--- title: "Three Papers Thought They Were Blacklisted. The Rota Sorts By Owner, Not Masthead." dek: "Six years of draw sheets and the secretary's working spreadsheet, obtained under freedom of information, show the defence ministry's press rota has not been re-randomised since 2014. The shuffle macro was deleted in a security upgrade." kind: analysis (Analysis) desk: The Republic author: June Halloway (fictional) published: 2026-08-22T07:30:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/rota-alphabetical-by-owner tags: press pool, Ministry of Defence, freedom of information, rotas, Whitehall genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # Three Papers Thought They Were Blacklisted. The Rota Sorts By Owner, Not Masthead. *Six years of draw sheets and the secretary's working spreadsheet, obtained under freedom of information, show the defence ministry's press rota has not been re-randomised since 2014. The shuffle macro was deleted in a security upgrade.* Three newsrooms believe they have been kept out of the defence ministry's rotating press pool since 2019, when each of them ran a story the department disliked. They have not been. The rota has never reached them. This newspaper obtained six years of draw sheets and the pool secretary's own working spreadsheet under freedom of information, rebuilt all 312 draws, and found the reason in column C. ## What the rota sorts on The list runs alphabetically. It does not run alphabetically on the masthead. It runs on the registered corporate name of the subscribing organisation, which is the field the subscriptions team fills in and the only name the spreadsheet has ever held. So a paper called The Fenwick Review sits under T, for Thurloe Free Press Ltd. A paper whose title begins with G sits at position 1, because its owner begins with A. Thirty-six organisations. One column. Nobody chose the order. ## Nothing has moved since 2014 The workbook's last structural edit is dated 3 March 2014. Since then the order has changed exactly twice, and neither change involved a person. In April 2019 a holding company renamed itself from Wexley Publishing Group to Corvid Holdings plc. Its title moved from position 22 to position 8 in the next draw and has attended forty-one briefings since. In November 2019 a merger placed The Fenwick Review under Thurloe Free Press Ltd. It moved from 13 to 34 and has attended none. Both events fell in 2019, the year the three excluded titles believe they began to be punished, which is the coincidence that made the account plausible. Both are on the public register, with effective dates, and the register gives a cause for each. Neither cause is a story. > **Figure:** Thirty-six positions, one alphabet, and the line the pool has never crossed — see https://theyburied.com/article/rota-alphabetical-by-owner ## The button that is not there The rota was designed to be re-randomised annually. The workbook still names the module that did it. The module is not in the file. In February 2014 the department completed a security upgrade that blocked macro-enabled workbooks across the estate. The spreadsheet was re-saved, three weeks later, in a format that cannot hold code. Nobody rewrote the shuffle. There is no record that anybody was asked to. The list has therefore been drawn from the same starting order for twelve years, and the draw has gone past position 22 on four occasions in six years. Positions 23 to 36 have never been reached at all. The three titles that say they are excluded sit at 29, 31 and 34. ## The other quiet failure Sign-ups close at 18:00 the day before, by email, to a distribution list last rebuilt in 2017. Two subscriber addresses on that list point at a domain decommissioned in 2021. Mail to them does not bounce back to the sender. It is accepted and discarded. Both titles are below position 22, so we cannot show this has cost either of them a place. Neither can they, which is a sentence we would rather not have to write. > I have written it down four times and I keep the replies. I am not a whistleblower. I am a person with a spreadsheet that does not work. > > — Bridget Ansah-Whitlock ## The secretary Bridget Ansah-Whitlock has run the pool rota since 2018, on a 0.4 full-time assignment. Two days a week. She has raised the sorting problem in writing four times — in September 2019, twice in 2021 and again in March 2024. She holds every reply. Three are acknowledgements. The fourth asks her to bring it to a forum that has met twice in seven years. She gave us all four exchanges without being asked for them, in an interview with a press officer sitting in the room, and then asked us to make sure we said that the department had never told her not to. ## What this desk takes from it There is no blacklist. There is a deleted macro, an alphabet and a corporate registry, and that is a duller machine than the one three editors have described to us for six years. It is not, however, an acquittal, and the editor of one of the three says so at length at the foot of this page. His argument is that a department told four times in writing that its list excludes the same three names, which does nothing on all four occasions, has made a decision by declining to make one. We could not answer him and we have not tried. He also does the thing this desk finds hardest to print, which is to begin by saying he was wrong. He told us in March there was a list. He has read the workbook and there is not. The rota will run again next Tuesday, from position 8. ## Sources (invented) - Defence press pool rota sheets, March 2020 to March 2026, 312 draw sheets, one per briefing, with attendance marked — Obtained under freedom of information after an internal review; released in three tranches, £47.50 in copying charged and paid (November 2025 to April 2026) - The pool secretary's working spreadsheet, Native-format workbook, last structural edit 3 March 2014 — Requested specifically as a file rather than a print, and released with formulas intact after the department satisfied itself it held no personal data (May 2026) - Bridget Ansah-Whitlock, Pool secretary; civil servant on a 0.4 full-time assignment — Interviewed twice, once by telephone and once at a departmental office with a press officer present; supplied her own correspondence unprompted and without being asked for it (June and July 2026) - Kit Marchetti-Lowe, Editor, The Larkhill Sentinel — Interviewed in March 2026 before we had the workbook, and again in August with the full draft and three weeks to reply (March and August 2026) - Register filings for 36 subscribing organisations, Incorporation, rename and merger records with effective dates — Pulled from the public register by this newspaper and checked against the position of each organisation on the date of every draw (May and June 2026) ## What we could not confirm - Whether the shuffle macro ever existed. The workbook names a module that is not in it, the file's last structural edit is dated three weeks after the 2014 hardening, and two officials remember a button. We have no copy of the code, and the departmental change record for the upgrade was destroyed on schedule in 2020 after six years. A named module and two memories are not a macro. - Why four written warnings produced nothing. We hold the replies Ansah-Whitlock was sent. Three are acknowledgements and one asks her to raise the matter at a forum that has met twice since 2019. We do not know who read them above that level. The department declined to say and is not obliged to. - Whether the two dead addresses have cost anyone a briefing. The decommissioned domain kept no delivery logs and its operator is dissolved. Both affected titles sit below position 22 in any case, so we cannot show the failure changed a single outcome — and neither, in fairness to the department, can they. ## Right of reply **Kit Marchetti-Lowe, editor of The Larkhill Sentinel** (Replied by email on 19 August 2026, asking that it run in full and unedited. It does.): > I told your reporter in March that there was a list. There is not a list. I was wrong about that, and I would rather be the one who says so than have it said about me for the next ten years, so let it stand at the top of this where people will read it. > > Now let me tell you what you have got wrong, which is the whole meaning of the thing. > > You have found the mechanism and you have mistaken it for an innocence. Those are different objects. A sorting key is not a motive, agreed. But a department that is told four times in writing that its sorting key excludes the same three titles, and does nothing on any of the four occasions, has made a decision. It made it by not deciding, which is the way departments prefer to make the decisions they would not care to sign. The absence of a name on a piece of paper is not the absence of a choice. It is the absence of a signature. > > And look at what the machine does when it is asked nicely. A holding company changes its name in April 2019 and the rota reflects it in the next draw. Nine days. My own request to be listed under our masthead rather than under a company nobody has heard of has been outstanding since February 2020. It has been acknowledged four times. Same spreadsheet, same secretary, same column. One change went through in nine days and one has not gone through in six years, and the difference between them is not the alphabet. > > I want to be careful about Bridget Ansah-Whitlock, because your piece is fair to her and I want to be fairer. She has done nothing wrong. She is two days a week and she has flagged this in writing more often than anybody above her has replied to it, and she handed you the correspondence without being asked, which most people in her position would not have done. If the department wants to be angry with somebody about this story it should be angry with the people who wrote her those acknowledgements. > > What has it cost us? I will be exact, because you like exactness. Six years, nought briefings. Two reporters who left because a defence correspondent who cannot get into the room is not a defence correspondent, and both of them told me so on the way out. A running joke among people we compete with. And a slow thing that is worse than the jokes: you begin, without deciding to, to pitch the stories that do not need the room. That is what exclusion actually does. It does not stop you writing. It quietly changes what you write about. > > You will publish under a headline that says we only thought we were blacklisted, and by Thursday a press officer will be sending that headline to anybody who asks about us. I do not blame you for it. It is what your piece found. But I would ask your readers to hold two facts at once, because your headline can only hold one: nobody built this to keep us out, and everybody who could have fixed it has been told, and it is six years, and we are still not in the room. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.