A new guidebook for editors to the Editors’ Code of Practice has been produced for publishers signed up to the press watchdog.

The Independent Press Standards Organisation has announced the launch of the Editors’ Codebook, which puts the Code in context and highlights best practice and key adjudications it has made.

The book is intended to help members of the public considering making a complaint, and editors facing a difficult decision on a story which might give rise to a breach of the Code, by providing examples of how IPSO has approached similar cases in the past.

Topics featured in the guide include coverage of suicide, discrimination, privacy, the use of subterfuge and the special protection provided for children.

IPSO chairman Sir Alan Moses said: “IPSO welcomes the publication of a new edition of the handbook. It is a fresh and vital source of what the Code means in practice.

“It sets out the steps editors and journalists should take to avoid breaches of the Code. It demonstrates the ambition of all those committed to its provisions to maintain a regulated but untamed press.”

Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, who is also chairman of the Editors’ Code of Practice Committee, said: “The Editors’ Code is the rock on which self-regulation of the press is founded.

“This new edition of the Codebook is a vital guide to how the Code has changed post-Leveson and how IPSO now enforces it.

“I commend it to everyone – journalists and the public alike – who needs to know how the Code works and how IPSO are likely to interpret it when there is a complaint.”