Eventually we joined NASAR, the National Association for Search and Rescue. We were never called into the field, but the work stayed with me, and so did the lesson.
A good search dog does not start with the answer. It starts with the trail. It does not care which version is popular. It does not stop because the ground gets difficult. It does not mistake noise for evidence. It keeps its nose down and follows what is actually there.
That is the spirit behind The Rotten Dog.
I am expanding my daily work on Substack into a non-profit, ad-free online newspaper: no advertisers to satisfy, no sponsor to protect, no party line to repeat, no platform mood to chase.
I intend to keep it free while it grows toward its first 10,000 subscribers. A few recent stories have already reached more than 20,000 readers, enough to show that the audience is there. The next question is whether that attention can become a durable readership.
Independence does not make the work true. It only makes the work possible.
This is not a newspaper of “both sides.” That habit lets one person lie, another person answer, and the story end as if truth were merely a matter of balance. The work begins somewhere else. zft to live with the result.
Not “trust us.”
Not “everything is fake.”
Not opinion dressed up as reporting.
Just the record, followed as far as it will go.
The Rotten Dog will publish what was said, what was done, what changed, what does not fit, and what still cannot honestly be known. It will show enough of the trail for readers to make up their own minds.
I started my daily Substack more than a year ago out of frustration with the country’s drift toward noise, spectacle, and institutional dishonesty. This project grows out of that work. The Rotten Dog will add journalists who share the same approach: slow down, look closely, and stay with the facts even after the easy version has already gone by.
One more thing–we do make selective use of AI. Frankly, we’d be stupid not to. We use it for research, proof-reading , editorial analysis, and page layout. The drafts are human-written and between the multiple (lots!) of editing passes, human intervention critiques the AI as the AI critiques the person. Fact-checking is done by both humans and AI.
The world will keep producing stories.
We’ll be out back, nose down, following the scent.