Public Interest Test Builder — Written Record for the Editorial File
The public interest defence and the Editors’ Code exception both turn on what you believed, and why, at the time you published. A justification reconstructed after a complaint lands is worth very little; the same reasoning written down beforehand is worth a great deal.
Last reviewed: Next review due:
Public Interest Test Builder
Build a documented public interest record for your editorial file. IPSO and NUJ both expect public interest decisions to be recorded in writing.
Information only — not legal advice. This record supports your editorial decision-making process. It does not constitute a legal defence without supporting evidence. See full disclaimer.
Public interest grounds * (select at least one)
How it works
- You write a story summary, tick at least one of eight public interest grounds — exposing serious wrongdoing or crime, protecting public health or safety, exposing a miscarriage of justice, holding public officials to account, disclosing a failure of public duty, preventing the public being misled, disclosing impropriety in public bodies, protecting freedom of expression — and add free-text proportionality and alternatives assessments.
- You then record the editorial decision as Approved, Conditional or Held.
- It assembles a plain-text “PUBLIC INTEREST RECORD” containing the story, today’s date, the grounds you selected, your proportionality reasoning, the less intrusive alternatives you considered, the decision, and blank reviewer and date lines to sign.
- The date is read from your browser after the page loads rather than at build time, so the record is dated the day you made the decision.
- The Generate button stays disabled until you have written a story summary and selected at least one ground — an empty record cannot be produced by accident. Output is copied to your clipboard for pasting into your editorial system.
When to use it
- Before publishing anything that intrudes on private life, uses covert methods, or identifies a child — the situations where the asterisked Editors’ Code clauses require a demonstrable public interest.
- Before a subterfuge or undercover assignment, when you need to show the material could not reasonably be obtained another way.
- When holding a story, so the file records that the decision was taken deliberately and on what basis.
- As the document you hand a lawyer when a s.4 public interest defence is being assembled after a complaint.
- When a freelance commission requires you to evidence your own editorial process to a commissioning desk.
What it does not do
- Not legal advice, and the record it produces is not itself a defence. A s.4 defence requires a reasonable belief that publication was in the public interest, and that belief has to be supportable on the evidence — a form asserting it is not evidence.
- The eight grounds are a paraphrase of the public interest definitions used in the Editors’ Code and in NUJ guidance. They are not statutory, and they are not the same as the public interest test the courts apply under s.4.
- It never reads your story and never evaluates your reasoning. Whatever you type into the proportionality box is reproduced verbatim, however thin it is.
- It stores nothing. Once you navigate away the record is gone unless you copied it out — and a record that only ever existed on screen is the same as no record at all.
- It does not address the separate public interest tests under FOIA, the DPA 2018 journalism exemption, or the Ofcom Broadcasting Code, all of which are framed differently.
More tools
This is one of the free tools on UK JournoHub. See the full tools index for the rest.