Editorial policy
How The High Desert Ledger is written and checked, what it will not publish, and how corrections and funding are handled.
Service page · Edition of
The High Desert Ledger publishes one kind of page: an entry that answers a single question about the American Southwest, its water, its land and maps, its weather and seasons, or the working life of its small towns. Everything on the site is written by the ledger and checked against sources a reader can obtain.
Sources
An entry names the sources it read. In this field the useful sources are the maps and reports of the national and state agencies, the records kept by a county clerk or a land office, the guidance published by the extension services, and the regulations that govern water, land and building in each state.
Where two sources disagree, the entry says so and explains which one governs locally. Where no source settles the question, the entry says that the point is unsettled. No local figure, price, yield or date is invented, and a figure that comes from an agency is named as the agency's figure.
Money and independence
The ledger is funded by its publisher and takes no payment for a mention, a link or a correction. It carries no advertising script and no sponsored entry. A business, an agency or an organisation named in an entry is described in the third person, and none of them has any editorial role here.