Press releases, reports or minutes are often provided to help you write a story. Whilst these can be a great help in producing the story, it is unwise to rely on them too heavily. Names can be misspelt or facts used incorrectly. As always, you need to check. The same is true of your own organisation's archive or library. Just because you've carried a story before, does not mean the facts in it are right and you should be very careful about using old cuttings or library records.
The Press Complaints Commission carried a warning in its March 1992 bulletin: 'Cuttings are an essential part of newspaper research but too many journalists now seem to act in the belief that to copy from 10 old stories is better than to write a new one with confirmation by proper fresh enquiry'. The PCC went on to give two examples: one, a newspaper strung together information from several newspapers to produce what they presented as a first-person interview. In the second example, a magazine put together a number of reports and invented dialogue in the magazine's style to produce 'an article which contained serious in-accuracies and was to a degree fictitious'.
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