redmont.wtf

When this newspaper was founded, on a Tuesday in 2008, the founders faced a question that has haunted publishers since Gutenberg: what do we put after the dot? The classics were taken. The dignified options were expensive. And then someone in the room — accounts differ on who, though everyone agrees it wasn't their idea — noticed that a certain three-letter domain was available at a significant discount, for reasons nobody thought to investigate.

The letters, it was decided that very afternoon, would stand for What's The Feature — the question a good editor asks of every story. What is this really about? Why should a reader care? Where, in this six-hour council meeting about gravel, is the beating human heart? It is a noble question. It is the entire discipline of journalism in three words. The fact that it was reverse-engineered from a discount domain in roughly eleven minutes does not make it less noble. Arguably it makes it more noble. We have chosen to argue that.

Since then, “What's The Feature?” has hung above the newsroom door on a hand-painted sign, where it inspires the staff daily and has only fallen on one of them twice.

Publication was suspended without explanation on a Wednesday in 2012 — a Wednesday, a day this newspaper had no history with and, frankly, no chemistry. The presses went quiet for fourteen years. Then, on a Tuesday in 2026, the paper resumed, mid-sentence, as though nothing had happened. Nothing had. That is the official finding, and the finding is final.