nothing else, and the privacy notice sets out the legal basis and the retention period for both the form and email in the same terms.

Correction requests: what to include

A correction is assessed against the underlying record rather than against the chapter, so the more precisely the message identifies the disputed sentence and the evidence, the faster it can be resolved. The checklist below is what the desk needs in order to act on the first reading.

Correction request checklist

• The page title and the full address of the page.
• The exact sentence, table cell, caption or checklist item in question.
• What is wrong with it, stated as plainly as you can.
• The record that shows the correct position, with its name, date and section if it has one.
• Whether the error could mislead a reader into a decision with consequences.
• Whether you would like the correction noted publicly on the page or simply fixed.

What the response window means

Five working days is the period within which the desk replies, not the period within which a page changes. A reply confirms that the message arrived, says which route it has been logged under, and states what happens next: that a correction is being assessed against the record, that a barrier has been reproduced and scheduled, or that the desk cannot help and why.

Assessment itself takes as long as the record takes. Where a correction depends on reading the current text of a statute or confirming a body's present remit, that work happens before the page is edited rather than after, and the reply will say so. A correction that changes a fact is dated and described on the page; a typographical fix is made quietly and logged. Requests are logged in order of receipt, with anything capable of misleading a reader into a consequential decision moved to the front of the queue.

Permission to reuse a chapter

Short quotations with attribution need no permission. For classroom handouts, reading lists or internal training notes, send a General enquiry describing what you want to reproduce and where it will be used; the answer is normally yes, on two conditions. The material must be attributed to Craft of Reporting with the page named, and it must not be presented as a recognised programme or as evidence of certified training, because it is neither.

Form, email or telephone: which to choose

The three channels lead to the same desk and the same five working day window, so the choice is a matter of convenience rather than priority. The form suits a short, self-contained message, particularly a correction or an accessibility report, because the route list makes the queue explicit and nothing can be mislaid in a subject line. Email suits a longer message, a thread you want to keep in your own sent items, or any enquiry you would rather send from an address of your choosing.

The telephone is the right channel for two situations in particular: a page that is unreadable for you, where describing the barrier out loud is faster than typing it, and a data-protection request where you want to establish first what the desk actually holds before putting anything in writing. Calls are taken during publication hours only and are not recorded, so anything that needs a record still has to be written down afterwards, either in the form or by email.

The site still runs no live chat, no comment system and no newsletter sign-up, and the form is served from this domain like every other file here, so using it makes no request to any other company. If a further field is ever added to it, the privacy notice will be updated before the field appears rather than after.

Please do not send

Do not send confidential source material, unpublished drafts for review, identity documents, medical or financial details, passwords, or anything you are under a legal duty to keep confidential. This applies equally to the form and to email: neither is a secure channel, neither can promise confidentiality for unsolicited material of that kind, and anything of the sort is deleted on recognising it.

Do not send requests for legal advice, for an opinion on whether a specific article is publishable, or for help with a complaint against another publisher. Complaints about published Irish journalism are handled by the Office of the Press Ombudsman under the Press Council of Ireland's code, and data-protection complaints by the Data Protection Commission. The desk has no role in either process.

What happens to your message

Messages are read by the desk, logged with a date and a route, and kept only as long as needed to resolve the matter and to record what was decided. A form submission and an email are handled identically once they arrive: the fields you filled in become the body of a message in the same mailbox, on the same legal basis, with the same retention period, and neither is ever used for marketing. Correction messages are retained with the correction log because the log is the record of why a page changed. The privacy notice sets out the legal basis, the retention periods and your rights, and names the Data Protection Commission as the supervisory authority.