Ownership & Funding
Who owns TL TALK RADIO
This site is published by a small independent operation run by the editors who founded it. There is no parent media group, no outside shareholder pulling strings, no political party’s media arm, and no single wealthy backer whose interests we quietly protect. Nobody owns a piece of this publication who is not doing the work of it.
The operation is registered and files what the law of the place it is established requires. We do not print the registration particulars on this page, mainly because that material gets scraped and reused in impersonation attempts against readers. If you have a genuine reason to need them, such as serving a legal notice or verifying us for a transparency body, write to support@tltalkradio.org and we will provide them. Because the owners are the editors, there is no proprietor to phone this desk, and nowhere for us to hide: if this site publishes something indefensible, the people who own it published it.
No state money, no party, no hidden backer
We take no money from any government, ministry, department or agency, and we run no government advertising while we can afford not to. We have no affiliation with any political party, campaign, alliance or candidate, and we accept nothing from political action committees, party media operations or organisations acting for them. Political advertising that hides who is paying for it is refused outright. We would rather take the revenue hit than let our space quietly become someone’s undeclared campaign spend.
Where the money comes from
Advertising is our primary source of revenue and, at present, close to all of it. Most of that is programmatic display filled through advertising exchanges, with a smaller amount sold directly. Occasional clearly labelled sponsored posts and newsletter sponsorship make up the rest. The rules those sales run under, including the categories we refuse, are on our advertise page.
Where we use affiliate links, we disclose them. If a story links to a product and we may earn a small commission when you buy through that link, the story says so, the commission never changes what we recommend or whether we recommend it, and the price you pay is not affected. There is no paywall and no subscription. If a new revenue stream ever becomes significant, this page changes to describe it before the money is spent, not at the end of a financial year.
How advertising is kept off the story list
Our team is small, so the wall between money and journalism here is procedural rather than architectural. It holds because the rules are few and absolute. Advertiser identities are not circulated with the day’s story list. No advertiser is told what is coming. No advertiser sees a story before publication, and no story is shown to a buyer for comment as a courtesy.
When an advertiser asks for a story to be pulled or softened, the answer is no, and the request itself may become something we report. When a company that advertises with us becomes the subject of coverage, the story says so. On programmatic space we usually do not even know which company bought a given impression, which is inconvenient for selling and useful for everyone else. How we source and how right of reply works is set out in our editorial standards.
Grants, donations and reader support
We currently accept no grants, donations or reader contributions. If we ever do, the terms will be set in advance and will not be negotiable: we name the funder, we describe the amount in a band that actually means something, we publish the purpose and duration, and we state whether the funder had any say over what we cover. A grant conditioned on covering a subject, or on approval of our output, is not one we can take. Any funder providing a meaningful share of our income would be named here, not buried in a footnote nobody reads.
Conflicts of interest
The owners hold no stakes in the companies on our beat and take no paid work from political parties, government departments, PR agencies or businesses we cover. Nobody here advises an interest in the morning and edits its coverage in the afternoon. Where an editor has a family or financial interest in a story, they declare it and hand it off, and the handover is recorded. Press trips, hosted stays and gifts are declined or, where a review copy or accreditation is genuinely part of the job, disclosed.
Keeping this page honest
If the ownership changes, if an investor turns up, if we take a grant, or if a revenue stream grows into something that matters, this page is updated first, before any announcement elsewhere. The wider account of who we are is on our about page, and errors here are fixed the way errors in our reporting are, which our corrections policy describes. If something on this page reads as thin or evasive to you, say so. Write to support@tltalkradio.org and ask the specific question. The fastest way to keep a transparency page honest is a reader who actually reads it.
Last updated: August 2026
