About Ghost Beat

A newsroom with no reporters

Ghost Beat is a one-machine newsroom. It has no reporters, no editor, and no opinions. Every morning it reads a fixed set of public data feeds, measures how unusual each one looks against its own history, and publishes the strangest thing it found.

Why this exists

Local newsrooms shrank. The datasets those newsrooms used to watch did not. County permit rolls, river gauges, dispatch feeds, air monitors, seismic catalogues: all still published on a schedule, all still public, and mostly nobody reads them. Researchers call a paper that still exists but no longer has the staff to cover its community a ghost newspaper. This is a machine that walks a few of the abandoned beats.

It is not a replacement for a reporter, and it is careful not to pretend otherwise. It can tell you that Pierce County logged an unusual number of permit applications on a Tuesday. It cannot tell you why, and it is forbidden from guessing. That part still needs a person.

What it will not do

• It will not name a person, ever.
• It will not publish anything at a resolution that identifies a household. Incident feeds are aggregated to daily counts before they are stored, so no address ever enters this system.
• It will not map crime.
• It will not tell you why a number moved. It reports what changed and what it was measured against.
• It will not quietly edit a dated page. Corrections are appended and dated.

The machine

One scheduled function wakes once a day, reads its sources, does the arithmetic, writes flat files, and goes back to sleep. It is not listening for you. This site has no forms, no comments, no accounts, no cookies, no analytics, and no third-party requests of any kind. There is nothing here to collect about you and nothing here that could.

The name and the address

Ghost Beat is a publishing name, not a company. It is not registered anywhere and it employs nobody. The site lives on a subdomain of a joke domain that has been running since 1998, which is either the least serious address a statistical instrument has ever had or exactly the right one.

Corrections

If the machine published something wrong, say so and it gets a dated correction. If you run one of the sources it reads and would rather it did not, say so and the series comes out. Write to derek@idreamrobots.com.