The publication and the company

About This Publication, and the Company That Publishes It

One person writes this, one small company publishes it, and the address and telephone at the foot of every page are real and answered during the hours printed beside them. Everything else on this page is detail.

What this publication is

The Public Deck is a small independent publication about a working shipping channel and the machinery around it, written for somebody who is coming to look. It began because the subject was sitting in plain view in the middle of a city and nobody was writing about it for visitors, only for the trade.

The name is a joke in two directions. A deck is the part of a bridge you stand on, and in the trade of putting words on a page a deck is the short paragraph under a headline. Both are true here, and neither has anything to do with the address this site happens to live at.

Who writes it

Rosalind Kotula writes it and is the only person who does. Before this she spent eleven years doing document work in an office two floors above a valley floor street, which is how the subject arrived: the window looked at a rail crossing, and after enough months of watching a crossing close for a slow move rather than a train, it became obvious that the whole arrangement was interesting and nobody had explained it.

There is no staff, no contributors and no guest pieces. When a page needs correcting, one person corrects it and dates it.

How it is paid for

Plainly, because this is where most publications go vague.

The publication is funded by the company that publishes it. There is one revenue arrangement and it is a flight search, which appears at the foot of the front page and on getting there. That search is run by an outside booking service, not by us. Where a reader uses that search and then books with the service, a commission can come back here. None of it changes the figure the reader is shown.

That is the whole of it. There is no advertising on this site, no sponsored writing, no affiliate links inside the articles, no paid placement, and no relationship of any kind with any dock operator, vessel owner, mill or transport company. If any of that ever changes, it will be written on this page and in the disclaimer before it happens, not afterwards.

What we will not do

• Name a structure, dock, terminal, park or building by its own name. Places are given by type and by street. That is enough for a reader to find them, and it keeps somebody else's name out of our writing.
• Publish reviews, ratings, testimonials or awards. We have none that would survive a question, and inventing them is the oldest trick in publishing.
• Describe a place that requires passing a gate or standing on an operating dock. A working dock is a workplace with equipment moving on it.
• Present a photograph as documentation of a named object. The plates show the type of structure under discussion. Editorial standards states this and explains why.
• Sell anything, take a booking, or hold anybody's money.

Registered details

The state charter number is deliberately not printed here. Ohio issues those in a continuous sequence, so a printed number tells a reader when a filing happened and nothing useful about the company. Anybody who needs it can ask the filing office, which is the correct place for it.

The office

The office is two rooms on an upper floor of a five story building on a valley floor street, put up in 1917 as the head office of a company that no longer exists. It has a marble entrance hall with a mural of the industrial valley in it, which is either a coincidence or the reason this publication ended up at this address.

The building's own names are not printed anywhere on this site. It has had several, all of them belonging to companies, and this publication does not borrow company names. The address is the address.

Correspondence

Letters come to watch@travelmonte.com and are read during the hours above. Records requests, privacy questions and anything to do with what is stored go to clerk@travelmonte.com. Post reaches the office at the address above. The telephone is answered by a person during desk hours and not outside them, and there is no queue behind it because there is nobody else to pass you to.

Letters are read Tuesday to Saturday between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm Eastern time. Sunday and Monday nobody is at the desk, and anything that arrives then waits for Tuesday.