Ownership & Funding
Who owns this newspaper, who pays for it, and where that creates a problem.
Owner
The Buried Trust (a New York not-for-profit trust)
They Buried is owned outright by the Buried Trust. The Trust has five seats, four of them filled and named below, and no shareholders; under the deed the chair casts the vacant seat's vote, which is how a board of four divides 3–2. No trustee may hold an editorial position, and no editor may hold a trusteeship.
Trustees
- Adaeze Ohanraju-Fell, chair (retired appellate judge)
- Peter Lindqvist-Awasthi (librarian, Cornell Rare Books)
- Sr. Marta Peñaloza (hospital administrator)
- Douglas Reyes-Stamm (retired printer, Local 34)
- one seat held vacant since 2021 by resolution of the Trust
Where the money comes from
$9/month or $96/year. No tiering, no paywall on corrections, standards, or The Vault.
Received 1987 and 1994. The donor's identity is unknown to this newspaper. See the conflict note below.
Libraries and universities. No commercial re-licensing to any party we cover.
Sold by the line, never by the impression. No programmatic advertising has ever run on this site.
The conflict we cannot resolve
Twenty-two per cent of this newspaper's income comes from an endowment whose donor we cannot identify. That is a conflict of interest and we treat it as one. The endowment is irrevocable, cannot be withdrawn, and carries no conditions we are aware of — but we cannot rule out conditions we are not aware of. Every story touching the topics MERIDIAN's two covering letters mention (Antarctic logistics, the 1947 reorganisation of the United States intelligence apparatus, and lunar seismology) carries a disclosure line at its foot. Sixty-one stories in the archive carry that line.
Every vote the board has taken on returning it
Published at a reader's request, made in the comments on our editorial of 6 August and agreed by the opinion editor the same afternoon.
| Year | Result | Margin | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1996 | Keep | 5–0 | The board's first vote on returning the MERIDIAN endowment. Unanimous, and the minute runs to one sentence. |
| 2011 | Keep | 4–1 | The first dissent. The dissenting trustee's note — that disclosure is a receipt, not a solution — is quoted in every subsequent debate, including this year's. |
| 2026 | Keep | 3–2 | The narrowest yet. Both dissents are published in full in the editorial of 6 August at the dissenters' insistence. |
| 2031 | Scheduled | — | The board has resolved to vote every fifteen years and to publish the margin whatever it is. If it narrows again, the answer changes. |
Thirty years of it
The endowment's share falls every year for the only reason it can: it is a fixed sum and the newspaper's readership is not. Fourteen thousand nine hundred and two households now pay for sixty-one per cent of this newspaper. In 1996 four thousand paid for forty-one. The board's stated aim is a MERIDIAN share below ten per cent by 2041, at which point the question answers itself.
Advertising
No programmatic advertising, no sponsored content, no affiliate links, no native advertising, and no advertorial has ever appeared in They Buried. Classified advertisements are set in the paper's own type and are marked CLASSIFIED. If we ever accept a sponsored placement it will be labelled at the top of the item in the same size as the headline.
What we collect about you
This site sets no cookie. Your reading preferences are kept in your own browser's storage and never sent to us. It runs no third-party scripts. Page views are counted server-side, in aggregate, and the counts are published at /newsroom.
What we will not do
- We will not take money from any organisation we cover, in any form, including event sponsorship.
- We will not run an advertisement that resembles an article.
- We will not let a funder see a story before publication. This has been requested twice and refused twice; both requests are in The Vault.
- We will not paywall a correction, a standards page, a right of reply, or an obituary.