The Paper

The company

The paper is read Thursday to Sunday between 11 am and 5 pm Eastern. Anything that arrives outside those hours waits until somebody opens it, and no page here suggests otherwise.

Three things are missing from that table deliberately: the state entity number, the federal tax number, and the name of an agent for service.

Numbers in this state run consecutively, which means every convincing one already belongs to somebody, and setting one on a page would be wearing their identity. As for the remaining two, they are apparatus between a company and a state office and disclose nothing useful about who is on the other end of a letter.

Why the masthead is not the domain

The address was bought first and the name chosen afterwards, and the two have nothing to do with each other.

Neither word in the address describes this paper or its subject, and neither appears in the writing on any page here. A stringcourse is the horizontal band of masonry running across the face of a building. It is put there to throw water off the wall and to hide the change of thickness at a floor level, and it is the part of a front that nobody ever removes. When the use inside changes, the band keeps running.

That is the paper's subject in one object, which is a better reason to be called something than a domain is.

Where the paper sits

In a plain commercial building on a street of plain commercial buildings, well away from anywhere anybody photographs.

One room, two desks, a plan chest and a kettle. Visitors are not received and there would be nothing to receive them for.

How it is funded

Three sources, stated here rather than implied.

1. The company itself, which covers the room and the hours. The bulk of it.
2. The search on the front page, operated by an outside booking service. Where a reservation grows out of a search begun on the front page, that company may hand over a share of what the sale made it. What a reader is quoted does not move because of that, and no page here collects money.
3. No other source. Nothing is advertised, no entry was bought, and there is no tier to subscribe to.

The disclaimer puts that formally. Terms of use says what it means for a reader.

The method

• Read the openings first, then the fills, then the band, then the reveals, then the rhythm. The whole method is one page.
• Stand on public ground. Every entry says which ground, and the paper has never been anywhere it was not entitled to be.
• Describe a kind of front rather than a named building.
• Print what is checkable and mark what is inference. Where a page is guessing, it says so in the sentence rather than in a note at the bottom.
• Correct anything wrong within a working day and move the date at the foot of the page.

Four things this paper will not do

• Name a building, a business or an address. The reasons are on the front page and the tools to identify anything yourself are in where the records are.
• Print a price. Not for anything. The only numbers a reader sees come from the search and belong to whoever produced them.
• Publish a review, a rating or a ranking. None exist. Inventing one would be worth less than the space.
• Recommend entering anywhere. Every front here is read from a sidewalk, a public lot or a lobby open in working hours, and the paper says which.

Who writes it

Two of us. Neither is a public figure and neither appears anywhere on these pages, on the view that writing about other people's buildings does not benefit from being about the writers.

Letters reach both at openings@thecoveregister.com. Corrections go to daybook@thecoveregister.com and are read first.