ETHICS
Editorial standards
What we hold ourselves to, stated plainly enough that you can hold us to it.
Sourcing
Every figure published here traces to a primary source, identified where it appears. Where a claim rests on inference rather than a document, it is written as inference. Where a question is open, it is left open — the article says so rather than resolving it in the direction the story is going.
Analyses built on bulk data are published with the data. Reproducibility is not a courtesy; it is the only reason to believe us.
No invented content
This site never displays a number, quote, vote or name that is not real, in any context, including as illustration. A component that needs data we do not have renders as an empty state that names what is missing. That rule exists because a labelled mock-up is still a mock-up, and screenshots outlive their labels.
Roll-call components render only from verified City Clerk records. Charts are drawn from the published source series, never traced from an image.
Right of reply
Our standard is that anyone whose conduct is the subject of reporting is contacted before publication and given a fair opportunity to respond on the specific findings — not a general request for comment — and that their response is carried in the piece. Where someone has died or cannot respond, the article says so at the point where they are discussed.
Where we have not met that standard, we say so in the article itself, name everyone who was not contacted, and state what remains unverified as a result. We do not publish a piece that falls short of it while implying otherwise. Any response we receive is carried in full and without condition, however late it arrives, and it is added to the article rather than filed away.
That disclosure is not a substitute for the reply, and we do not present it as one. A reader who discounts reporting that carries such a note is reasoning correctly, and the note exists so that the choice is theirs to make.
Anonymity of the reporting
Nothing here carries a byline. In a small city, a named local reporter working on the finances of the organisation that governs it is a personal-exposure problem before it is a journalistic one, and we would rather the argument be about the documents.
We recognise what this costs. Anonymity removes one of the ordinary ways a reader tests credibility, so it has to be paid for in transparency elsewhere: the datasets are published, the method is written out, the corrections are permanent and public, and every figure names its source. If a claim here cannot be checked against something you can open yourself, treat that as a defect and tell us.
Corrections and updates
A correction fixes an error. An update adds new information. They are never conflated. A correction is appended to the article permanently, listed in the site-wide corrections index, and never quietly edited into the text. This site also corrects errors in the published record made by other outlets, including its own earlier work, and shows the working when it does.
Money and independence
The project is self-funded and solicits nothing — no donations, memberships, subscriptions, advertising or sponsorship. There is no reader-level tracking and no advertising inventory, now or planned.
Images and rights
No image is published without documented rights. Archival material is tracked with a rights analysis and a permissions status before it is used, which means most image slots on this site launch empty and show a caption only. An empty frame is preferable to an uncleared one.
Privacy in published data
Campaign finance filings are public records and we publish them in bulk. We remove contributor, payee and treasurer street-address columns before publishing, because no analysis here depends on them and republishing tens of thousands of home addresses is a harm with no reporting benefit. Names, employers, occupations, amounts and dates — the fields the disclosure regime exists to expose — are published in full.
Tell us we are wrong
oursantamonica@gmail.com. Show us the document.