The Paper

The company

The paper is read Wednesday to Saturday between 10 am and 4:30 pm Central. Anything arriving outside that waits until somebody opens it, and no page here pretends otherwise.

Three things are missing from that table on purpose: the state control number, the federal tax number, and the agent for service. Tennessee issues its control numbers in an unbroken run, which means any plausible looking number belongs to a real company and printing one would be borrowing somebody's identity. The other two are filing machinery between a company and a government, and neither tells a reader anything about who they are dealing with.

Why the masthead is not the domain

Two separate decisions, made months apart, and it is worth explaining rather than leaving odd.

The address was bought first. Both of its words are ordinary English that could describe almost anything and neither has any bearing on what this paper is about, so neither of them appears in the writing anywhere on this site.

A doorstone is the flat stone at the foot of a door, worn hollow in the middle by everybody who ever crossed it. It is the exact object this paper is about: the place where somebody else's ground begins and where a visitor decides whether to step. That is a better name for the work than anything we could have made out of the address.

The address is how you arrive. It is not what the paper is called.

Where the paper sits

MetroCenter, in a plain 1970s office building on made ground in a bend of the river, three miles from the middle of the city and about as far from a picturesque address as it is possible to get inside the county.

That is deliberate and it is also just what a two person paper can afford. There is one room, two desks, a wall of files and a kettle. Nobody visits and there is nothing to visit.

How it is funded

Three sources, and all three are stated here rather than implied.

1. The company. Doorstone LLC pays for the room, the two desks and the time. That is most of it.
2. The fare search. There is a fare search on this site, run by an outside booking service. Where a booking follows a search begun on this site, the service may pay us a commission out of its own margin. The reader is quoted the same fare regardless, and nothing on these pages accepts money from anybody.
3. Nothing else. No advertising is sold on these pages, no piece has ever been paid for by anybody who owns the ground it describes, and there is no membership or subscription to buy.

The disclaimer says the same thing in the language a lawyer would use and the terms say what it means for a reader.

The method

• Go on an ordinary day, at the hour we are going to recommend, and go back at a different hour.
• Telephone the number on the board. The board is right; the internet is a copy of the board made at some point in the past.
• Stop where we are told to stop, and print on the page where that was.
• Write about a kind of ground rather than a named business. Not one trading name appears in this paper.
• Correct anything wrong within a working day of being told, and move the date at the foot of the page when we do.

Four things this paper will not do

• Name a business. The pieces describe kinds of ground. A named place changes hands, changes hours and changes its mind, and a paper that named it would be wrong within a year.
• Print a price. Not for entry, not for anything. The only numbers on this site come out of the fare search and they belong to the service that produces them.
• Publish a review or a rating. None are real. A block of invented ones would be worth less than the empty space it filled.
• Tell anybody to go somewhere it has not been. Every one of the eight was walked, twice, by one of the two people whose desks are in that room.

Who writes it

Two people, neither of whom is a public figure and neither of whom has a photograph on this site. That is a choice about the subject rather than modesty: a paper about other people's ground is not improved by being about its authors.

Letters reach both of us at post@kestrelroads.com. Corrections go to copydesk@kestrelroads.com and are the part of the post we read first.