How we report

Every fact in a Clinton Courier story should be something a reader could check. For history and profiles, that means published sources, public records and institutional archives. For current stories, it means documents and the people involved.

We do not make up quotes, composite characters or scenes. When we do not know something, the story says so or leaves it out.

Photographs come from our staff or from openly licensed collections such as Wikimedia Commons. The caption under each image names the photographer and the license. When we cannot find a photo that actually shows the subject, we run the story without one.

If a story needs fixing, we fix it and add a dated note at the end explaining the change. We do not quietly rewrite published stories.