Derby Broadcasting SystemsLouisville, KY

Digging Beyond
the Surface

Investigative journalism · Louisville, KY

Truth buried is still truth. One open file ↓
RegisterOpen files
Count1
MethodFive phase
Updated2026

Investigations

Every file follows the same path: the public claim, the record underneath it, and the property that connects them. A file marked RESEARCH carries a question, not a conclusion. Nothing here has published yet.

001

Federal Hill

Bardstown, KY — 1922–present

A fabricated slave cemetery presented as history for over a century, despite archaeological proof it never existed.

DRAFTING Open file 001

What’s open right now. Records requested, records produced, and the documents already scheduled to arrive. No findings. This file hasn’t published.

Camp Ground Road

Louisville, KY · opened August 2026

OPEN

A 153-acre data center approved beside Rubbertown, the historically industrial, majority-Black stretch of southwest Louisville. It cleared after a moratorium sat in committee for eleven months and expired unpassed. A resident made six specific claims about it in public comment at Metro Council on 13 August 2026. The file checks all six against the record, one at a time.

Open records requests filed7
Files produced to date74+
Documented rows in the ledger111
Questions still unanswered16

Held in the file

  • Planning Commission case files 25-CAT3-0006 and 25-CAT3-0015, including the approved plan and the July 2026 redline.
  • Ordinance O-135-26 in three versions, the 13 August 2026 Council action summary, and the enacted text.
  • The developer’s own fiscal impact analysis, emailed to Metro on 25 September 2025 by the president of Poe Companies.
  • The Kentucky Department of Revenue’s 2025 annual report on data center projects, dated 4 May 2026.
0Exemption certificates issued statewide

The Kentucky Department of Revenue reported on 4 May 2026 that it had received no notification of any approved data center project in the Commonwealth and had issued no certificates of exemption. That’s the department’s account of its own program, and it’s four months old.

Already scheduled to arrive

1 Nov 2026The next annual disclosure under KRS 139.499 is due. The statute says it is not confidential.
9 Feb 2027The replacement moratorium runs 180 days from passage and expires on or about this date.

Broadcast

RegisterAudio + documentary
AiredNothing yet
Air dateNone set

Audio and documentary work. Nothing has aired yet. What follows is what’s being built and the rules it’s being built to. It isn’t a schedule, and there’s no date attached to it.

Long-form audio

One case per season

A season follows one case from the first records pull to the final draft, including the parts that collapse. The killed-speculation log is part of the material, not an appendix.

Documentary episodes

Field and document

Built on the same five-phase method as the written work. Every claim sourced on screen, every document shown unaltered. No straightening, no whitening, no scan used as a background texture.

Short-form

Testing claims, one at a time

The first series in production takes six claims from a single public comment and checks each one against the record. It’s the format where the standards are easiest to break, which is why it’s the one being built first.

No air date, because there isn’t one yet. When something ships it shows up here with the documents attached.

Publications

NewsletterDiaspora Digest
Issues out5
Papers1
LongformNone yet

What’s actually published, and where to read it.

Diaspora. Digest

Stories from the global Black world.

Bubba · Louisville, KY

A weekly read on the Black diaspora. One big story, five things from five places, and an Underreported section for what got slept on. At least three of the five have to be non-U.S. That rule is what keeps it a diaspora letter instead of a Black-news roundup. It’s separate from the investigations: different audience, different voice, same ledger discipline with a lighter touch.

Five issues published, 10 May to 8 June 2026. It’s between runs right now and coming back; the sourcing pipeline restarted on 1 September 2026.

  • 005The price of recognition.8 Jun 2026
  • 004The Glitch31 May 2026
  • 003Congo Again24 May 2026
  • 002Coast to Coast17 May 2026
  • 001Maps redrawn.10 May 2026
SubscribeRead the issues

The DBS Standard

Version 0.1 · Zenodo, 25 May 2026 · CC BY 4.0

The research methodology, written as a specification rather than a manual: how a claim is tiered, how a source is classed, and what a case isn’t allowed to say. It’s built for cases where the investigative file is itself compromised, managed or incomplete. Treat the official record as a neutral starting point in one of those and you end up working inside a narrative somebody else built. Version 0.2 is in revision against seven cases and adds Records Debt as a named component.

10.5281/zenodo.20383114 →

DBS Editorial Standards

Version 0.1 · drafted 5 September 2026

How research becomes a published claim: the five claim tiers, the six source classes, how a quotation is handled, what counts as ours and what counts as the record, and what happens when we get something wrong. The Standards section of this site summarizes it. The full document publishes here.

Read the summary →

Longform and academic

Nothing published yet

Written investigations are drafted for outside publication, and peer-reviewed contributions are planned. Neither has run yet. When one does it gets listed here with its outlet and date, and not before.

Standards

DocumentEditorial Standards
Versionv0.1
Drafted2026-09-05
CorrectionsNone issued

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.

DocumentedA named, citable source exists and we hold it.Published as fact.
SupportedSecondary sources agree, but we don’t hold the primary record.Attributed reporting only. Used in zero cases.
InferredA deduction from documented evidence, with an interpretive step.Published only with the qualification in the sentence itself.
SpeculativeA theory that organizes the evidence but goes past it. Carries a written test that would collapse it.Never published as fact.
ContestedTwo sources of comparable weight conflict, unresolved.Both sides shown. Used in zero cases.

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.

About DBS

OperationSolo
NewsroomNone
Editorial boardNone
MethodFive phase

DBS is an investigative journalism operation built on a single premise: property is the motive, the deed chain is the story, and the institution is the cover. Every investigation follows the same five-phase methodology: tracing public claims back through their citation chains, following the money and the land through property records, mapping how misinformation propagates through the information ecosystem, pressure-testing every conclusion against alternative explanations, and structuring every publication so the audience can verify it independently.

Phase 01Citation Audit
Phase 02Property Chain
Phase 03Ecosystem Mapping
Phase 04Pressure Testing
Phase 05Document Handoff

Solo operation. No newsroom. No editorial board. One researcher, public records, and the question nobody asked.