About
The publication. Third person about the water and never about the group. It names a stretch of water, the pressure on it, who holds the instruments and who pays; it never says that a problem is addressable by anyone in particular, and it never names a system, a program or a service. The reader is trusted to be intelligent, busy and capable of holding a number, and is never told how to feel about what they are shown.
One named body of water at a time, with a live and dated problem, read down through its physics, its chemistry, its century, its fleet, its law and its people. Monthly, twelve hundred to fifteen hundred words, one journey.
The pictures
Every issue opens with a photograph, and none of them is a photograph of the water the issue is about. They are licensed stock, chosen for what the piece feels like rather than for what it describes, and each one is filed with a note recording what it shows, who took it, and what it is not.
That rule is not modesty. This publication writes about named bodies of water that are in trouble, and a picture at the head of a piece is read as evidence by people who would never read a caption. A photograph that appeared to be the reef, the gulf or the lake in question would be making a claim nobody checked, in the one register nobody checks. So it does not appear to be.