Prosperitist is an independent newspaper that takes the claims everybody repeats and checks them against the sources that hold the numbers. A figure in a minister’s speech, a sum in a viral post, a forecast in a famous book: each story finds the strongest version of the claim, then reads it against the statistics, the court file or the original text.
It writes most often about energy, climate, economics and Germany, and also about society, history and the economists and writers whose arguments keep turning up in the debate. It is written and edited by one person, Raphael Bauer. There is no advertising department, no growth team and no algorithm deciding what runs on the front page. Nothing here is sponsored.
How a story works
The answer is rarely a plain yes or no. A claim usually survives one test and fails another, and the story reports both: where the claim holds, and where it does not. Points that cut against the story’s own conclusion stay in the text, not in a footnote.
The paper has a point of view. It is sympathetic to markets, property and free speech. That is a reason to check the claims its own side likes as carefully as anybody else’s, and several of the profiles do exactly that.
Sources
Every number, quotation and finding carries a numbered source at the foot of the story. The paper cites the study, not the newspaper that wrote it up, and the statistical office’s table, not an article about the table. Quotations are checked against the original. Charts are drawn from the data, and most carry a table of their numbers underneath.
Corrections
A story that got something wrong when it was printed is corrected in the text. A story overtaken by later events keeps what it said and gains a dated update at the end of the section concerned. Stories stay at the address they were printed under.
Two editions
Every story appears in English and in German. The English text is the original; the German follows it paragraph by paragraph, and a correction always applies to both. In the German edition, quotations from English-language sources appear as reported speech or in the original English — a translation is not a quotation.
How it is made
The paper is a static site. The layout and stylesheet are written by hand — no third-party theme, no cookies, and no JavaScript except a few lines that run the search page and an anonymous page-view counter. It is a few hundred lines of HTML templates and one CSS file.
Write to the editor
Corrections, missing sources and arguments against a story are all welcome. The address is at the foot of every page, under Write to the editor.