I have to be honest. I don’t want to think about politicians having sex. The number of readers flocking to the stories this week about Barnaby Joyce, the end of his marriage, and his new relationship with a woman who was once a member of his staff, suggests I might be in a minority – but I just want to start this weekend with that full disclosure.

So I don’t want to be the Canberra sex correspondent. I’d rather think about energy policy, or whether any of us will ever get a wage rise, or whether our hospitals will be properly funded, not because I’m a buttoned-up puritan, but because that’s why I think I’m here: to keep close eyes on those things for readers.

As well as being a reluctant Canberra sex correspondent, I’ve known Joyce and his former wife Natalie, for ages. We all grew up in the same part of the world. Anyone can see this is visceral, the end of a partnership in full public view.

But my reluctance to jump on the sex beat, and my natural human sympathy for the people involved in this story, mean absolutely nothing.

Zip. Zero.

Neither feeling is material when it comes to determining whether or not something is newsworthy.

The newsworthy judgment is a two-step process. Can I verify what I’m reporting, and is sharing this information in the public interest?

That’s it. Not complicated.

Over the course of the past couple of days I’ve seen some hot takes round the place about the reporting of the Joyce story and theories about what the Canberra press gallery knew, or didn’t.

I can’t tell you what the gallery did because contrary to popular mythology, the gallery doesn’t share a brain and move as a single organism. I can only tell you what I knew and did.

Normally I wouldn’t take you into the sausage factory because the story is what matters, not the story behind it. But given there’s widespread distrust – in institutions, of journalists, of politicians – transparency, consistent with respecting my own professional obligations, is important.

So here’s my story. Perhaps because I don’t spend enough time hanging around in the corridor, or at the pub, or because I became obsessed with the national energy guarantee at a deeply inconvenient moment, I heard zip about the deputy prime minister’s private life until just before Daily Telegraph reported last October that he was “struggling with issues that have affected his marriage of 24 years”.

The day before that story appeared, I had a rushed conversation with a colleague who mentioned something in passing about Joyce, which in my harried state I didn’t comprehend. My colleague presumably thought I knew all about it, but I didn’t.

I’d certainly gleaned that Joyce was in a strange frame of mind, clearly preoccupied, but given the last six months of last year had driven the entire parliamentary precinct to a state of collective insanity, I didn’t reflect on that deeply.

So call me slow. It’s fine. I’ve been called much worse.

As we rolled into to the New England byelection, the web was alive with rumour and innuendo, with multiple stories circulating in high rotation. It was obvious that a process of verification was required and, depending on what (if anything) had happened, deciding if reporting it was in the public interest.

I wasn’t interested in infidelity per se, if that’s what we were actually talking about, and again, I didn’t know. I was concerned about the obvious public interest triggers: any potential abuse of power, taxpayer exposure, the potential for preferment – all the obvious things.

I know others (in the media and in the wider community) were troubled about hypocrisy: that Joyce had taken a traditional marriage stance during the same sex marriage plebiscite, but up close, my picture was more shaded. I saw a person who prefaced almost every utterance on that score with an acknowledgement of his own imperfections.

We see all those qualifications in Canberra because we monitor everything that comes out of a politician’s mouth. I acknowledge that qualification from Joyce may not have been at all obvious to the general public, and I don’t invoke it as any kind of plea bargain for him.

I respect the fury people feel about that.

Joyce has also had a tendency, as this sorry saga has transformed from rumour to substance, to style himself as the victim – which is behaviour you’d have to describe as entirely self-interested and deeply unfortunate. Another failure of judgment.

But continuing with my process – I contacted people I trust to see whether there were any primary sources with concrete, first-hand information, because all I’d heard to date was third-hand speculation and hearsay, every version of the various stories (and there were a number) different to the last. The feedback I got in the time I had available to make inquiries was people weren’t speaking on the record. That seemed to me to be a big problem.

I travelled up to New England to gather some first-hand impressions of the contest and the public reaction to it from the ground. During that trip I asked Joyce on the record, sitting across a table from him, about his private life – whether he had done anything he shouldn’t have.

It was an uncomfortable interview, but one that very obviously had to happen. He stonewalled. He said his personal life was his business. I asked him whether anyone had raised his private life negatively with him during the campaign. This was still early in the contest. He said not one person.

I asked him again about his private life, on the record, in an interview on byelection eve. Again, he insisted his personal life was his business.

I travelled north with photographer Mike Bowers, who also attempted to verify a story that had been circulating widely on the web. Allegedly, one of Joyce’s daughters had been out in the main street with a loud hailer. Bowers asked a number of business owners in Peel Street. Everyone had heard about this incident, but no one had actually seen it. In addition to no primary witnesses, it seemed odd to us that there was no footage given everyone with a smart phone has a camera in their pocket.

So to summarise all this, I heard a bunch of different stories that I couldn’t verify. All I had before me was a discomfiting, supersized dollop of rumour and heresay.

Now I’m a bit professionally sensitive about rumour and heresay because in my head, journalism is a daily war against those things.

Journalism is the pursuit of verifiable truth – it’s an existential fight against conspiracy theories, fake news, voluble opinions, false balance, online bandwagons, talking points, against activists who claim to be in the truth business, but are actually in the point-of-view business.

So to cut a long story short, I didn’t get the story ahead of confirmation of key facts this week. I didn’t report what I couldn’t verify, because I didn’t know that it was true.

That’s it. Perhaps this is a long column about failure, but there it is.

A long, sad, column about failure.

But it’s a failure I hope to persist with as long as I remain in journalism – not writing something unless I believe it, through careful checks, to be verifiably true and in the public interest.

In my book that’s the failure that separates journalism from everything else, and the very quality which makes journalism important, worth defending, worth standing up for – and worth devoting your life to.