DBS
Standards
DBS doesn’t generate truth. The cases are already there, in archives, court records, the ground, and people’s memories. So almost everything that can go wrong here is a handling problem. These rules make a handling failure visible instead of invisible, and every one of them says what happens when it can’t be met.
Every factual claim carries a tier before it is written down, assigned in the research file rather than at the draft stage.
Below all five sits the audit gap: something we believe, paired with the exact record that would settle it, and nothing else. It isn’t a finding and it isn’t publishable in any form. Three open cases have an empty Documented tier by design, because they were opened from working knowledge instead of from records. Their first milestone is one documented claim, and it doesn’t exist yet. Availability is not custody. A footnote is a map to a record, not the record.
A managed source is attributed out loud
A record produced by an institution that’s a subject of the investigation can’t be published as fact on its own. Either it’s named in the sentence that uses it, or it’s corroborated independently, or it doesn’t run. Institutions get split class by question, not by name.
Never a card without a document behind it
A ledger card quotes one verbatim line from a primary source and is followed immediately by the unaltered scan. The card heralds evidence; it never substitutes for it. Once per piece, twice if the story genuinely has two.
Documents keep their paper
Skew, stains, fold lines and the crop as it came off the glass. Nothing is straightened, whitened, sharpened or recropped, and a scan never appears as texture behind a title. The moment a real document becomes decoration, you can no longer tell which part of the frame is evidence.
Quotations are not cut inside a sentence
Original spelling, capitalization and errors are preserved exactly. A misspelled name in a 1965 police report is information. Recorded speech by a living, named person is never cut inside a sentence, in any medium, for any reason.
Killed angles stay killed, and stay visible
When an angle collapses it gets logged with the date, the reason, and what survives the kill. It isn’t revived without new documents, and never in a softer form: not hedged, not as a question, not as "some have wondered."
The furniture never touches a case
Period broadcast styling carries the show open, the transitions and the lower thirds. It doesn’t carry a claim. When the two conflict, the styling is the negotiable half.
Corrections are their own item
Same length, same places as the thing they correct. The original stays up. A correction states what was wrong, what is right, the date, and what else the error touched. Claims keep their identifier when corrected, struck through with a dated note, so an old citation still resolves.
Some documented material stays out
Private relationships that are not the engine of what happened. Vivid, sourced, irrelevant detail. People investigated and never charged. No true-crime register, no "victim’s final hours." The people in these cases get the dignity of the record.
No corrections have been issued, because nothing has published yet. When one is, it runs here at full length next to the piece it corrects. And if you find a document on this site that’s been cleaned up, straightened, or used as a background texture, that’s a violation of the standard and worth writing to us about.