Transparency

How this works

This site reports on San Juan County government from the public record. Here is exactly where the reporting comes from, how it is checked, and what it will not do.

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Where it comes from

Almost everything here starts as a county document — a meeting agenda, a budget packet, a staff report, a filing. Those documents are public, and most of them are never read by anybody outside the room. That gap is what this site exists to close.

How a story gets written

1. The document is read and its figures pulled out. Every figure is stored with the exact sentence it came from and where in the document to find it.
2. Every figure is checked against the source. A figure whose quoted sentence does not appear, word for word, in the document is discarded automatically. So is a number that does not appear in the sentence quoted for it, and a description whose wording is not in the document at all. Dates and times count as figures here: in a record made of meetings, a hearing date is the fact most worth checking.
3. The article may only use figures that survived that check. A sentence that states a number without one behind it cannot be published — not as a matter of policy, but because the software refuses.
4. A second pass tries to fail the draft. Its only job is to find claims the documents do not support. It rejects roughly a third of what gets written.
5. A person reads it and decides whether to publish. Nothing reaches this site automatically.

The questions asked of every document

What gets covered is decided by a fixed set of questions, applied to everything that comes in. They are listed here because the choice of what to look at is the most consequential editorial decision a news site makes, and it is usually invisible.

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What this site will not do

• Rewrite another outlet's reporting. When the Journal, the Sounder or the Islander breaks something, this site links to them and says so. It does not reword their work and call it ours.
• Build a story on a press release. A county announcement can point us at something; it can never be the basis of an article. The underlying document has to exist and be read.
• Publish a number it cannot show you the source of. Every figure in every article links to the document and the place in it.
• Guess. Where a document raises a question it does not answer, the article says so instead of filling the gap.

Corrections

This site will get something wrong. When it does, the article is marked retracted with the reason attached, and the original URL keeps working so anyone who followed a link is told what happened rather than finding nothing.

What the machine did and what a person did

By the numbers

Questions or a correction? Send us a tip from the front page.