Ownership and Funding
Who owns Riverdale Standard
Riverdale Standard is published by a small, privately held, independent company. It is not part of any media group, chain or network. It has no outside investors, no parent corporation, and no shareholder who is not involved in running the site. It is not owned, wholly or in part, by any government body, political party, campaign, candidate, union, trade association, religious organization, or by any business with interests in the sectors we cover, whether that is real estate in Clayton County, the airport and the companies that operate around it, or the industries our national desks report on.
We do not publish the company’s registration details or the names of its owners on this page, because that information gets scraped and reused in attempts to impersonate news organizations to their readers. If you have a legitimate need for them, such as serving legal process, verifying us for a transparency or press body, or evaluating us as an advertiser, write to support@riverdalestandard.com and we will provide them.
Because the owners are the people who run the publication, there is no proprietor to satisfy and no one else to blame. If this site publishes something it should not have, the people who own it published it.
No money from government, parties or campaigns
We accept no money from any government or public body at any level: not from the city of Riverdale, not from Clayton County or its agencies, not from the State of Georgia, and not from any federal source. That includes government advertising, which is a meaningful revenue line for local media and one we stay out of so that we can cover those bodies without a contract in the way. We accept no grants from political organizations and no money from any party, campaign, candidate, political action committee, or organization acting for one.
Political advertising that hides who is paying for it is refused. During election seasons in Clayton County and the south metro, we would rather lose the revenue than let our pages become a channel for undisclosed spending, and we apply the same rule to national campaigns.
Where the money comes from
Advertising is the source of our revenue and at present nearly all of it. Some is sold directly to businesses in the south metro who want to reach readers here. More is filled programmatically through advertising networks and exchanges. Labeled sponsored content and, when we send one, newsletter sponsorship make up the remainder. The rules that govern those sales, including the categories we refuse and how sponsored content is labeled, are set out on the advertise page.
There is no paywall, no subscription and no reader payment of any kind at present. We earn nothing from affiliate links; if we introduce them, they will be marked in the stories where they appear and described on this page before the first one runs. We have no syndication or licensing revenue of any significance. If the mix changes, this page changes before the money is spent.
How advertising is kept away from coverage
We are a small operation, so the separation between revenue and journalism is a matter of rules rather than of separate buildings. The rules are few and they are absolute. Advertiser identities are not shared with the newsroom as part of editorial planning. No advertiser is told what stories are coming. No advertiser sees a story before publication or is offered the chance to comment on one that is not about them. No story is commissioned, altered, delayed or killed because of an advertiser, and no advertiser has ever been promised otherwise. Sponsored content is produced outside the newsroom and labeled so that a reader cannot mistake it for reporting.
If an advertiser is the subject of a story, the story is reported as any other would be, and the fact that they advertise is disclosed in it where it is relevant to the reader.
Grants and other support
We currently receive no grant funding. We would consider grants from foundations that support local journalism, on the condition that the funder has no say over coverage and that the grant, its amount and its purpose are disclosed here. We would not accept funding from any organization whose activities the local desk covers.
Staff and contributors
Our editors and reporters are paid by the company. Freelance contributors are paid per piece at a rate agreed before they start. Nobody who writes for us is paid by a subject of their coverage, and contributors disclose any connection to a subject to an editor before taking on a story, as the editorial standards require.
What we will disclose
If the ownership of Riverdale Standard changes, if an outside investor takes a stake, if we accept grant funding, if we take government or political money of any kind, or if a new category of revenue appears, this page will say so, with dates. We would rather readers learn about our finances from us than discover them.
Questions
Questions about ownership or funding, including from readers, researchers, regulators and prospective advertisers, go to support@riverdalestandard.com. We answer them.
