About Our Santa Monica

What this is

Our Santa Monica reports on how Santa Monica is governed and who pays for it. The work is documentary: campaign finance filings, council agendas and minutes, court records, state housing correspondence, budget documents and rent control board data. Where a claim rests on a primary record, the record is cited, and where the underlying dataset can be published, it is — see Data & method.

Who runs it

Residents. The project is deliberately published unattributed: there are no bylines and no staff page. That is an editorial choice about where authority should sit — on the documents rather than on a name — and it comes with an obligation, which is that the documents have to be available. They are. Our reasoning is set out in Ethics.

How it is funded

It is self-funded, and that is the whole answer. There is no advertising, no sponsorship, no grant, no membership programme, no donation page and no newsletter list. No support of any kind is solicited or implied. Nothing on this site asks you for money, an email address, or an account.

There is also no reader tracking. We do not measure how far into an article you read, we do not run behavioural analytics, and there are no third-party scripts. A newsroom whose pitch is that it takes no money against its stories should not be surveilling the people who read them.

What we will not do

• Invent anything. No placeholder statistics, no illustrative charts, no sample roll calls, no fabricated quotes. If a component needs data we do not have, it renders as an empty state naming what is missing.
• Publish before it is ready. Reporting that has not cleared right of reply and legal review has no public URL on this site.
• Bury a correction. See Corrections.

Getting in touch

Documents, records, recollections and corrections are all welcome at oursantamonica@gmail.com. See Contact for what is useful and what we can and cannot promise.