Sustainability Policy

The Kingfish Project — kingfish.la Effective date: July 17, 2026 Last updated: July 17, 2026

How to read this policy

Plain language: Every section starts with a short summary in everyday English. The summaries help you understand; the detailed text underneath is the official version.

Each section begins with a plain-language summary, written following the Federal Plain Language Guidelines and ISO 24495-1. Summaries aid understanding; if a summary is ever inconsistent with the full text beneath it, the full text controls.

The short version

Plain language: An accountability outlet that quietly disappears takes its archive — and its promises — with it. This policy is our plan to outlast our founder: diversify the money, keep costs brutally low, build reserves, stand up real governance, and guarantee that the public record we’ve built survives us no matter what.

The honest starting point

Plain language: Today this outlet runs on one person’s money and labor. That’s maximum independence and maximum fragility at the same time. The goal is to fix the fragility without surrendering the independence.

The Kingfish Project is currently founder-funded and founder-operated, as our Funding & Transparency Policy discloses. A one-person funding base means no outside funder can influence us — and it means the outlet’s survival currently depends on one person’s finances, health, and time. This policy exists because we consider that dependency a problem to be engineered away, publicly and on a schedule readers can watch.

Diversifying revenue

Plain language: At maturity, no single funding source — including the founder — should be able to sink or steer this outlet. Working target: nothing over a third of annual revenue.

As we open outside support, we will build a mixed revenue base — small-dollar reader support, foundation grants consistent with our Editorial Independence Policy, and mission-aligned earned revenue — with a working target that no single source exceeds one-third of annual revenue at maturity. Concentration will be reported in our annual revenue summary so readers can track our progress against our own standard.

Keeping costs low by design

Plain language: Our infrastructure is self-hosted and open-source on purpose — the outlet is cheap to run, so it’s hard to kill.

Sustainability is as much about the cost side as the revenue side. We run on self-hosted, open-source infrastructure by design: our publishing, archives, and processing pipelines carry minimal recurring vendor costs. A newsroom with a low burn rate can survive lean years that would end a more expensive operation, and can say no to compromised money without existential pressure.

Reserves

Plain language: We’ll bank toward a cushion — several months of operating costs — so one bad stretch can’t end the outlet.

As outside revenue develops, we will build an operating reserve with a target of three to six months of operating expenses, held to absorb funding interruptions without interrupting journalism. Reserve status will be reported alongside our annual revenue summary.

Governance and succession

Plain language: A board is being formed. Its jobs include the uncomfortable one: making sure the outlet and its obligations survive the founder.

We are forming a governing board with fiduciary responsibility for the organization. Its mandate includes continuity: succession planning for leadership, custody of the commitments made across our public policies, and ensuring the organization’s obligations — to sources, to readers, and to the archive — do not depend on any single individual. The board governs the nonprofit; it does not direct editorial content, per our Editorial Independence Policy.

The archive continuity commitment

Plain language: The strongest promise on this page: the public record we’ve built will outlive us. Our journalism is already licensed so anyone can lawfully preserve and republish it, our archives are built in portable, mirrorable formats, and if this organization ever winds down, transferring the archive intact to a public-interest steward is a binding obligation of the wind-down — not an afterthought.

The Kingfish Project’s archives — our journalism, our document collections, and our records of public meetings — are built as a public asset, and we commit to their survival independent of ours:

• The license does the first half. Our journalism is published under CC BY 4.0, which means anyone — libraries, archives, other newsrooms — may lawfully preserve and republish it forever. The work cannot legally die with the organization.
• The architecture does the second half. Our archives are maintained in open, portable formats with mirroring in mind, so a handoff is an operation we’ve prepared for, not a crisis.
• The commitment does the rest. If The Kingfish Project ever ceases operations, we commit — and will bind our board — to transfer the archive intact to a qualified public-interest steward, such as a library, university, established digital archive, or successor newsroom, with public access preserved. Consistent with the law governing charitable organizations, our assets on dissolution go to exempt purposes; we designate the archive as first among them.

Annual review

Plain language: This plan gets measured against reality once a year, in public.

We review this policy annually against our actual revenue mix, reserves, and governance progress, report the results on our transparency page, update the date above when this policy changes, and preserve prior versions.

Contact

[email protected] The Kingfish Project, 1924 Albert St, Alexandria, LA 71301