Disclosure: this notice is from The Houston’s owner and publisher, about its own operations. It is not independent reporting.
Where we actually are
Nexcom Media operates from Conroe, in Montgomery County, roughly 40 miles north of downtown Houston. That is a business address, not a newsroom. No Nexcom employee covers Houston from the ground, there is no staffed newsroom in the city, and we produce no original field reporting.
What The Houston is
A free local-information service. Software monitors Houston sources we have chosen, publishes short attributed items about their reporting, and links readers back to the original. As of July 24, 2026 our sitemap lists 751 summaries from 81 outlets — Houston Public Media, KPRC 2, FOX 26 Houston, the Houston Chronicle, Community Impact and the Defender Network among them, each listed with its count at /sources. The journalism in those stories belongs to the outlets and the reporters who did it, and we say so on every story.
What is automated and what people do
Software drafts the summaries. People select the sources, set the rules the system follows, investigate reported problems, and issue corrections. Not every article receives individual human review before publication — in practice our provenance record reports prepublicationHumanReview: false on every article, and that record is in the page source of each one. We publish it rather than hide it.
How we link
Across the full archive, about 70% of our summaries link directly to the publisher. The remainder route through a Google News item we cannot unwrap, so the reader lands on Google rather than on the outlet. That is a defect, not a preference.
Bylines and credit
The structured-data author on every article is “The Houston Editorial Team.” Where the source names the reporter who did the work, we carry that as the source’s credit — attribution, not affiliation. Those journalists are not our staff, do not review our work, and were not asked. Any of them can have their name removed by writing to editor@nexcom.media.
Our archive and the July 2026 review
The archive begins August 12, 2024, but most of it dates from 2026. During a July 2026 platform migration we reviewed the legacy archive and unpublished 578 earlier articles because we could not validate their provenance under our current standard — the absence of a recoverable source record does not by itself mean an article was false, but we removed those items rather than leave them up. The same review ended the template-generated pen-name author profiles earlier versions of this site used. Both are logged at /corrections.
What our short items actually are
This matters and we would rather state it than have it discovered. When we publish a short item — usually one paragraph — the text is generally the outlet’s own feed summary, trimmed to length, not something we rewrote. We measured this on 24 items in July 2026 against the original reporting: most shared a long run of wording with the source, and about two-thirds carried over the source’s opening sentence. Longer pieces on this site are written here and do not track the source’s wording. We are changing the short path so that what we publish is either genuinely our own words or a clearly marked quotation, and we are reviewing what is already published. Until that is finished, treat a one-paragraph item here as the outlet’s own words, credited to them, with a link to their story — and if you are that outlet and you object, our rights and takedown page will get it removed.
Photographs
Photographs belong to the outlets that made them. Image references on our pages resolve by redirect to the publisher's own server: /imgp returns an HTTP 302 with zero bytes from us, so the publisher's server delivers the file and logs the request. Anyone can confirm that with a single request. We do not have, and do not claim, any license from the outlets we summarize. Our position is that linking to reporting and publishing short attributed summaries of it does not require one. We will remove or amend any image or item an outlet asks us to remove or amend, promptly, without requiring a formal legal notice — see our rights and takedown page.
Not a substitute
This region is served by working reporters and newsrooms. This publication is not a substitute for them. Its intended role is to help readers find and navigate identified local reporting and official information, and to send them to the outlet that did the work.
Scrutiny
Questions from a local reporter accelerated parts of this work. We welcome that scrutiny, and we would rather publish these limits ourselves than have them discovered.
Money
Free to read and funded by the founders. These sites have generated no revenue. No display advertising runs on any page and we do not solicit or accept reader donations. We publish an AI-licensing declaration at /.well-known/ai-paywall.json; all pricing in it is zero and every payment method is disabled.
For outlets
If you want direct links instead of syndicated ones, different attribution, or want us to stop summarizing your reporting entirely, write to editor@nexcom.media. We will comply.
