Editorial standards
A publication of record has to be legible about how it works. This is the whole of it — what we take money for, how households in our pages are treated, what happens when we get something wrong.
Independence
Household Journal is independent and reader-funded. There are no affiliate links in editorial, ever. Newsletters carry at most one sponsor, disclosed in the newsletter itself, and no sponsor sees a piece before it publishes or has any say in what we cover.
Funding and ownership
Members pay for this. Membership is the majority of revenue by design, with newsletter sponsorship second. We take no money from any company whose products we could plausibly cover, and we do not run advertising on the site.
Who owns this
Household Journal is owned by its founder and staff. No investor, platform, or parent company holds an interest in the publication or any say in its coverage.
Sources and households
Every piece carries at least one real household or one real number. Households in the Audit, Ledger and Minutes formats are real and anonymised with their consent — names changed, employers and schools generalised, dollar figures never rounded to flatter anyone. We do not compose households out of several families and present them as one.
Fact-checking
Numbers are checked against the primary source, not against another article about the primary source. Every dollar figure, count and date in a reported piece is verified before publication, and the source is linked where a reader can reach it.
Corrections
We correct in public. A factual error is fixed in the text, and a dated correction note is appended to the bottom of the piece explaining what was wrong. Substantive corrections are also carried in the next Weekly Entry. Nothing is quietly edited away; write to corrections@householdjournal.com.
Clinical review
Every clinical claim in the Care desk is reviewed by a named clinician on our medical advisory board before publication, and the reviewer's name and credential appear on the piece with the date of review. Reviewers check accuracy; they do not write, edit, or approve the editorial angle.
The board is being appointed and is not yet named. Until it is, the Care desk publishes only process and paperwork reporting, and no piece on this site carries a review claim.
Generated writing
Household Journal does not publish generated writing. Reporting, drafting and editing are done by the named people on the masthead. We use software for transcription, for searching public records and for checking arithmetic, and a human verifies the output of all three before it reaches a reader.
Readers' privacy
We collect an email address if you give us one, and nothing else you have not chosen to send. Reader letters are published only with permission, first name or initials only unless you ask otherwise.