A regional daily has apologised to the family of a man it wrongly reported had been found dead in a skip.

The Bolton News has said sorry to relatives of Christopher Paxford and made a donation to charity after they went to the Independent Press Standards Organisation over the error.

The News blamed the mistake on human error in its reporter’s shorthand when it covered the inquest at Bolton Coroner’s Court into the death of Mr Paxford, who was in fact found dead in a derelict mill.

The matter was resolved after the newspaper agreed to donate to Mr Paxford’s favourite charity, Bolton Urban Outreach.

Complaining under Clause 1 (Accuracy) and Clause 4 (Intrusion into grief or shock) of the Editors’ Code of Practice, Mr Paxford’s family said he was found in a derelict mill and provided a recording of the inquest to support his position.

They also considered the article to be sensationalist and claimed that when they had contacted the News to make them aware of the inaccuracy, the staff were facetious, condescending and unwilling to concede that a mistake had been made.

The News accepted the story was inaccurate after receiving the recording of the inquest from IPSO but said it was not an attempt to sensationalise the man’s death in any way.

It apologised for its mistake and published a correction, although the family were upset by the repetition of the reference to “derelict skip”.

They also did not consider the correction addressed everything he believed went wrong during the handling of their complaint or how the original error occurred.

In response, the News said it had conducted an internal review and has since spoken to the reporter about the importance of accuracy, adding it had included the incorrect phrase in its apology because it felt it was important to be transparent about the error it had made.

After IPSO began an investigation into the matter, the News published a further apology with an explanation of how the mistake happened and agreed to make a donation to the charity.

This resolved the matter to the family’s satisfaction and IPSO therefore discontinued its investigation.

The full resolution statement can be read here.