How Nightlore Started, and Why It Stayed Small

The site began out of a fairly specific frustration: most of what passed for sleep journalism online was written by, or quietly funded by, a mattress or supplement company with an obvious reason to reach a particular conclusion. Finding a plainly written, independently reported piece on something as ordinary as bedroom temperature turned out to be harder than it should have been.

What we built instead is smaller and slower. Writers work directly with an editor from the first pitch, sources are checked against their original material rather than against someone else's summary of them, and a second editor reads every draft before it goes live. That review step has meant fewer articles per month, which we consider a fair trade.

The reader-facing side follows the same logic: funding sources are disclosed, corrections are logged rather than quietly edited away, and there is a direct way to reach an actual editor rather than a general inbox that nobody reads.