Stray Ferret Focus: Why we publish stories about local companies going bust

Welcome to our regular look at what goes on behind the scenes when we are working on articles at the Stray Ferret.

Sometimes in this slot, we explain the exhaustive process that lies behind one of our more complex recent articles. But this time, we wanted to explain why we publish some of the stories that appear on this site.

We think the effort we put in distinguishes us from the pack and hopefully provides an additional reason, beyond our seven-days-a-week rolling news service, to subscribe.

Sometimes when we publish an article, people object.

These tend to be stories that are by their nature considered to be negative, and the people on the wrong end of them often don’t like the publicity.

Many of them have been mentioned in a court story and don’t want to be, but sometimes there’s no crime involved at all.

Owners of companies that go into liquidation often don’t want the failure of their business to be widely known – for obvious reasons. Pride is of course an issue, but they may also fear it will adversely affect the viability of any business they may set up in the future.

So why do we publish such stories?

Where a crime has been committed, the issue is clear. The freedom of the press to report on trials in open court is one of the mechanisms that helps to ensure fairness and accountability in the judicial process.

Our very presence in the courtroom – our reporters are at Harrogate Magistrates Court every week – means we have a duty to report accurately on any trials we hear. To sit in on a trial and then fail to report on it would be dereliction of that duty, as would taking a story down when requested to by someone who has been found guilty.

But what about where no crime has been committed, for example when a company goes under?

Often, here too there is a strong case for publishing the story. In one recent case we covered, a company had gone into voluntary liquidation leaving debts in excess of £340,000. Some of this was owed to local suppliers, but over £116,000 was owed to HMRC – in other words, you and me.

The director had also been company secretary of a firm that went into voluntary liquidation last year owing more than half a million pounds, over £350,000 of it to HMRC.

When any company, regardless of its circumstances or the good intentions of its owners, goes into liquidation owing such large sums to the public purse, it is clearly in the public interest to publish.

Publishing liquidations also helps inform local people about the local economy - what sort of shops, restaurants and businesses are surviving (or not) and how different companies are affected by global isssues and by government economic policy. 

Not many people relish negative stories – there are often sad circumstances lying beneath their surface – but sometimes it is necessary to report them. Often it is members of the public and suppliers owed money who alert us to them.

The Stray Ferret is currently the only news organisation in the district that routinely covers court cases and proactively monitors activities in the business world. That doesn’t mean we like bad news – it means we’re taking our role as an independent news organisation in a democracy seriously.