The permanent references.

What qualifies as an archive dossier?

A dossier earns a place in the archive by meeting a specific standard: it should be the most complete public reference on its subject that our editorial staff can produce, it should contain numbers and templates rather than generic advice, and it should stay accurate long enough to be worth bookmarking rather than treated as disposable news. That rules out most of what shows up in our weekly dispatches, which are tied to specific moments and events.

Dossiers are reviewed on a rolling quarterly schedule. Each review pass checks the numbers against current conditions, updates any sections where industry practice has shifted, and either adds new sub-sections or splits a dossier into two when it becomes long enough that readers need a second entry point. The Touring & Booking Guide has been through three review cycles; it started at 2,800 words and now sits at around 3,500 after two rounds of additions.

How the archive relates to the rest of the site

The Tour Journal 2010–2011 sits somewhere between dossier and editorial retrospective — it’s long-form enough for the archive but its value is historical rather than operational. We’ve kept it here because the archive is also where longitudinal editorial work belongs, and because the context it provides on the pre-streaming touring economy is referenced throughout the Touring craft guide and the Booking Guide. A second historical archive (1998–2003 venue economics) is drafted but not yet published.

For day-to-day reading, start with the dispatches. For frameworks and orientation, start with the craft pages. Only come here when you need the definitive version of a reference — the kind of document you open once and come back to for years.