Some of the best local stories start with someone who noticed something first: a notice taped to a lamppost, a shop stripped out overnight, a letter home from school, a road sign with dates on it. Tell us below. A person reads every tip, we treat them in confidence, and we do not publish your name unless you ask us to.

Prefer email? hello@sevenoaksonline.co.uk reaches the same desk, and it is the address to use if you want to send a photograph or a document, because the form above takes text only.

The tips we are most glad to get

We watch the public record closely: the planning register, committee papers, Ofsted, the hygiene register, the Gazette, police data. What we cannot see from a desk is the thing you walked past this morning. The tips that turn into stories here are usually one of these.

  • A notice that has just gone up. A road closure order on a lamppost, a licensing notice in a pub window, a planning site notice on a fence. These carry dates and reference numbers, and a photograph of one is often the whole story.
  • A shop, pub or restaurant changing hands, opening or closing. Brown paper on the windows is a tip. So is a new sign going up.
  • A building site starting, stopping or changing. Work beginning on a scheme that was refused, or stopping on one that was approved, is worth a look either way.
  • A school, club or charity doing something. An inspection result, a fundraiser hitting its target, a team going up, a hall reopening.
  • A letter or email from an official body. School closures, water supply notices, consultation letters to residents, a landlord’s notice to tenants.
  • Something that keeps happening. One flooded junction is bad luck. The same junction flooding every winter for four years is a story, and the council’s own records will usually show it once we know where to look.

Do not worry about whether it is big enough. Tell us what you saw and let us work out whether there is anything in it.

Send the paperwork if you have it

The single most useful thing you can send is a photograph of a document: the notice itself, the page of the agenda, the letter that came through the door. It gives us a date, a reference and a body to go back to, which is what turns a rumour into something we can check and publish.

The form on this page takes text only, so email documents and pictures to hello@sevenoaksonline.co.uk. Please only send photographs you took yourself. We cannot publish someone else’s picture, and we say so on our editorial standards page.

What happens after you press send

Your tip goes straight to the newsdesk inbox and a person reads it. From there:

  1. We go back to the first-party record: the council’s register, the court or company filing, the inspection report, the body itself. We do not publish a tip as a fact because it arrived in the inbox.
  2. If we need more, or we want to check a detail with you, we email the address you gave us. That is the only reason we ask for it.
  3. If it stands up, we write it and link to the source, so you can check our working. Stories run under our house byline, Sevenoaks Online Newsdesk.

Not every tip becomes a story. Some cannot be stood up, some turn out to be already public, and plenty go into the background file and surface weeks later when a second piece of the same picture arrives. We read everything, but we cannot promise a reply to every message, and we do not pay for tips.

Your name, and staying anonymous

We ask for a name and an email so we can come back to you. Neither is published, and neither is passed to anyone else. If a story would identify you by its detail rather than your name, tell us and we will talk to you about it before anything goes out.

If you would rather not give a name at all, email us instead and say so. An anonymous tip is still worth sending: we cannot quote you, but we can go and look at the record, and the record does not mind who pointed us at it. What we cannot do is publish an allegation about a named person or business on an anonymous tip alone.

Things we cannot fix for you

We are a newspaper, not the council, and reporting a problem to us does not report it to anyone who can send someone out. If you need something dealt with, these are the places that will log it, and they are worth using even if you also tell us:

Once you have reported it, we are still interested. A backlog of reports about the same junction, or a repair that has been promised four times, is exactly the kind of thing the public record can be made to confirm.

Not a news tip?

  • An event to list. Send it to the same address and we will consider it for what’s on in Sevenoaks. Date, time, venue, price and a link is all we need.
  • A business to add or correct. Our directory is free to appear in and free to correct. Every listing has a link on it for that.
  • An error in something we published. Please tell us. We correct the article, add a dated note and leave it there: see corrections. We aim to reply the same working day.
  • Advertising, sponsored features or a job advert. Those are set out on our advertise page, and they are kept well away from the newsdesk.