In July the Cheshire paper ran exclusive footage on its website of youths throwing firebombs at a moving freight train and later reproduced stills from the video in its print edition.
The paper had taken footage from a homemade video that had been posted on YouTube and embedded it into its site.
The video showed the gang standing on an embankment, throwing improvised grenades at a train as it passed, with one device bursting into flame as it hit the side of a container.
The father of a 15-year-old boy featured in the film complained to the PCC, claiming the paper's failure to obscure the identities of the youths breached the commission's code of practice.
In its defence the newspaper said the son of the complainant had voluntarily uploaded the footage to YouTube and the PCC subsequently rejected the complaint.
"It's a triumph of common sense. It was clearly a matter of public interest and from our point of view we considered this to be a legitimate journalistic exercise," Keith Morris, the paper's editor, told Journalism.co.uk
"We take PCC complaints very seriously, but we believed we were right in what we did."
Morris said that he had not seen criminal vandalism on this scale before in the community.
"The difficulty is that once something is on a website or social network it's there for the world to see," he added.
"How much more in the public domain do you want something to be?"
The PCC adjudication said there were numerous reasons why the complaint was not upheld.
"The first was that the information contained in the video was not private," it said.
"It showed an anti-social or criminal act committed in a public place by individuals who were over the age of criminal responsibility.
"Such behaviour has never been considered to be private by the Commission, and the Code is not designed to shield people from scrutiny of it.
"Publishing the story was clearly a matter of public interest and an example of an entirely legitimate journalistic exercise."
The firebomb story came to the Northwich Guardian's attention via a Google Alert, underlining the importance of good search discipline to the journalist's arsenal of digital research tools.
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