Eighty-Eight Corrections Issued. Twelve Reached The Papers That Ran The Error.
The Continental Wire published its correction figures for the first time on Tuesday. Corrections do not travel on the news feed. They travel on an advisory feed priced at £140 a month, which sixty-one of 140 subscribers do not buy.
LONDON, United Kingdom — Eighty-eight corrections issued. Twelve recorded as having reached a subscriber that had published the error.
The Continental Wire put those figures on its public standards page on Tuesday, covering the second quarter. So far as this desk can establish, no wire service anywhere has published such a table before.
This item records what is in it.
The counts
Eighty-eight corrections were issued between 1 April and 30 June.
Seventy-nine of them concerned a story that at least one subscriber had taken. Nine concerned copy nobody ran.
Thirty-four concerned a story taken by at least one subscriber that also buys the corrections feed.
Twelve are recorded in the table as having reached a subscriber site that had carried the erroneous story.
The table names no subscriber, and does not define the word "reached".
The feeds
Corrections do not move on the news feed. They move on a separately priced advisory feed.
The wire's 2026 rate card, supplied on request within four hours, prices the advisory feed at £140 a month on top of any news tier. The wire has 140 subscribers. Sixty-one do not take it.
Of those sixty-one, forty-four are on the lowest news tier, Regional B, at £310 a month, which the card offers to titles under 25,000 circulation.
The corrections themselves
We read all eighty-eight.
They are prompt. The median interval from the wire being notified to the correction going out is seventy-one minutes, and the longest is nine hours and four minutes, on a bank holiday.
They are also well made. Each one names the error, names the story it corrects, gives the corrected wording in full, and does not explain itself. There is no throat-clearing in any of the eighty-eight. This newspaper does not manage that.
Harjit Bhogal-Mears runs the night desk of a daily selling 12,400 copies in the north of England. His title is on Regional B. It does not take the advisory feed. He was asked why and gave the reason before the question had finished: the feed costs about what the paper pays a casual sub for two shifts a month, and he would rather have the sub.
He also said, unprompted, that he checks the wire's public standards page most mornings when he remembers, and that he does not always remember.
What this item is not
It is not an allegation. Nothing in the table suggests the wire has suppressed a correction, delayed one, or written one badly, and we found no evidence of any of those things.
It is not a comparison, either, because there is nothing to compare it against. Dr. Serafina Quill-Baptiste, who made the only previous attempt to measure correction propagation and abandoned it in 2019 for want of cooperation, points out that twelve may be an unusually good number or an unusually poor one and that nobody alive can say which.
And it is not, yet, a story about the twelve. We asked the wire on Tuesday morning for the per-subscriber breakdown, and again in writing on Tuesday evening. The director of standards has undertaken to provide it and has explained, in the reply printed below, why she cannot do so this week.
What we are waiting for
Three things. The names behind the twelve. The wire's definition of "reached". And confirmation of whether the sixty-one who do not take the advisory feed are the same sixty-one who took the erroneous stories in the first place, which the table permits us to guess at and does not permit us to state.
Until those arrive, the position of this desk is that eighty-eight corrections were written well and quickly by people who then had to charge £140 a month to tell anyone about them, and that we do not yet know what that has cost a reader in Blackburn.
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Sources & Method
This is a record of a published table and a rate card, read against each other, with two calls made to check that we had read them correctly. It reports counts, a price and how the feeds are arranged. Our correspondent has asked for the per-subscriber breakdown and for the identity of the twelve, and will not characterise these figures until she has them.
Who we spoke to
- The Continental Wire, second-quarter corrections and propagation table, Eleven pages, published to the wire's public standards page, 18 August 2026. Downloaded on the morning of publication, archived by this newspaper, and republished in full alongside this item 18 August 2026 No subscriber is named anywhere in it. Neither is the method by which 'reached' was determined.
- The Continental Wire, 2026 rate card, Commercial schedule, four tiers plus optional feeds. Supplied on request by the wire's commercial office, without conditions, within four hours of being asked 18 August 2026 Advisory feed £140 a month. Lowest news tier, 'Regional B', £310 a month, sold to titles under 25,000 circulation.
- Ottoline Fenwick-Adeyemi, Director of standards, The Continental Wire. Telephone, forty minutes, on the record; sent the draft of this item and given until Tuesday evening to answer 18 August 2026 Her reply is printed at the foot of this item, unedited. She thinks our funnel is fair and our headline is not.
- Harjit Bhogal-Mears, Night editor, a 12,400-circulation daily in the north of England. Telephone twice; his title's subscription tier confirmed against the rate card with his employer's written permission 18 and 19 August 2026 Regional B. Does not take the advisory feed. Gave the reason without being asked for it.
- Dr. Serafina Quill-Baptiste, Researcher on correction propagation, and author of the only prior attempt to measure it. Video call; sent the table in advance and asked only what it does and does not establish 19 August 2026 Warns that a delivery record is not a reading record and that the table does not claim to be one.
What we could not confirm
- Which twelve. The table gives a count and no names. We asked the wire for the per-subscriber breakdown on the morning of publication and again in writing that evening, and we do not have it. Until we do, we cannot say whether the twelve are twelve different titles or four titles corrected three times each.
- What the wire means by 'reached'. The table does not define the word. It could mean the advisory item was fetched by a subscriber's system, or that a correction notice was published on the page carrying the error, or something between. Dr. Quill-Baptiste reads it as the first. The wire has not yet told us.
- Whether sixty-one is a current figure. The subscriber count is dated 30 June and the rate card is dated January. Two subscribers have joined since the quarter closed and we do not know what either of them bought.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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Signal & LedgerContinental Becomes First Wire To Publish Correction Propagation
Read the release as a governance milestone and explained the tier structure to readers who buy feeds for a living.
Had that we did not
The rate card, laid out clearly, with the news tiers priced beside the advisory feed. Better than we managed.
Left out
The twelve. The figure appears in their fourteenth paragraph without the denominator beside it.
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The Hollow PostThe Wire That Sells You Its Own Mistakes Back
Took the £140 as the story and the release as an accident of candour that the wire will come to regret.
Had that we did not
The price, correctly, and the observation that the cheapest tier is bought by the smallest titles.
Left out
That no other wire service publishes any propagation figure at all, so there is nothing to measure twelve against.
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They Buriedthis newspaperEighty-Eight Corrections Issued. Twelve Reached The Papers That Ran The Error.
Recorded the counts, the price and the feed architecture, and declined to say what any of it means until the breakdown arrives.
Had that we did not
All five steps of the funnel, the nine corrections nobody needed, and the seventy-one-minute median we could not fault.
Left out
Our headline sets 88 against 12 and lets a reader do the subtraction before the third bar of the chart explains it. We knew the subtraction was misleading when we set the type. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Ottoline Fenwick-Adeyemi, director of standards, The Continental Wire by telephone on 18 August 2026, then sent the full draft, the chart and the rate-card figures at 18:40 the same day. Replied in writing at 22:15 on 18 August. Printed entire and unedited.
I will answer the arithmetic and then I will object to the headline, and I would be grateful if you printed both parts.
Your funnel is right. I have checked it against our table and I cannot fault a single step of it, including the last one, which is the step we have not published and which you are entitled to be annoyed about. You will have the per-subscriber breakdown. It requires me to obtain the consent of every named subscriber to being named, which is a commercial matter I did not think through before publishing, and that is my fault and not a policy.
Now the objection. Your headline sets eighty-eight against twelve. A reader who goes no further will finish it believing that seventy-six corrections went nowhere, and that is not what our table says. Nine of them corrected stories no subscriber had taken. Forty-five of them corrected stories taken only by subscribers who do not buy the feed the correction travels on, which is a fact about our commercial architecture and I will come to it. Twelve is not the residue of eighty-eight. It is the residue of thirty-four.
On the architecture. I have argued inside this building for three years that corrections should ride the news feed, free, on the same wire and in the same file format as the story they correct. I have lost that argument three times. The reason given each time is that our subscribers' systems ingest the news feed automatically into publishing queues, and an unattended correction landing in a queue at four in the morning becomes, in perhaps a third of installations, a new story on the front. We tested it. It does. The advisory feed exists because it is human-read, and it is priced because it is human-written, and I can defend that sentence but I notice that I do not enjoy defending it.
What I will not accept is the implication I expect your rival to draw tomorrow, that we sell the mistake back to the person who printed it. Every correction we issue is on our public standards page within the hour, free, to anybody, subscriber or not, which is where you got the table. What £140 buys is not the correction. It is the interruption.
And I would point out, without expecting it to be printed prominently, that no wire service in this country has published a propagation figure before. I published one and by Thursday I will be the wire with the correction problem. The next person considering it will have watched what happened to me. That is the part of this I would ask your readers to hold on to.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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