Tangle Today publishes public records for working people.
Public records exist because the law says some things must be told to the public: how many workers a company is about to let go, how many times more its CEO makes than its median worker, how many complaints its customers have filed against it, when an employee is injured on the job, what a court decided, what a city council said out loud. Court opinions are public. NLRB filings are public. CFPB complaints are public. WARN notices are public. City council recordings are public. All of it exists because working people fought for it to exist.
11 of those records are what this paper reads: SEC EDGAR, SEC DEF 14A proxy statements, CourtListener, The National Labor Relations Board, The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, The Texas Workforce Commission, The Eviction Lab at Princeton, The Texas Office of Court Administration, City council meeting records, Around thirty other publications’ own RSS feeds. The about page says what each one carries.
Most of it is not read. Not because it is secret. Because it is boring — a 400-page 10-K, a JP-court eviction docket, a Federal Register notice, an OSHA severe-injury CSV. Nobody has time. The powerful count on that.
We read it. We publish what it says. Every figure links to the document it came from, so you don’t have to trust us — you can check the work yourself.
Our editorial line
Working people deserve to know what employers, landlords, banks and courts are doing in their name and to their livelihoods. The records that answer those questions are already public. Our job is to put them in front of you.
We do not pretend to be neutral. Neutral coverage of a company that underpays its workers while calling record profit a “strong quarter” is itself a political act — the political act of accepting the company’s own frame. We refuse that frame. We publish the numbers on the wage and the numbers on the profit and let the ratio between them stand.
We are also open about what we are not. We are not investigators. We are not muckraking journalists with unnamed sources and Signal accounts and stringers in field offices. We are a machine that reads public documents very quickly, and a single owner-operator with an in-house language model as interim editor, describing plainly what those documents say. Our credibility does not rest on our judgement of what is important; it rests on the fact that every claim links to the document it came from.
What we will not do
- Fabricate a figure. Not once, not for effect, not to fill a table. Missing numbers render as em-dashes, always.
- Publish a machine’s opinion as prose. The Justice Lens on the front page computes; it does not generate. When we tried a generative pass we caught it telling the reader that workers “earn an average profit share” of the CEO’s payroll number. That failure mode does not go away by tightening the prompt. So the Lens stays arithmetic and the templates on this site are written in code by a person.
- Rewrite anyone. When we point at another outlet’s reporting in the aggregator, we publish that outlet’s own headline and their own summary and a link to their page. No paraphrasing. No summary. No “explaining” someone else’s story back to you.
- Publish an individual’s pain to make a point. Eviction cases carry no tenant names. CFPB narratives are never republished; we publish only the aggregate patterns. OSHA severe-injury narratives carry no worker identities because OSHA redacted them.
- Ads. Paywall. Engagement bait. Comment sections. Sponsored content. Push notifications. Breaking-news posturing. Analytics that tell someone else who visited us. Anything designed to keep you here rather than send you to the source.
What we do owe you
- A page that works with no network beyond itself, no client-side script, no font loaded from a stranger, and no image hosted somewhere we can’t see.
- A rebuild every hour, with the changes visible in the feed if you want to subscribe.
- A corrections page where we log any error we make on the item where the error appeared, dated and unhidden.
- An editorial-independence page that says what governs coverage of Tangle itself, its clients, and its founder — and what we don’t cover for that reason.
- The whole publication as data at receipts.json and feed.xml, so you can read us the way you want.
Who is this for
People whose paycheck comes from a wage. People whose landlord is a limited liability company. People whose 401(k) balance is not the news story on their lives. People who, at some point, will need to know that their employer just filed a WARN notice, or that their state’s AG just filed something in a court somewhere, or that their kid’s teacher’s union just filed a petition to hold a strike vote.
If you are the person who needs to know those things, this paper is for you. If you are the person who would rather that person didn’t know, this paper is not for you, and no amount of PR outreach will make it so.