Ownership & Funding

Who owns Newfound Times

This site is published by a small independent company owned by the working editors who run it. There is no parent media group, no outside shareholder pulling strings, no political party’s media arm, and no proprietor whose other business interests need protecting in our coverage. Nobody owns a stake in this publication who is not doing the work of it.

Because the owners are the people producing the journalism, there is no proprietor phoning the desk to kill a story, and equally there is nowhere for us to hide. If this site publishes something indefensible, the people who own it published it, and they answer for it.

No party, no state money, no hidden backer

We take no money from any government, party, campaign, or candidate, and we are not the media wing of anyone’s cause. Election and political advertising that hides who is paying for it is refused. We would rather lose that revenue than let our advertising space quietly become somebody’s undeclared campaign spend.

There is no secret investor and no undisclosed backer shaping what we cover. If that ever changes, if an outside investor takes a stake or a backer appears, this page is updated to say so before it affects a single story, not quietly and not after the fact.

Where the money comes from

Advertising is our primary source of income and, at present, close to all of it. Most is programmatic display advertising, filled automatically through exchanges, with a smaller amount sold directly. Occasional clearly labelled sponsored posts and newsletter sponsorship make up the rest. The rules those sales run under, including the categories we refuse outright, are on our advertise page.

There is no paywall, no subscription, and no reader payment of any kind. If we ever add affiliate links, where we earn a commission when a reader buys something, we will mark them in the story and describe the arrangement here. We do not have such links today, and we will not pretend a recommendation is neutral when money rides on it.

How advertising is kept away from the journalism

We are a small team, so the wall between the money and the reporting is procedural rather than a matter of separate buildings. It holds because the rules are few and absolute. Advertiser identities are not circulated with the day’s story list. No advertiser is told what is coming. No advertiser sees a story before publication, and no story is shown to a buyer as a courtesy.

When an advertiser asks for a story to be pulled or softened, the answer is no, and the request itself may become something we report. When a company that advertises with us becomes the subject of coverage, the story is written exactly as it would be for any other company, and where it is relevant we note the advertising relationship. On programmatic space we usually do not even know who bought the impression, which is inconvenient for selling and healthy for everything else.

Affiliate links, sponsored content, and disclosure

When something is paid for, we say so, in plain words, next to the thing itself. Sponsored content is labelled as sponsored and is not written to look like our journalism. Any affiliate arrangement, if we adopt one, is disclosed in the article that carries it. The principle is simple: you should never have to guess whether money changed hands behind something you are reading, and if you are guessing, we have failed.

Advertising pays for the reporting, and we would drop the noisiest parts of it tomorrow if the economics allowed. They do not, so we are honest about the trade instead of hiding it.

Grants, donations, and conflicts

We currently accept no grants, donations, or reader contributions. If we ever do, the terms will be set in advance and disclosed here: who the funder is, roughly how much in a band that actually means something, the purpose, and whether the funder has any say over coverage. A grant conditioned on covering a subject a certain way, or on approval of our output, is not one we can accept.

Where anyone here has a personal or financial interest in a story, they declare it and step aside, as our editorial standards require. If the ownership or the funding of this publication changes in any way that matters, this page is updated first, before an announcement anywhere else, and errors on it are corrected the same way errors in our reporting are, under our corrections policy. If something here reads as thin or evasive, say so at support@newfoundtimes.com and ask the specific question.