About, ownership and funding
Memory Hole is an investigative publication of Hesitation Media. It publishes original accountability reporting under the EJ-1 standard, grades every load-carrying claim under Receipts v1.0, and archives and fingerprints every source it cites.
Who does the work
Brian Nuckols reports and edits Memory Hole. He is a licensed clinician by training, which is not a biographical detail but the method: the reading a therapist is trained to do on the gap between what a person says and what a person shows is the instrument that tells a reporter which claims to chase. The methods page sets that out in full.
Memory Hole ships as a solo publication and is built to take contributors. The content schema carries multiple authors, and EJ-1 is written to be declared by someone who is not Brian. Contributor infrastructure gets built when a named person wants in.
Ownership
Memory Hole is published by Hesitation Media, which is owned outright by Brian Nuckols. Nobody outside the byline holds equity or editorial authority: no parent company, no investor, no board.
The formal legal registration of Hesitation Media is being completed. The specific entity type and state of registration will be stated here when it is, rather than described vaguely in the meantime.
Funding
This publication has no institutional funding. It carries no grant, no foundation money, no advertising, and no sponsored content, and it has never been paid by any organization it covers.
The reporting published here has been co-published with newsrooms that paid for the work as freelance journalism, and every such piece names that relationship on its own page. Where a story was commissioned and paid for by another outlet, the piece says which outlet.
If that changes, this section changes with it, and any grant or fund that pays for work published here will be named on this page and on the pieces it paid for.
Conflicts of interest
Brian Nuckols is a practising clinician. No client, employer, or clinical relationship has been the subject of reporting here, and any story that came near one would be declined rather than managed.
No organization covered in this publication has paid for anything: not travel, not access, not advertising, not consulting. Where that ceases to be true, it will be disclosed on the piece and here.
Ethics and standards
The binding commitments are published rather than promised: EJ-1 sets out the right of reply, the corrections policy, and the chain-of-custody requirement. Receipts sets out how claims are graded. The corrections ledger is append-only.
Two rules govern coverage and are worth naming here. A claim is never stated above the grade its receipt supports. And where an auditor has questioned a cost, that is what is reported: questioned costs are not described as losses, theft, or fraud, because those are different findings and the record does not support them.
Feedback, complaints and corrections {#feedback}
Corrections, disputed claims, and complaints about the work are read and answered. Every claim on this site publishes the one thing that would prove it wrong, which is an invitation to aim at it.
Tell us the claim, what you think is wrong with it, and what you are reading that says so. Every claim on this site publishes the one thing that would overturn it, so there is a specific thing to aim at.
The public address for corrections, right-of-reply requests, and questions about funding or method is being set up and will be published here before this site carries any republished work, because several of the licenses involved require it. Until it is, this page is incomplete and says so rather than printing an address that does not answer.
Republishing this work
Original work here is licensed CC BY-ND 4.0. See republish us for the terms.