Twenty-seven days, twenty posts. VERORECORD.COM opens on 1 October.
I posted here for the first time on 1 September, with no name in this subreddit, no history, and no particular reason for anyone to read past the title. That was twenty posts and twenty-seven days ago, and the site all of it was leading up to opens on 1 October.
What I remember about the first week is that I thought I was publishing. I was being checked. People pulled the links and went through the arithmetic, and a few of you opened the documents yourselves and came back with things I had missed. That was not comfortable and it was not meant to be, and it is the single biggest reason the standard got tighter as the month went on instead of looser. Being corrected in public, where everyone can see it, is a strong argument for not needing to be corrected a second time.
The rule I ended up with is a narrow one. I mark a finding A only where I pulled the record and read it myself. B means somebody identifiable said it and I can show you that they said it, which is not the same as showing you it is true. C means it is my own inference and nothing more. Where I could not get a document at all, I say so, and I say what it would have cost to try, so you can go and get it yourself if you think it matters more than I judged it to.
33 people are now waiting for a door that is not open yet. A month ago that number was zero, and I would not have guessed either figure.
On 1 October the site opens with that same rule and nothing else attached to it. No paywall, no adverts, no login, no tracking. Everything that has appeared here in pieces will be in one place, graded, with the corrections left where they happened rather than quietly edited out of the text.
Before then there are two things I would genuinely like to know. Which post made you stay, and which one did I get wrong? The second question is the more useful of the two, and if you have been sitting on an answer to it, I would rather hear it now than after the launch.
We are not asking you to believe us. We are asking you to check us.
A page can be taken down. A copy cannot be unmade.
Read the record. Keep the record. Be the record.
— Dr Vero
Truth has a paper trail.
Vero Record. 1 October.
About this dispatch
This is a public post by Dr Vero, archived here as published, with its full text and every graphic that accompanied it. Dispatches are written for a general audience and are not graded: they are a record of what was said publicly and when, not a sourced report.
Graded, document-sourced reporting is kept separate, in the newsroom and the dossiers.