Disclaimer · the limits in full
1. General information only
Everything on this site is general written information about how reporting is done. It is not advice, and it is not tailored to any reader, publication, article, source or jurisdiction. It does not take account of your circumstances, your employer's rules, your contract, your insurance position or the specific facts of anything you are working on.
Practice described here varies between newsrooms and countries. Conventions differ, house rules differ, and what one editor treats as mandatory another treats as optional. Where a chapter labels something as convention, that label is doing real work: it means you should expect to find it done differently elsewhere.
2. No qualification and no accreditation
Craft of Reporting is not a school, college, university, training provider or awarding body. It runs no course and no programme, sets no assessment, and issues no certificate, transcript, diploma, credit, badge or completion record. It is not accredited by any authority, and it makes no claim of accreditation, recognition, validation or equivalence.
Reading these chapters is therefore not training in any formal sense and produces nothing you can present to an employer, a professional body or an educational institution as evidence of qualification. If somebody offers you a credential based on material from this site, it does not come from this site.
3. No legal advice
The chapters name Irish instruments and bodies, including the Defamation Act 2009, the Freedom of Information Act 2014, data-protection rules supervised by the Data Protection Commission, the Press Council of Ireland code administered through the Office of the Press Ombudsman, and the functions of Coimisiun na Mean. They do so in order to tell you where a question belongs.
They do not state what the law is, do not set out defences, do not apply law to facts and are not a substitute for advice from a solicitor. Statutes are amended, judgments change the position, and codes are revised. Before you publish anything you are unsure about, obtain advice from a suitably qualified professional in the jurisdiction that applies to you. If you have received a legal letter, that advice is urgent and this site is not the place to look for it.
4. No promise of employment or publication
The site arranges no work, placement, internship, shift, commission or introduction, and it makes no representation about your prospects of being employed, commissioned or published. It is not a recruitment agency and does not act as one informally. Any claim that reading these chapters leads to work is false, whoever makes it.
5. No review of your work and no representation
The desk does not read unpublished drafts, does not assess whether a specific article is publishable, does not advise on whether a source may be identified, and does not act for anybody in a complaint, a dispute or a regulatory process. Unsolicited drafts and confidential source material are deleted rather than read.
6. The interactive tool
The story-structure meter in the news-writing lesson is arithmetic. It divides the figures you type: words by words per minute, lede words by total words, words by sentences. It does not read your text, cannot judge whether your top line was the right one, produces no score, grade or assessment, stores nothing and sends nothing anywhere. The reference bands it compares against are conventions used in these notes, not standards imposed by anybody.
7. Institutions named on this site
Every institution named anywhere on this site is named as a neutral reference point so that a reader knows where a record sits or which body sets a rule. No mention implies that Craft of Reporting is a member of, affiliated with, approved by, accredited by, endorsed by, supervised by or in any relationship with that body, and no such relationship exists in any case.
8. External sources and links
Institutions, statutes and codes are named in plain text rather than linked, so that reading a chapter makes no request to any other domain. That also means the site cannot warrant that a document you find elsewhere under the same name is current, complete or the version that applies to you. Check the publishing body's own current text.
9. Accuracy over time
Chapters are reviewed on a stated cycle and corrected when they are wrong, and they will still sometimes be out of date between reviews. A page carries no guarantee of currency. Where a fact changes, the change is dated and described on the page; where you find an error, the correction route on the contact page is the fastest way to have it fixed.
10. What the contact form is not
The form on the contact page is a way of writing to the desk about this site: a correction, a question about scope, a data-protection request, an accessibility barrier. It is not a submission system for pitches or drafts, not a legal enquiry desk, and not a secure channel for anything confidential. It carries no attachment field for that reason, and a message that arrives outside the four routes receives a reasoned reply saying so rather than being quietly filed.
11. Liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, the publisher accepts no liability for loss arising from use of, or reliance on, this material, including any publication decision, legal outcome, complaint, lost opportunity or reputational consequence. Nothing here excludes liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded. The terms of use set out the full position, and the operating company is Craft of Reporting Ltd, CRO 698412, 8 South Mall, Cork, T12 R5NP, Ireland. Telephone +353 21 486 2270, email [email protected].
The limits in seven lines
- General information about practice, not advice about your situation.
- No qualification, credit, certificate or accreditation, and none planned.
- No legal advice: named statutes are signposts to a solicitor, not defences.
- No employment, placement, commission or publication is arranged or promised.
- No review of unpublished work and no role in anybody's complaint.
- The interactive tool is arithmetic that stores nothing and assesses nothing.
- Institutions are named neutrally, with no relationship of any kind implied.