Accuracy

You need to make as sure as you possibly can that your stories are accurate because a mistake can cost your paper thousands of pounds and you your reputation.

According to Sam Holliday, editor of the Bath Chronicle, you should treat even the smallest story with the same care as a front-page lead. "Every word you write affects somebody, somewhere, and it is vitally important to them," he said.

Check Your Facts

Once you have written a story and it is ready to be sent to the sub-editors, read through it one more time and try to pick holes in it. Particularly with contentious stories, look at every sentence and challenge yourself to see whether you can defend why you have written it.

With every single statement in every story you write, you have to be sure that you can defend it. This does not mean you have to be certain everything you write is true. But it does mean that you should be able to identify what your source was and show that the source was reliable. Often, there will be statements you are 95 per cent confident in and with these it is always better to leave them out of the story even if it makes the story less interesting.

You should also check and double-check your source material. With statements containing a criticism of someone, even if it is implied, you should be completely confident that you are not opening your newspaper up to a libel action.

Most journalists have at some point had that horrible sick feeling in the stomach when they suddenly realise they have got a story wrong and it is too late to do anything about it. I once wrote a story about a report that I said had criticised Hertfordshire County Council when in fact it had been about Herefordshire County Councill. Messing up like this is not a nice experience so it is worth trying to avoid.

Even if the statement seems to be an insignificant part of the story, you should apply the same rule and be just as robust with it as with a serious allegation. One tactic press officers use to respond to damaging stories is to look for any inaccuracy in the story, no matter how small, and then focus in on this mistake. By doing this, they can give people the impression the whole story was wrong, even if the error is only about a minor detail. Do not let it happen to you.

Grammar

If you are a journalist then you are writing for a living and this means that you should be writing to a professional standard. Too many journalists do not even have a basic understanding of how to use apostrophes or how to form a sentence.

If you are one of those then you should buy a book about grammar and learn it. It is not the job of sub-editors to cover up your mistakes, which is what happens in many newsrooms.

Grammar does not come easily to some people but you just have to persevere. If you cannot use grammar, then people in the newsroom are less likely to respect your ability to do the job. If this happens, they are also less likely to trust you to work on the kind of big stories you got into journalism for in the first place.

When Things Go Wrong

With the pressure of deadlines, it is likely that no matter how careful you are, there will be a time when you get something wrong.

If this happens, the best approach is to admit your mistake and print a suitably prominent correction in the next edition. As well as being the right thing to do, it is also what the Press Complaints Commission's (PCC) Code of Practice says should happen.

In reality, many editors are reluctant to publish corrections and will encourage you to try to get out of it and this usually involves taking advantage of people who do not know how newspapers work.

This can include tactics like offering them the chance to write a letter to set the record straight. Even when it is an open and shut case, often editors will not agree to put a correction in unless they are threatened with a complaint to the PCC.

This is not a good way for a newspaper to behave, but if this is the approach your editor wants then realistically you have to go along with it. But remember that as a general rule, the better a paper is, the more likely it is to be willing to admit to its mistakes in print.

If you do publish a correction then you should also bear in mind that it should have due prominence. There is no formal definition of what entails due prominence, but it is no good making a mistake on your front page and then publishing a correction as a nib on page 33. The Daily Express and the Brighton Argus are examples of papers that have fallen foul of the PCC on the due prominence issue.