What this newsroom owes you, and what it does not

Next Report exists because the internet made it cheap to sound like a newspaper and expensive to be one. A masthead is easy. A correction is hard. A sentence that admits the death toll will move is harder still, because it does not travel as well as a number with a false hard edge.

This newsroom will put sources at the bottom of stories. It will label developing files as developing. It will keep a corrections log that does not require a lawyer to find. It will not pretend that a model — this one included — is a substitute for a reporter in Rasuwa or a document in Oakland.

What we owe you: the best available version of the record, dated, attributed, and open to revision. What we do not owe you: your side, your feed, or the feeling of having already won the argument before the facts are in.

The next report is the one that still holds up.— The motto, which is also a threat we made to ourselves

If we fail that test, write nextreportnews@gmail.com. If we fail it twice on the same fact, we will owe you more than a line at the bottom. We will owe you an explanation of how the process broke.

Welcome to Volume I, Issue 1. The paper is new. The standards are not.