A speed alert is a useful instrument and a poor place to stop. It can tell a reader that something has happened near a station, a hospital, a market. It cannot tell them whether the first number is the right number. Those are different jobs, and this newsroom gets into trouble when it pretends they are one job.
The pressure to collapse them is commercial and social at once. A reader who sees the alert elsewhere will not wait. That fact does not promote the alert into a report. It means the alert should be labelled as a pointer, with the report arriving when there is a second source and a named accountable person.
What happens next
Readers are capable of holding both. They already do, every time they hear a siren and wait to learn what it was. The insult is to assume that a gap between the siren and the explanation will be filled by rumour unless we fill it first with a guess.
We will keep sending alerts. We will stop treating the alert as the edition. If that costs us a minute on a story, the minute is cheaper than a correction we had time to avoid.
Taj Today will update this report if the official numbers or the timetable change. Related coverage stays on the Opinion page.
