The press watchdog has rapped a regional daily for giving the misleading impression standards had fallen under the leadership of a school’s former principal.
The Bristol Post also misinterpreted information on a school newsletter which compounded its inaccuracy, the Independent Press Standards Organisation found.
The Post reported in March that Beverley Martin, who it said had served as executive head teacher of the Ridings Federation, an educational trust which runs a number of schools in South Gloucestershire, left the role “under a cloud” after less than six months.
It said that more than 30 teachers had left one of the schools, Yate International Academy, during the previous summer, claiming the school, and its sister institution Winterbourne Academy, used to be “the most outstanding schools in South Gloucestershire”.
Ms Martin, pictured above left, complained to IPSO under Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice, claiming was intentionally biased against her and contained numerous inaccuracies.
The complainant said her title at the trust had been chief executive principal and principal of Yate International Academy, adding she had not left the post “under a cloud” but of her own volition seven months after starting the post, not “less than six months” as reported.
In addition, she claimed approximately seven staff had left Yate and not “more than 30 teachers”, as had been reported.
Ms Martin also disputed that the schools had once been “the most outstanding in South Gloucestershire” because Winterbourne had never achieved an Ofsted grade higher than ‘Good’, and Yate International had never achieved more than ‘Satisfactory’, noting Yate had become part of the trust because it had been a failing school.
The Post said it had relied on a school newsletter which had said that 30 members of staff were leaving in summer 2015, which the newspaper understood to mean Yate alone rather than all schools run by the trust.
It offered to publish a correction stating Yate had only ever been rated “satisfactory” by Ofsted, and that the 30 members of staff had worked across the trust’s schools.
IPSO found the claim Yate had been “one of the most outstanding schools in South Gloucestershire” had given the significantly misleading impression that Ofsted had found that standards at the school had fallen under the complainant’s leadership.
This impression was compounded by the inaccurate assertion that 30 members of staff had left the school in the summer of 2015, and represented a failure to take care over the accuracy of the article.
However, the Committee dismissed several other claimed inaccuracies put forward by Ms Martin and found the offered correction was sufficient for the Post to avoid a further breach of Code.
The complaint was upheld, and the full adjudication can be read here.
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It relied on a school newsletter? Did it not go to person it was attacking to check the facts? Surely someone in the office suggested such a thing?
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Doesn’t work like that now, paperboy. Just chuck it at a website, hope it sticks and then scrape it off to run in a paper a few days later perhaps. Proofing, checking, double-checking all old hat, old chum. After all, have you ever known a press release to be wrong?
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Paperboy, the newspaper world has changed. It’s not that standards have slipped; there are no standards any more. This is largely because the ‘old hands’, the ‘sticklers’ and the ‘proper’ journalists have all gone. The kids who populate most newsrooms have nobody to look up to, nobody to ask and nobody to aspire to.
The average journalists in the industry have now all been promoted way above their levels and they keep on the right side of management instead of doing what’s right.
There is little quality left in local newspapers and readers can see it. That’s why they are leaving in droves.
I actually avoid mentioning to people that I used to edit the local paper. It’s now so bad that I’m embarrassed about my association with it.
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Yep, Harry makes my point far more eloquently. One online title with pretensions to quality recently ran a story in which the circumstances of the case were presented completely the wrong way around, thus rendering it all gibberish. When a sub preparing it for the paper pointed this out, the author replied “Oh yes, silly me, you’re right” – and then left it unchanged online to baffle more readers. That’s where we’re at now in too many cases – youngsters in desperately understaffed news teams with perhaps one harassed editor with a thousand other things on their plate to go to withy queries. Above this level legions of pointless managers sail on serenely drawing their big salaries and contributing nowt to generating what profits are left.
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yes harry I know how you feel. My local weekly paper of which I was once so proud is now in the tender care of a creature called a content editor who could not even edit a shopping list. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. And the kids, some of them not long ago production people, sail along merrily writing rubbish and thinking they have made it and sticking Journalist on their Facebook entries. I wish so much it was otherwise, for the sake of others making a living in hacking.
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The Bristol Post is no longer daily, having discontinued a Saturday edition in May 2012. It only publishes Monday-Friday.
This is by no means an isolated incident of Post sloppiness. The paper constantly commits gaffes, of varying degrees of severity, yet very seldom publishes corrections/amendments in print or online – despite a prominent stated policy (usually on page 2 of each day’s Post) of correcting errors.
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Paperboy, without stating the bleedin’ obvious: Go to the article on this website about a regional publisher shedding up to 19 subs. Then have another look at this story. It tells you all you need to know, I would think.
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