Corrections Policy
Every publisher has a corrections policy. The test of one is whether the note is still on the article a year later. This page says what happens after we find out a story was wrong, how fast, and who decides.
Last updated: August 2026.
Correction, clarification, update
Those three words get used interchangeably by publishers who would rather not say which one applies. We keep them apart because they mean different things to a reader working out whether an article can be trusted.
Whichever it is, the note goes at the foot of the article with the date it was added, and it says what the piece said before. Somebody who read the first version should be able to see what changed without digging out a screenshot.
- A correction means we published something factually wrong: a wrong figure, a wrong name, a misattributed quote. The note states the error and gives the right fact.
- A clarification means every fact was right and the piece still left a wrong impression, usually through an omission or a headline doing more than the copy supported.
- An update means nothing was wrong. The story moved: a company responded, an official figure was revised, a regulator acted. Updates are timestamped and never used to smuggle in a correction.
The note stays on the page
Corrections are made in the original article at its original address. We do not delete a piece and post a fixed version somewhere new, because that breaks every link to it and removes the evidence that a first version existed.
Nothing is edited away in silence. When a sentence changes for accuracy after publication, the article says so, when, and what it used to say. The temptation to fix a number at nine in the morning and mention it to nobody is real. The reason we do not is that a reader who notices has learned something worse about us than the original mistake.
Serious errors and small ones
A material error changes what a reader takes away: the wrong figure in a recall notice, the wrong company, a misstated legal outcome. Those get a dated correction note, a rewritten passage where one sentence cannot repair it, and a check of everything else we published on the subject in case the error travelled.
A typo, a broken link or a formatting fault is fixed without a note, because a page cluttered with announcements about spelling makes the real notes harder to find. The line is not always obvious, and where it is arguable we tell the reader. A misspelled surname counts as a factual error, not a typo.
Telling us we are wrong
Write to support@thekissingpunk.com, the one address on our contact page, with the word correction at the front of the subject line. What helps most is the headline, the sentence you dispute, and whatever settles it: the filing, the register entry, the archived version of a page we relied on. Nobody has to be polite about it.
Reports are read the day they arrive, weekends included, and you get a reply within two working days. Clear errors are fixed the same day. Disputed ones take longer, because we go back to the source rather than take either side’s word, and we tell you what we found even when the answer is that the article was right.
Chasing the correction off the other copies
Fixing the article is the easy part. The copies are the problem, because a wrong sentence keeps working long after we stop serving it. Our email edition goes out and cannot be recalled, so a correction to a story we sent is carried at the top of the next edition.
We keep no accounts on social platforms, so there are no posts of ours to fix, but there are feeds. Where a piece went into an aggregator we resubmit the corrected version and ask for a re-crawl. Where another publisher licensed the story, we write to them with the correction the same day and ask them to run it.
We do not delete articles
An article that turns out to be wrong is corrected, or in bad cases rewritten from source with a note saying why. It is not deleted. Unpublishing is not available as a favour to a subject who dislikes accurate coverage, and requests of that kind arrive regularly, sometimes from lawyers.
Three situations do get a piece taken down: material that puts a named person at genuine risk of harm, material we had no right to publish, and a story so wrong at its foundation that no correction could repair it. A note stays at the address explaining that something was published there and why it has gone. A takedown is signed off by our managing editor and the reason recorded, so the exceptions can be counted.
Who signs it off
Corrections are decided by our managing editor, not by the reporter whose article is in question. The person who made the mistake is the worst placed to judge how bad it was, and everybody in this trade privately hopes an error is smaller than it turns out to be.
The reporter is told and is asked what happened. Where the failure was in the process rather than in one person, the process changes, which is how the rule against running a story on a single official statement came about. That rule and the rest of what our editors work to is in our editorial standards.
Keeping the record
Significant corrections are logged with the date, the article, what was wrong, how it got through and what changed afterwards. The last job of our working day is that log, opened whether or not anybody wrote in, and it is what we read when the same kind of error shows up twice in a quarter.
We will send it to any reader, researcher or ratings organisation that asks by email. The checks meant to stop those entries being written are described in our fact-checking process.
