As night follows day, Sunday indeed follows Saturday. For some, it’s the first day of a brand new week – for others, it’s one last day of rest before getting back on the treadmill on Monday. And for many of us, it’s a day when we might reflect on what well in the week that was, and what could have gone better.

If, however, you are the dance music press doyenne that is Annabel Ross this weekend, you could be forgiven for wanting to just forget about the past seven days. Mostly because the self-dubbed award winning journalist – just look at her profile on X, formerly Twitter, for the proof – put her foot in it quite spectacularly.

Back on Wednesday, she published a post stating that an unnamed person – or “an abuser”, as she phrased it, had a new album out that day. She went on to comment about how this individual “recently played a gig with an American house music legend”. She concluded her tweet by stating she hoped his identity would be revealed soon.

To the surprise of literally no one except Ross herself, her post piqued the interest of her followers – who started to speculate as to the possible identity of this person. Even more unwise was Ross’s decision to answer some of the people playing this apparent guessing game…

One user, apparently disgruntled at Ross’s refusal to name the person, received a dismissive response from the dance music press doyenne herself – where she asked “are you gonna pay for my lawyer?”. And even though Ross did later retract her initial comments, she still refused to apologise for what she called “making innocent people the subject of speculation”.

For a journalist who proudly calls herself an “award winner”, Ross seems dangerously unaware of the concept of jigsaw identification. Quite simply, this is the practice of using information that’s either in the public domain or has been released by a journalist in order to identify a person – and courts take no risks on the subject.

In Britain, blogger Craig Murray was imprisoned for eight months over his coverage of a trial involving former Scottish first minister Alex Salmond. The politician was subsequently found not guilty of twelve charges of sexual assault – whilst Murray’s coverage led to a contempt of court charge. His own reporting had led to a risk of jigsaw identification against four women – all of whom are under anonymity orders issued by the court.

And if this is all a bit complicated to follow, here’s an explanation of jigsaw identification by the BBC’s children’s news service, Newsround…

You’re welcome, Annabel…