Public, binding, and written before the first broadcast.
These standards govern everything we publish. They were written before we shot a frame, and you can hold us to every line on this page today.
Most newsrooms publish their standards after years of work, as a summary of habits already formed. We are doing it the other way around: publishing the rules first, then building the newsroom to meet them. That order matters. It means that from our first day on air, you can measure what we publish against what we promised, and there is no grace period where the rules were still settling in.
Five rules, stated plainly. If we break one, the contact page is open.
Five rules. No fine print.
Firsthand or labeled
We shoot our own footage. When we use material we did not shoot, it will be labeled as such, every time, and traced to its origin before it airs. No unmarked wire clips, no footage of unknown provenance presented as ours.
Chain of custody
Every clip we publish keeps the camera operator's name, the coordinates where it was filmed, and a hard timestamp, all the way back to the card it was recorded on. Originals are preserved. If a frame cannot be traced to its source, it does not go out.
Corrections run as large as the error
When we get something wrong, the correction will be published as prominently as the story it corrects: same placement, same weight. Every correction will also live in a public log, so the record of our mistakes is as easy to find as our work.
Funded in the open
Building this takes money, and some of it will come from early backers. Every meaningful funding source will be disclosed, on this site, for as long as it funds us. None of it buys coverage: no backer, advertiser, or parent company gets a veto over what we publish. If funding ever shapes a story, that is a broken rule, and rule 03 applies to us.
When we cannot verify, we say so
Uncertainty is part of the story, and we will report it as uncertainty, on air and in writing. We will tell you what we know, how we know it, and where the edge of our knowledge sits. No confident narration over unconfirmed facts.
Watch us keep to them.
Get the dispatch: you will hear from us when there is something worth your time, and not otherwise.