Support trusted local journalism

In a world where misinformation and unsubstantiated facts and stories can be published to huge audiences via social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, with no regulation, our brands have a long and proud history of bringing you well researched and accurate journalism.

Throughout the campaign, we will be asking readers and advertisers to support us in delivering this message and to get involved in learning about how we carry out our trade.

Next week, we will be staging an Interactive Day, where we will open our newsrooms to our readers.

Via video channels we will showcase what our journalists do every day, we will invite readers to ask us questions about how we go about our jobs and invite you to take part in a Q and A session with some of our senior journalists.

Our campaign will also open out our journalists to check stories you may have heard about. Fact not Fiction will run throughout the campaign offering our readers the opportunity to ask our journalists to check out stories for them.

We will be talking to the business community and senior people in our communities to ask them to say why they value the trusted news service we deliver every day. We have also lined up a series of politicians and celebrities who will talk about why they believe the local print industry is important for local democracy.

Our plea to you today is to support this campaign, support local journalism which is under constant threat from unregulated, free and inferior content providers and to get involved with your local newspaper and website publisher.

Fact or Fake?

If you're not sure that a snippet of local news you've seen on social media is fact or fake we can check it out.

Email our hotline at [email protected] with a screen grab of the item or all the details you have and our trained professionals will investigate.

The story needs to be local and it must be passing itself off as news - perhaps it is an alleged crime or a claim about a council decision.

We'll let you know the outcome of our investigation - and we will share the truth with our readers too.

Fake news – together we can fight it. And that’s a fact.