BBC's credit and attribution policy on local news stories published

For a long time now the BBC's local news teams have been paying particular care to ensure that when we follow up on stories from other media sources we make that clear to our audience. Now we are sharing what we have circulated to all our teams already: our policy on credit and attribution.



It is one of the many positive products of the Local Journalism Working Group, set up with a range of other local news organisations as part of a renewed commitment by the BBC to be a good neighbour. 



We are doing this for a couple of reasons. 



Attribution is a key part of accurate reporting. At a fundamental level the audience should be in no doubt when we are reporting things that we have witnessed directly or those seen by others. 



Not that attribution is always so clear cut. When a story can spread round the globe in minutes, or when content is a commodity syndicated across multiple online outlets simultaneously, it is sometimes impossible to pinpoint the exact origin of a claim or a quote. And we must also accept that journalists have been borrowing from each other since the dawn of time, sometimes fairly and sometimes not.



Attribution alone is not enough. It is also important that when we follow up on someone else's story we give them due credit. Even if every fact of the story has had to be verified by a BBC journalist, it still remains true that we owe our knowledge of it to someone else: fairness and respect demands we explain where it came from. We know as well as anyone how it feels to have our work taken and used wholesale with no acknowledgement, but two wrongs don't make a right.



These principles are not new for us, but writing them down and sharing them widely is. There is a recurrent theme in some quarters of the local news media that the BBC depends on the work of others to fill its bulletins and further, that it rarely gives credit to those whose work it consumes. This is not the case and publishing this policy is a mark of our confidence. If anyone feels their work has not been properly credited by BBC English Regions they should contact us so that we can investigate it.

Download the English Regions Policy on Credit and Attribution

David Holdsworth is controller of English Regions

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