This page explains how articles on LongBeach.biz are researched, written, checked and corrected.
Sources
Every factual claim on the site is traceable to a source listed at the end of the article that makes it. Sources are ranked in this order of preference:
- The City of Long Beach and its departments: Financial Management’s Business License Division, Community Development’s Planning Bureau and Permit Center, the Health and Human Services Department’s Bureau of Environmental Health, the Fire Department, Public Works, Economic Development, and the city’s fee schedules, forms and brochures.
- The Long Beach Municipal Code and the zoning code, cited by chapter.
- The Port of Long Beach, Long Beach Transit, Metro and other public agencies; the State of California (the Department of Tax and Fee Administration, the Secretary of State, Alcoholic Beverage Control, the Contractors State License Board, the Coastal Commission and others); Los Angeles County; federal agencies.
- For Visiting pages, the operator’s or venue’s own site: Carnival for the cruise terminal, Catalina Express, the Aquarium of the Pacific, the Queen Mary, the Long Beach Convention Center, the Grand Prix, Long Beach Airport, and each hotel’s own page for its own facts. The city’s tourism bureau only for its own facts, where no operator page exists.
- Established news reporting, for dated events and for facts no official page carries, cited for its own reporting.
Wikipedia, forums, review sites, contractor and permit-service marketing pages and other blogs are used to find leads, never as the cited source for a fact. Businesses, hotels and venues are described by what their own pages state. The site does not publish reviews.
When official pages disagree, the article says so, cites both, and says which to plan around. The city’s own permit FAQ, for instance, gives older thresholds than its current “Do I Need a Permit?” page; the article shows both rather than choosing silently.
Facts that change
The city’s fee schedules change on October 1 and some on July 1. Permit thresholds, caps on regulated activities, transit routes, parking rates and event dates change on their own schedules. Articles state such facts as they stood on the date checked, name the fee year where one applies, phrase them so a reader knows to confirm, and link to the live page for anything that changes weekly. Each article shows the month its sources were last checked. Pages that carry fees are re-checked after each schedule change; Visiting pages at least quarterly.
The data pages
The Data section is built from the city’s open data: the business-license layer and the polygon layers on the city’s GeoSpatial and Open Data Hub, and the Go Long Beach service-request dataset and others on the city’s data portal. Each data page carries a provenance box with the dataset, its URL, the period covered, the date it was fetched and a link to the methodology page, which states every definition and exclusion: what counts as a new business, why home-based businesses are reported only in aggregate, how closures and response times are measured. The figures are regenerated on a schedule, and the page says when. The data is used under the City of Long Beach’s open-data terms of use, which license it for copying, adaptation and commercial use; the city does not endorse this site, and the data is provided by the city without warranty.
What the site does not do
- It does not give legal, tax or investment advice. It describes a process and cites the rule; whether the rule applies to your case is a question for the office that administers it, or for a professional.
- It does not publish first-person accounts, reviews or claims of experience the byline has not had.
- It does not invent fees, thresholds, distances, walking times, statistics or quotations. Where no official page publishes a figure, the article says so rather than borrowing an estimate.
- It does not name or locate home-based businesses from the city’s data, even though the city’s layer contains them.
- It does not accept payment for coverage. Affiliate relationships are disclosed on the affiliate disclosure page and on the pages where links appear.
Use of software and AI tools
Articles carry the byline Dana Castellano, which is the editorial byline of the LongBeach.biz team at the publisher, Webhaus LLC, rather than one person’s legal name. Research, drafting and fact-checking are done with the help of AI research and writing tools under the direction of that team. Every article is built from the cited sources, checked for accuracy against them before publication (including an automated check that every figure and every cited page appears in the research record), and edited by a person. Webhaus LLC is responsible for everything published.
Corrections
Errors are corrected as soon as they are confirmed, and the article’s “updated” date changes. To report one, use the contact page and include the article title and the page that contradicts it.