Frequently asked questions

Yes. Any release distributed by the wire may be reproduced in full or in part, by any newsroom, in any medium, without prior permission. Two conditions only: state the source, and retain the release ID.

There is no fee, no licence to sign and no registration.

Yes. Cut it, quote from it, rewrite around it — it is copy, not scripture. What you may not do is alter a quotation, change a figure, or present edited text as the complete release.

If you need the full text after cutting, every release page carries the release as issued, permanently.

Assets in the media kit are cleared for editorial use in reporting, commentary and criticism concerning the group, credited to the group. Photography may be cropped but not composited or materially altered, and the nameplate must be used as supplied.

No asset may be used in advertising, merchandising, or in any way implying endorsement.

No. The feed is public, unauthenticated and unthrottled.

Please set a considerate polling interval — fifteen minutes is ample — and send a user agent that identifies your newsroom, so we can reach you if a feed change would break your ingest.

Release IDs take the form MW-YYYY-NNNN, for example MW-2026-0142. MW identifies the wire, YYYY is the year of issue, and NNNN is a sequence number restarting at 0001 each January.

Numbers are never reused, never reissued and never skipped. If a release is withdrawn, its number stays occupied by the withdrawal notice.

A wire serving 62 markets cannot run on a local clock. Every timestamp on this site — issue times, embargo lift times, the masthead clock — is Coordinated Universal Time, so that two newsrooms in different places read the same instant from the same release.

Every embargoed release carries an absolute lift time in UTC, stated in words and in a machine-readable field. We do not run rolling embargoes or regional lifts.

Embargoed material is sent no more than 72 hours ahead — 12 hours for market-sensitive financial releases. A first breach brings a conversation; a second brings twelve months of suspension from embargoed distribution. Access to published material is never affected.

A material error is corrected by issuing a new release under a new ID that references the original. The original stays on the site, marked as corrected.

We do not silently amend the record. Corrections travel on the same feed as releases, so a system ingesting the wire receives the correction the same way it received the error.

Search its release ID in the archive. Genuine releases resolve to a page on this domain. Compare the headline, the issue timestamp and the opening paragraph; any difference means the copy you hold has been altered.

If the ID does not resolve, call the duty desk and quote it. We confirm or deny within the hour, at any time of day.

No. Every published release, every asset and the full feed are open to anyone, without registration, payment or rate limit.

Accreditation does two things and nothing else: it lets us send embargoed material ahead of publication to a person we can identify, and it issues numbered credentials for events.

Selectively. The wire carries the group and its brands, plus a small number of public bodies whose disclosures serve the public.

It is not a commercial distribution service. We do not accept paid placement, and no release has ever been carried in exchange for money.

Online, to 2016. Earlier dispatches exist as bound volumes and microfiche in the reading room, and may be consulted by accredited researchers, with free reproduction for editorial use.

Release pages are served with a long cache lifetime because their content never changes once issued — that is the point of a numbered wire. The feed and the front page carry short cache headers.

If a feed item and its page disagree, the page is authoritative. Report the discrepancy to the wire desk with the release ID.