A practical guide for readers who have seen something ridiculous and would like it made slightly more so
Prat.uk receives roughly three hundred story tips a week. Of these, around forty are usable, twenty are complaints disguised as tips, and one is invariably a photograph of a pigeon with no accompanying text. This guide exists to move readers from the pigeon category into the usable one, and to explain what happens to a tip once it enters the building.
Where to send it
All tips go through the Contact Prat.uk page, which lists an editorial address staffed by a rota of writers who take turns reading the inbox aloud in a flat voice. This is called the tip reading and is the most popular half hour of the working day. Tips sent to the advertising address are forwarded to editorial with a note reading Not Ours, and tips sent to the legal address are read by Gerald and then by everyone else.
What makes a good tip
The ideal tip is a real thing that has happened, is mildly absurd, and involves an institution. A council that has painted double yellow lines around a fallen tree is a good tip. A neighbour who is annoying is not, however strongly you feel about it. A supermarket that has renamed its Small Trolley the Compact Personal Cart is a very good tip, and the reader who sent it in 2023 now receives a Christmas card.
Include where and when. The exaggeration desk needs a foundation to build on, and a tip that says a thing happened somewhere at some point cannot be enlarged, only invented, which the fact-checkers do not permit.
What makes a poor tip
The tip reading has identified several recurring categories. There is the tip that is already a joke, sent by a reader who would like it printed under their name; these are politely declined and the reader is pointed at the Authors and Contributors page to see how the process actually works. There is the tip that is a grievance about a former employer, often running to several pages, which is filed under Legal and never spoken of. And there is the tip that reads simply You should do something about the Tories, which arrives eleven times a day and is technically correct.
What happens next
A usable tip is assigned to a desk. The desk verifies that the thing occurred, which takes ten minutes, and then spends three hours deciding what the spokesperson should be called. The reader is not contacted unless the story is published, at which point they receive a short note of thanks and, if the story performs well, an invitation to a Christmas drinks event that has been announced every year since 2009 and held twice.
Readers are not paid for tips. The editor has described this policy as consistent with the treatment of the writers.
A note on anonymity
Tips can be sent anonymously and many are, particularly those concerning workplaces, local councils and one specific golf club in Surrey whose members appear to tip on each other in rotation. The site does not publish names, sources or the golf club, though the golf club has now been described often enough that it has written in to ask for a link.
The pigeon
The pigeon photograph continues to arrive weekly from an address the team has never traced. It is printed and pinned to the noticeboard. There are now 340 pigeons. Staff have been asked not to speculate about what it means, and the editor has ruled that if the sender ever includes a caption, the story runs on the front page.
The tip that changed the rules
In 2019 a reader sent a tip about a parish council that had voted to rename a bench. The desk investigated and discovered that the council had in fact renamed the bench three times in a single meeting, reversing itself twice after members changed seats and lost track of which bench was under discussion. The published story ran at 800 words and was, the fact-checkers confirmed, entirely accurate, requiring no work from the exaggeration desk at all. This caused what the minutes describe as a crisis of purpose. The desk was given the afternoon off and the tip was placed in a frame above the inbox, where it remains as a warning that reality occasionally does the job itself and should not be encouraged. The reader was sent two Christmas cards that year, one from each fact-checker.