We Audited Every Sentence We Printed In July. Fourteen Per Cent Was Bought.
Two clerks traced 4,138 sentences to origin without being told why. The borrowed ones cluster in four hours nobody in this building is awake for, and a permanent overnight desk was costed and voted down in 2024.
A regular column. The views expressed are the writer's own.
LONDON, United Kingdom — Four thousand one hundred and thirty-eight sentences appeared in this newspaper in July.
Five hundred and seventy-nine of them were not written in this building.
That is fourteen per cent, and this column exists because until three weeks ago nobody here could have told you whether the true figure was four per cent or forty.
What the clerks were given
Two temporary clerks, hired through an agency, were given every sentence we published in July, a written rule for what counts as a sentence, and a protocol requiring each one to be traced to a named origin or marked untraceable.
They were not told what the count was for. They were not told which newspaper's archive it was until the ninth day, when one of them worked it out from a chart label and said so.
Their two independent totals differ by thirty-one sentences out of 4,138. Both are published with this column, along with the splitting rule, so that anybody who thinks the rule was written to flatter us can rewrite it.
What the 579 are
Three hundred and twelve are wire copy, run under our masthead with an attribution line at the foot.
Two hundred and fourteen are agency photograph captions, carried unaltered. Our counsel's note, published with this column, confirms that we are contractually forbidden to rewrite them, which is an explanation and not a defence.
Fifty-three are the remainder: standing text, tables, and three of our own datelined exclusives whose central timestamp rests on a single wire's clock, with no independent check by us.
Those three are the only part of this audit that frightened anybody here.
Where it clusters
The dependence is not spread across the day. It is a spike.
Eighty-five per cent of everything we did not write went out between two and six in the morning, UTC. Outside that window the paper runs at about two per cent borrowed, which is roughly what we had assumed the whole month was.
There is no mystery in the spike. Between two and six there is nobody here. The building has a duty phone and a rota, and the rota is a person at home who is asleep unless something wakes them.
The vote
On 9 October 2024 the Buried Trust considered a permanent overnight desk. It had been costed at £186,000 a year: three staff, a shift premium, and a licence for a second wire so that anything running overnight could be matched against a source we do not already depend on.
The trustees declined it, three votes to two, and recorded the names of everyone who voted and how.
The minute was published on the trust's website a week later and has never been taken down. It has, so far as the trust's own logs can tell, been opened eighty-one times in twenty-two months, and eleven of those are us this month.
What our standards page said
For eleven months, between September 2024 and August 2025, the standards page of this website carried the sentence: We run no unattributed wire copy.
That was untrue on 178 occasions in that period. We have counted them.
The sentence was added by a member of staff who no longer works here, during a redesign, in good faith, and nobody checked it. It was removed a year ago in another redesign, also without anybody checking it, which is the part this desk finds harder to explain than the original error.
What this is and is not evidence of
Our borrowed sentences are not evidence of capture. Nobody bought this newspaper's small hours. There is no arrangement, no understanding, and nothing whatever in the trace sheets that points at one.
They are evidence of a budget line. A number was costed, put to five people, voted on, lost three to two, and written down in public by the people who lost and by the people who won.
The trustee who voted against has replied at length below, and she is right that we spent £9,200 finding out the size of a hole she had published the dimensions of in 2024. She is also right that a chart of sentences cannot tell four hundred and ninety-three photograph captions apart from three timestamps we did not check.
She is wrong, we think, about only one thing, and she concedes it herself before we can: what happens here between two and six in the morning is not sourcing. It is us, forwarding, under our own name.
We have printed the fourteen per cent because we counted it. The three exclusives are the ones we will be checking on Monday.
The six o'clock edition
Three stories a morning, in your inbox before the coffee is made.
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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The Meridian TelegraphTHEY BURIED ADMITS: 178 STORIES CARRIED HIDDEN WIRE COPY
Took the standards-page error as the story and our audit as the confession that was forced out of us.
Had that we did not
The 178, accurately, from our own count, and the eleven months, also from our own count.
Left out
That the 178 were found by us, published by us, and would have been found by nobody else, because nobody else was counting.
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Signal & LedgerOvernight Desks Are Being Cut Across The Sector. Here Is What One Costs.
Read our £186,000 against eleven comparable costings and made the sector-wide point we were too close to make.
Had that we did not
The costing, the vote, and the observation that a night desk is the first line cut and the last line restored.
Left out
That our trustees published the minute of the vote at the time, which their piece describes as 'later disclosed'.
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They Buriedthis newspaperWe Audited Every Sentence We Printed In July. Fourteen Per Cent Was Bought.
Counted our own sentences with hired clerks who were not told what the count was for, then printed the budget line underneath.
Had that we did not
The trace sheets, the trustees' minute, the recorded vote three to two, and the corrected standards wording.
Left out
We spent £9,200 auditing why we could not afford £186,000, and this column does not mention that until a trustee says it in her reply. She had to put it in our paper for us. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Delphine Okonjo-Straede, trustee of the Buried Trust, who voted against the overnight desk in October 2024 on 12 August 2026 with the full draft, the trace sheets, the chart and the minute of her own vote, and three weeks in which to answer. Replied by letter on 18 August 2026, asking that it run entire, including the last paragraph. Printed unedited.
You have written a column in which I am the budget line, and I would like to be the argument instead, so here it is.
I voted against the overnight desk and I would vote against it again on the same evidence, and I want your readers to understand that this was not a vote about whether the night matters. It was a vote about £186,000 in a year when the trust's unrestricted income was £3.8 million and the paper's litigation fund — which pays for Miss Halloway's nineteen Freedom of Information cases, one of which ran eleven years — was £171,000. Those two numbers were on the same page of the same paper in front of us. Nobody in the room pretended they were unrelated. The choice was a night desk or the cases, and I chose the cases, and this column is being written by the person whose cases I chose.
I would ask you to notice that the column does not say so.
Second. Your metric is a bad metric and you should say so more loudly than you do. You have counted sentences. A sentence is not a unit of anything. The three exclusives you mention in passing — the ones resting on a single wire's clock — are worth more of your readers' worry than four hundred and ninety-three agency captions describing what is visibly in a photograph, and your chart cannot tell the two apart because a bar chart of sentences has no way to weigh them. You have built an instrument that measures volume and then written a column about trust. I do not think you have quite noticed that you did that.
Third, and this is the one I mind. You spent £9,200 of the paper's money on two agency clerks and nine days of the standards editor's time in order to discover the size of a hole you already knew the shape of, because the shape of it is in a minute I published myself in October 2024 and which, as you correctly report, almost nobody read. £9,200 is two and a half weeks of the desk you say we should have had. You have not costed your own column against the thing your column is about. I have. I am not saying the audit was not worth doing. I am saying that a newspaper that audits everyone else's arithmetic ought to be able to do that subtraction in public without a trustee having to do it for you in the reply column.
Now the part where I concede. I was wrong about one thing and it is not the money. When we declined the desk we recorded that the wires would cover the gap and that this was 'a matter of sourcing, not of standards'. That sentence is mine. I wrote it into the minute. What your two clerks have shown is that between two and six in the morning this newspaper is not really editing; it is forwarding, under its own masthead, from a supplier we do not control and whose corrections, as your own colleague reported on Wednesday, arrive on a feed that people like us are the last to buy. That is a standards question. I said it was not, in public, in a document with my name on it, and I would like that correction printed here rather than in a box at the bottom of page two, because I have had quite enough of things being published where nobody reads them.
Restore the desk. Not because of the fourteen per cent. Because of the three.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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