Somebody has to be paid to check

There used to be a person whose job it was to be there.

At the courthouse when the plea went in. At the zoning board when the variance passed at eleven at night with four people left in the room. In the bureau in Tehran, in Moscow, in Seoul, when the thing that would matter in six months was still a rumour in a ministry corridor. That person drew a salary to show up every day, to know who was lying because the same people had lied to them last year, and to write down what happened in plain language with a name standing behind every claim.

We got rid of that person. Not because the work stopped mattering. And not, at first, because the money ran out.

More with less

In 2000 the average American newspaper company cleared a profit margin of 21.5 percent, up from 13.5 a decade earlier. Most businesses would kill for half of that. It was not enough. Wall Street wanted the number higher every year, so the chains that owned the papers went looking for costs, and the biggest cost in any newsroom is the people in it. The following spring the publisher of the San Jose Mercury News resigned rather than make the cuts his owners demanded of a paper that was making money, warning of “significant and lasting harm”. He was the exception. Everywhere else they took the buyouts, shut the bureaus, and told whoever was left to do more with less.

There is no such thing as more with less. You do less with less. That is what less means.

Then the advertising left for the internet and the real collapse began, and the papers that had already sawn off their own legs discovered they could not run. Since 2005 the United States has lost almost 40 percent of its local newspapers and more than three-quarters of its newspaper jobs, upward of 270,000 of them. They are still going at better than two a week. Twenty years ago those papers had nearly four thousand different owners; today it is fewer than nineteen hundred, and nobody has bought a newspaper chain lately in order to open a bureau. In the dozen years to 2011, eighteen American newspapers and two entire chains closed every foreign bureau they had. Every one.

Understand what that means. It does not mean the news stopped. It means the news kept arriving, faster than ever, with nobody standing behind it.

Why a war is the worst place to find this out

In a war every party lies. That is not cynicism. It is the oldest rule on the beat. Governments lie about what they hit and what they lost. Militaries lie about who fired first. And now the lie travels on a feed that pays whoever is first and most frightening, passed hand to hand by accounts with no name, no address and nothing to lose by being wrong.

What used to stand between you and that was a desk full of people whose whole professional pride lay in not being fooled. An editor who would pull a line off the front page because the source would not stand behind it. In most of the country that desk is gone, and what replaced it is aggregation: people who have never been there rewriting people who have never been there.

So you are frightened, reasonably, and you are being served by a machine built to keep you that way.

This site is an argument that it does not have to work like that. Every claim here carries one of four labels, and a government’s word about its own conduct is never rated better than claimed. Every report lists the documents underneath it. The escalation scale is built so that it can go down, and says so when it does, because a gauge that only ever rises is not a gauge, it is a sales pitch. And the software that publishes this site will refuse to build a page if a claim on it has no source attached. We did that on purpose. Discipline fails at three in the morning. A build error does not.

What we are, and what we are not yet

We are not going to insult you by calling this a newsroom. It is not one. Not yet.

It is a desk, and it is small. A great deal of the reading, the translating and the first drafting here is done by machine, under rules we publish, and nothing goes out until each factual statement has been checked against the source it cites. We are not ashamed of that and we are not going to dress it up. It is what doing more with less looks like when you are honest about it, and we have just told you what we think of more with less.

A machine can read ten thousand pages of inspection reports before breakfast. It cannot knock on a door. It cannot sit across a table from a man who left Tehran last week and know from the way he tells it which half is true. It cannot be owed a favour. It cannot be the person who was there.

That is what the money is for. People.

What it costs, in plain numbers

Our first fundraising goal is $1,000. Contributions support the server, document access and research tools behind this publication. Forty one-time contributions of $25 would reach that goal; a gift of any offered amount helps.

The running-cost figures below are planning estimates, not an audited expense statement. A contribution supports the publication as a whole rather than buying a specified number of reporting hours or days of hosting.

Everything under it is what the money buys after that. These are our estimates; as we start paying for things, we will publish what they actually cost.

What	Roughly
Keeping the site alive: server, domain, archive and document access, and the machine tools the desk reads and drafts with	$500 a month
One experienced editor whose only job is verification	$90,000 a year
A researcher-translator for one theatre: Farsi, Russian, Mandarin, Korean, Urdu	$45,000 a year each
Commercial satellite imagery, when a claim can only be settled from orbit	$500 to $3,000 an image
Freelance reporters on the ground, paid properly and insured	$400 to $1,000 a day
A lawyer to read the stories that will get us sued	$15,000 a year

One editor, three researcher-translators, an imagery budget and a lawyer comes to about a quarter of a million dollars a year. Twice that is a small newsroom with reporters in the field and somebody awake in every time zone where the level can move. Measured against what was thrown away, it is nothing. Measured against what you are being served now, it is the difference between a feed and a fact.

Nobody is coming

The chains are not coming back for this. Most of the people buying what is left of the papers are not buying them to hire. The platforms that took the advertising have made it clear what they think news is worth. And as we explain below, the advertising market will not go near a page with the word war on it.

That leaves the oldest arrangement there is, the one that worked before anybody thought to sell a department store the space next to the news: the people who read it pay for it. Not because you get something the next reader does not. You will not; everything here is free to everyone and stays that way. Because you have looked at what is left of the alternative, and you know what it is worth to have somebody, anybody, whose job is to stand between you and the lie and say: that one we can prove, that one we cannot, and that one is a government talking about itself.

If you have it to spare, give. Five dollars helps. Give once, or choose monthly support if that suits you. Reading and sharing the reporting helps too.

If you do not have it to spare, do not give it. We mean that. There are three things further down this page that cost nothing and help more than you would think.

Why there are no ads here

Advertisers block war coverage. Not as a judgement on quality. Automatically, by keyword. Standard brand-safety blocklists filter words like war, death, attack, bomb and strike, which is most of the vocabulary of this subject. When researchers tested those lists against Reuters, more than half of the news pages that contextual tools had already cleared as brand-safe were blocked anyway. Across US publishers, incorrect blocking of safe news content is estimated to cost around $2.8 billion a year, close to one dollar in every four of digital news advertising revenue.

A site named WW3.press, reporting on nuclear material and casualty figures, sits at the bottom of that hole. Running ads here would earn very little, and it would earn it by putting a programmatic ad network between you and the page, which means trackers, cookies, and a third party building a profile of everyone who reads about a war they are frightened of. We are not doing that.

We are not going to charge you, either

Nothing on this site is behind a paywall, and nothing will be. A paywall on a page telling people how close a war is to getting worse would be indecent, and it would be self-defeating: the people who most need the escalation scale are not the ones with a spare subscription.

Every report, the scale, the timeline, the claim ledger and the alerts are free, and stay free.

Where the money goes

We will publish what comes in and what it paid for.

WW3.press is an independent commercial publication, not a registered charity. The people who do the work get paid for doing it, and that will be a line in the ledger like any other. A contribution is exactly that: a contribution to a working publication. It is not tax-deductible, it buys no influence over coverage, and it buys no access that any other reader does not have.

Contributors get nothing that non-contributors do not. There is no members’ tier, no early access, no bonus newsletter. Nobody who pays us is ever told about a level movement before anyone else.

If you have no money to spare

1. Get the escalation alerts. Free, and the single most useful thing you can do. A direct list is the only audience that cannot be taken away by a change to somebody’s search ranking or a forum’s rules. It is what makes this sustainable.
2. Send it to one person who is worried. Not a broadcast. One person. This site exists because people are frightened and being badly served; it spreads when someone who was frightened hands it to someone else.
3. Send a correction. corrections@ww3.press. An error caught is worth more to us than a contribution.

What money will never buy here

• A claim marked confirmed without the evidence for it.
• A level moved up because it would be good for traffic, or held down because it would be bad for the mood.
• A mention, a link, a framing, or a story killed.
• Your email address, which is never sold, rented, shared or handed to a third party.

If a contributor ever asks for any of those, we will refund them and say publicly that it happened.