Right of Reply Letter Generator — Request for Comment Before Publication
Not putting the allegations to the subject is the single most common way a defensible story becomes an indefensible one. It weakens the public interest defence, it breaches the Editors’ Code, and it means the first time you hear the answer is after publication.
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Right of Reply Generator
Generate a professional request-for-comment letter. Putting allegations to the subject before publication is required by the IPSO Editors' Code (Clause 1) and the NUJ Code of Conduct.
Information only — not legal advice. This template assists editorial practice. It does not replace legal review for serious allegations. See full disclaimer.
Deadline: 5pm on
How it works
- You fill in recipient name and role, a subject line, an allegation summary, your specific questions, your name, publication and contact email, and choose a deadline of 24, 48 or 72 hours or one week.
- It assembles a full letter that identifies you and your publication, sets out the allegations verbatim as you typed them, cites the IPSO Editors’ Code Clause 1 and the NUJ Code of Conduct as the reason for the approach, lists your questions, and states the deadline as “5pm on” a named weekday and date.
- The deadline is calculated by adding your chosen number of hours to the current clock, read after the page loads rather than at build time, so the date is right on the day you send it.
- It closes with the line that you will publish noting comment was sought and not received — which is what makes the letter useful evidentially even when nobody replies.
- Output can be copied to the clipboard or opened in a print window for PDF. The recipient role, when you give one alongside a name, now appears in the salutation — for example “Dear Jane Smith (Director, Acme Ltd),”.
When to use it
- Before publishing any allegation about a named individual or organisation, however confident you are of it.
- When you need the approach itself on the record — the date, the wording and the deadline — for a later s.4 public interest defence.
- When a press office is stalling and you want a documented deadline rather than an open-ended conversation.
- On a freelance commission where you must show the commissioning desk that the subject was approached before the piece is filed.
- When the allegations have changed since your first approach and the subject needs to be put to the revised version.
What it does not do
- Not legal advice. Sending this letter does not make an allegation safe to publish, and a bad allegation put fairly to the subject is still a bad allegation.
- It cannot judge whether your deadline is reasonable. The clock is plain calendar hours, with no awareness of weekends, bank holidays or the size of the organisation you are writing to — 48 hours from Friday afternoon lands on a Sunday, and a court would look at that.
- It never sees the story, so it cannot tell you whether the allegation summary you typed actually matches what you intend to publish. If it does not, the letter is worse than useless.
- The recipient role only appears if you also give a name. Enter a role with no name and it is silently dropped — the salutation just reads “Dear [Name],” — so a formal approach to a named office-holder still needs the name filled in.
- It handles the approach, not the response. It does nothing about assessing a denial, a legal threat in reply, or an offer of an off-the-record briefing.
More tools
This is one of the free tools on UK JournoHub. See the full tools index for the rest.