About Rochdale Daily

Independent local news for the Rochdale borough — and a plain account of exactly how it is made, funded and held to account.

Who we are

Rochdale Daily is an independent, digital-only local news service for the borough of Rochdale in Greater Manchester — covering the townships of Rochdale, Heywood, Middleton and the Pennines, together with Whitworth and the villages and neighbourhoods in between. We exist for one reason: residents of this borough deserve fast, accurate, plainly written information about the place they live, gathered in one place and free to read.

We are not owned by, funded by, or affiliated with any newspaper group, political party, council, or campaign. The publication is independently owned and operated from within the borough it covers.

What we publish

Our coverage concentrates on the things that most directly affect daily life here: crime and court outcomes, roads and public transport, council decisions and planning, schools, health services, local sport, community events and public-service information. Alongside reporting drawn from established sources, we publish primary public data that no other outlet routinely covers for this borough — such as food hygiene inspection results, flood alerts and official service updates — sourced directly from the responsible public bodies.

We deliberately do not publish job advertisements, property or classified listings, or promotional material presented as news. Advertising on Rochdale Daily is always visibly labelled as advertising.

How Rochdale Daily is made

Rochdale Daily is produced through a combination of automated systems and human editorial control, and we believe readers are entitled to know exactly how that works.

• Gathering. Automated systems continuously monitor official feeds and established public sources — including emergency services, the council, government data services, the Met Office and professional news outlets — for information relevant to the borough.
• Verification and filtering. Every candidate story passes through rule-based checks before publication: it must be verifiably about this borough, corroborated where multiple sources exist, and free of prohibited content. Stories that cannot meet these checks are not published.
• Writing. Articles are drafted with the assistance of artificial intelligence, working only from the identified source material and under strict editorial rules that encode UK media law and our house style. Drafts that add anything unsupported by the sources are rejected and rewritten or discarded.
• Attribution. Every article lists and links the sources it is based on, so readers can check the original material for themselves.
• Editorial authority. A human editor has final authority over the publication. The editor reviews output, corrects and re-categorises stories, locks articles against automated change, removes content, and sets the rules the automated systems must obey. Responsibility for everything published rests with the editor, not with the software.

Independence and funding

Rochdale Daily is funded by its owner and, as the publication grows, by clearly labelled local advertising and sponsorship. Advertisers have no influence over editorial content, no advance sight of coverage, and no ability to have coverage altered, promoted or removed. We do not accept payment for news coverage, and we do not publish paid content presented as journalism.

On party politics we take no side. Our interest is the borough: we report what elected representatives of every party do and say, and we hold all of them to the same standard.

Standards and accountability

Our editorial standards set out the legal and ethical framework every article must meet, including accuracy, presumption of innocence, protection of children and victims of sexual offences, privacy and non-discrimination. When we get something wrong, we say so: see our corrections and complaints page, which includes our published corrections log.

Last reviewed July 2026. This page is updated whenever how we work changes.