Why verification comes first

A news organisation has one thing to sell: trust. Every report that turns out to be wrong spends some of it, and trust is far slower to earn back than it is to lose. That is why every serious newsroom has one rule above speed: check before you publish.

## What "verified" means
A fact is verified when you can show where it comes from and you have good reason to believe that source. In practice that means one of these:
- You saw it yourself, and you can say when and where.
- It is in an original document — a court order, a government notification, an official dataset — that you have read yourself, not a summary of it.
- Two sources who are independent of each other, and who are in a position to know, tell you the same thing.

## Primary and secondary sources
A primary source is the original: the FIR, the judgment, the budget document, the person who was there. A secondary source reports on it: another newspaper, a social media post, a WhatsApp forward. Secondary sources are leads, not proof. Go back to the original whenever you can.

## If in doubt, leave it out
Speed matters, but being second and right beats being first and wrong. If you cannot confirm a detail — a name, a number, a cause of death — leave it out or say clearly that it is not confirmed. Readers forgive a story that grows as facts come in. They do not forget one that had to be withdrawn.