A note about yesterday’s story

Dear readers – I wanted to send you a short editor’s note about the story we published yesterday regarding a council employee, and why we have now taken the story down from our site.

I’m choosing not to name the man in question in this email because I can now see that naming him in our story was a mistake. Many of you realised that as soon as you had read the piece, and I should have done so long before we published it. I can only apologise – to the man himself and to you, our readers. 

The story was about an official in the rough sleeping support team at Manchester City Council, and it reflected unease from several senior staff members at homelessness charities about this man’s previous criminal convictions. As a young man, he had been convicted twice for arson and once for attempted robbery, and the charity staff member who approached us to highlight their concerns felt this conduct meant he wasn’t an appropriate person to be closely involved with vulnerable homeless people.

My rationale for publishing the story was that well-placed people were worried about having him in a position of responsibility and felt they had been ignored by the council. Of course, we don’t publish every story that people bring to us, but it is our job to highlight problems that people have with local authorities if we think those complaints make sense and are being made in good faith. For me, the story seemed to highlight a lack of care on the part of the council in deciding who should oversee one of their most sensitive obligations. And given that previous press reporting about this man’s cases was easy to find on the internet, I thought that naming him was a more transparent way to report about the issue than concealing his identity.

But, as many of you pointed out in the comments, the man’s convictions are two decades in the past and he is entitled to move on from them. He had revealed his past record when applying to work at the council and had thereby discharged his responsibilities. Crucially, there was no evidence that he has done anything in his role that puts anyone’s welfare at risk. By naming him in the story – and by illustrating it with a prominent photograph of him – we gave the impression that the man himself was at fault, rather than focusing on the systematic issue being raised. 

To many of you, the piece looked like a personal hatchet job rather than an exercise in raising issues of public concern. I didn’t plan for it to read like that, but clearly it did. The problem was exacerbated by the fact the story didn’t contain any on-the-record quotes from the people raising concerns about the council official. We noted this as an issue, but it contributed to the feeling that we were giving voice to petty grievances rather than genuine complaints from experienced people who were willing to put their names behind the issues they were raising.

My initial response to seeing Mill members criticising this story in the comments was that I felt they were missing the public interest justification for publishing it. But at a certain point, I realised the people commenting were not random people on the internet but people who read and trust The Mill. In some cases, people who have done so for a long time. As an editor, it’s quite common that after you have published something, your readers see something that you didn’t see, but rarely as dramatically and painfully as this. I had missed something fundamental about the importance of rehabilitation and one of the virtues embraced by a good society: that everyone deserves a second act.

I’ve taken the story down from our website and will be calling the man we wrote about to say sorry. Removing the story doesn’t take away the hurt it’s done to him, but it’s better than keeping it online.

Thanks to everyone who pointed out the flaws in this story, and thanks for directing your criticism at the publication rather than my colleague whose name was at the top. I’m writing you this note because I’m the editor and it’s my call what we publish and how we publish it. I’ve enjoyed incredible support and goodwill from many of you for a long time, and you deserve honesty and humility when I get things wrong.

Please feel free to get in touch.