About Us
Blue Hole Men is an independent general news site covering politics, business, technology, science, sport and culture. We often arrive a day or two after everyone else, on purpose. The first version of a story is usually a press release with quotes bolted on. We want the second version, written once the filing is public and somebody has read past the summary page.
The site is free to read and paid for by advertising. No paywall, no parent company, no investor with views on our story list, no party or government money. The full accounting sits on our ownership and funding page.
The name is older than the newsroom
Readers ask, so we will be straight. We did not sit in a room and invent this name. The domain belonged to a small workshop in Spain that made leather belts by hand, and when it came up for sale we bought it with the name attached. Renaming a site is a slow and expensive form of vanity, so we kept what we were given.
It also happens to describe the work. A blue hole looks like ordinary water. You swim over a patch of sea in a slightly wrong shade of blue and only later learn the floor beneath it drops far below the seabed on either side. Plenty of stories are that shape: the recall notice phrased like a software update, the transfer fee that makes sense once you see who else got paid.
For a long stretch we kept receiving mail meant for the belt workshop. Every so often one still arrives asking whether we make the wide brown one. We answer those.
Why we bothered
Between us we had done the jobs nobody puts in a highlight reel. One of us worked a rewrite desk, turning wire copy into short items at a pace that made reading the underlying document impossible. One of us covered a regional council: budget papers, planning committee, licensing hearings, the meetings that empty a press bench by the second item. Both taught the same lesson: the interesting part is almost never in the announcement.
What annoyed us was structural rather than personal. A regulator says it is opening an investigation and every outlet in the country runs that the same afternoon. Months later the decision notice appears on the regulator’s own site with the reasoning in it, and nobody writes it up, because by then the story is old. The announcement got the coverage. The document got a URL.
The other thing was beats covered as fandom. Games coverage that reprints a studio announcement and never looks at the credits or the licensing terms. Car coverage that reviews the seat stitching and ignores the recall database. Science coverage that runs a preprint as though it were a finding. Those are business and public-record beats in hobby clothes.
What we cover
Ten sections: News, Business, Tech, Science, Auto, Gaming, Sports, Entertainment, Lifestyle and Travel. They are not the same size and we do not pretend otherwise. News, Business and Tech carry most of the week. Travel is the smallest section here, for a reason we get to below.
Across all of them we prefer the story with paperwork behind it: filings, court lists, procurement records, regulator publications, accounts, credits, the registers most coverage mentions without opening. We do not run live blogs or write reaction pieces about other people’s reaction pieces. When a story is moving hour by hour and the only thing we could add is speed, we leave it and return when the record catches up.
Who works here
We are small, and we will not dress that up with a wall of headshots. The site is owned and run by its founding editors, who still commission, still edit and still write. Day to day that means a managing editor who owns the running list and the front page, an editor on business, tech and science, and an editor on courts, public records and local government, where most of our politics coverage begins.
Sport, entertainment, gaming, auto and travel go to freelancers who have been on those beats far longer than we have, commissioned because they can read a set of accounts or a set of credits. Everything they file is edited here, and nobody has a section they can publish into unchecked, including the two of us.
How a normal day runs
The morning does not start with other people’s homepages. It starts with documents: court lists, regulator publication feeds, company filings, the corners of official sites where things appear quietly weeks later. We keep a shared file called the waiting list, holding stories we have decided not to publish yet, each with a note naming the paperwork that would make them publishable.
Commissions get agreed on a short midday call, and everything is read twice. The second read goes to an editor who had nothing to do with commissioning it, whose job is to ask where each number came from. The first task next morning is reading yesterday’s stories cold with the reader mail open alongside. That is when most of our own mistakes surface.
A rule we got wrong
Early on we banned same-day publishing outright. If something broke on a Tuesday, nothing of ours went up before Wednesday. It felt principled. Mostly it was slow, and it produced pieces whose only distinguishing feature was lateness.
What we wanted was not a delay. It was a source a reader could open. So the rule changed: nothing runs without a primary document, a named person willing to stand behind what they said, or reporting we did ourselves. If that exists on day one, we publish on day one.
When we get it wrong
We do get things wrong. The fix goes on the story where the error was, with a line saying what changed and when. We do not quietly edit a piece and hope nobody kept the tab open, and we do not delete a story to make a mistake disappear. Our corrections policy sets out what counts as a correction, what counts as a clarification, and who decides.
The rules we hold ourselves to on sourcing, anonymity, conflicts and the use of AI tools are on our editorial standards page, and the checks a story passes before publication are on our fact-checking page. We are not a certified fact-checking organisation and do not claim to be. We work to the IFCN principles because they are the plainest description of the job we have found.
What we will not do
Nothing paid for is dressed up as reporting. Sponsored material is labelled at the top, looks different from our journalism, and is never written by the people who edit the news. No advertiser sees a story before it publishes, none gets warning that one is coming, and none has had a story pulled. The categories we turn away are listed with reasons on our advertising page.
Some of that costs money, and we would rather say so. Offers to slip a link into an old article for a fee arrive most weeks and we decline all of them. We do not take hosted press trips, which is precisely why Travel is thin. We do not tie games coverage to review key access, and we do not keep hardware we were sent to write about. Each rule has cost us work.
Reaching us
One address covers everything, read and sorted by editors rather than a support desk: support@blueholemen.com. Tips, complaints, corrections, advertising questions and legal notices land in the same inbox, which is less impressive than a switchboard and considerably faster.
Our contact page explains how to label an email so it reaches the right editor. If you have a document somebody buried, that is the mail we most want to open.
