About The Boston Tea

The mission

Most civic information in Boston is technically public and practically invisible. It is scattered across permit portals, council agendas, campaign-finance filings, 311 queues, and county deed books, in formats almost no one has time to read. The Boston Tea pulls that record together, maps it to where it happens, and explains it in plain language so residents, neighbors, reporters, and civic leaders can see the city clearly. The standard is simple: every claim traces back to a public record, and the reader can follow the link.

Editorial independence and objectivity

We are independent. We do not carry water for any campaign, party, developer, agency, or incumbent, and we are not an arm of the City of Boston. Our loyalty is to the record and to the reader. We report what the documents show, we show our confidence and our sources, and we use careful language: allegations are described as allegations, not facts. When we are wrong, we correct it in the open. The point is not to take sides; it is to make the civic picture legible and let Bostonians draw their own conclusions.

Political neutrality

We are nonpartisan. We do not adopt a partisan frame by default, and we do not favor or oppose parties, candidates, or factions. When we analyze partisan activity we say so explicitly, and we apply the same scrutiny across the spectrum. No advertiser, subject, source, or outside party directs what we cover or how we cover it. The test for every story is the same: is it accurate, is it in the public interest, and does the public record support it.

How it is powered

The Boston Tea runs on a civic-intelligence layer that continuously ingests Boston public records into a structured knowledge base, the Reality Graph, and keeps it current. That infrastructure is what lets a small desk track the whole city at once: normalizing records, linking people, money, and places, surfacing patterns worth a closer look, and drafting plain-language summaries that a human reviews before publication. The technology does the reading at scale. The editorial judgment stays human. For the full account of how data is collected, verified, scored, and reviewed, see our methodology and the live counts on the data and sources page.

For Bostonians

The core of The Boston Tea is free and public, because civic understanding should not be a luxury good. Start with the live map, follow the live feed, or read the accountability work. If you know something the public record should reflect, the tip line is open, and you can use it anonymously.