Story Risk Register — Log Legal, Safety and Source Risks Before Publication
The risks that sink a story are rarely unknown at the time — they are known to one person who never wrote them down. A register is the cheapest way to make the assessment survive contact with an editor, a lawyer, or a complaint six months later.
Last reviewed: Next review due:
Story Risk Register
Document and rate risks across five categories before publication. Print and store with your story file.
Overall Risk Rating: Not assessed
Legal Risk
Defamation, contempt, copyright, data protection
Risk: —
Ethical Risk
Privacy, intrusion, public interest balance
Risk: —
Safety Risk
Physical, online abuse, source safety
Risk: —
Source Risk
Anonymity, reliability, motives
Risk: —
Reputational Risk
Corrections likelihood, criticism, financial
Risk: —
Save or print this register and store with your story file. Editors and lawyers will ask for it if anything goes wrong.
How it works
- Five fixed categories — legal, ethical, safety, source and reputational — each holding as many rows as you add. Every row takes a risk description, a likelihood, an impact, a mitigation and a named owner.
- Each row is rated by multiplying likelihood by impact on a Low/Medium/High scale scored 1, 2, 3: a product of 1-2 is Low, 3-4 is Medium, and 6 or 9 is High. High combined with Medium, in either order, now reaches High — not only High times High.
- The overall rating is the single highest row score anywhere in the register, not an aggregate or an average. With no likelihood and impact set it reads “Not assessed”.
- The print button opens a new window with a formatted table: story title, reporter, date, the overall rating, and every row with its computed level colour-coded.
- The date defaults to today, read from your browser after the page loads rather than baked in at build time, and you can override it.
When to use it
- At the commissioning stage of an investigation, so the risks are on paper before any money is spent.
- Before a pre-publication legal read, to give the lawyer the risks and mitigations in one document.
- When a story involves fieldwork or a confidential source and someone has to own each mitigation by name.
- At the point a story changes shape — a new source, a new allegation — and the earlier assessment no longer holds.
What it does not do
- The maths still understates one combination: a High-impact, Low-likelihood risk — a catastrophic but improbable outcome — is rated Medium (3), not High, because likelihood and impact are multiplied rather than a severe impact being allowed to dominate on its own. A High-impact, Medium-likelihood risk — a plausible libel claim on a big story — now does reach High (6). Do not let the badge override your judgement on a severe risk you have marked unlikely.
- The overall rating is the worst single row, so a register with twenty Medium risks reads identically to one with a single Medium risk.
- Nothing is saved. There is no autosave, no export file and no local storage — close the tab and the register is gone. Print it before you leave the page.
- Printing opens a pop-up window, so a pop-up blocker will stop it with no error message.
- It records the assessment you type and computes nothing else. It is not sign-off: legal risks still need a media lawyer, and safety risks still need your employer’s risk assessment.
More tools
This is one of the free tools on UK JournoHub. See the full tools index for the rest.