Editorial Independence Policy

Display advertising on this site is programmatic. Our ad management network runs the auctions and places the ads. We do not choose, approve, or sell individual display ads, and no display advertiser has a relationship with our editorial team.

Affiliate links earn us a commission when you buy through them. The disclosure appears before the first affiliate link on a page, and commissions never affect whether a service is included, how it is rated, or what we write about it.

Sponsored placements are labeled partner modules and newsletter slots. A sponsor buys placement priority: a module on chosen pages, a labeled slot in the weekly newsletter, or exclusive partner placement across a coverage vertical. Modules sit between sections, never inside editorial copy, and always name the relationship. We do not sell sponsored editorial. No sponsor writes, edits, or previews our copy.

The careers job board sells job listings. A listing is a paid notice from an employer, reviewed before it goes live. Buying one gets an employer a listing, and nothing from the editorial desk.

Directory features can be paid. Directory inclusion cannot. A provider appears in the directory by passing our verification checks, and no payment changes a provider's ranking or verification status. The verified badge reflects our own checks, at every price point including zero.

The full breakdown of revenue sources, labeling, and prohibited advertisers is in our advertising and sponsorship policy. The placement products we currently sell are listed at advertise with us.

The Editor-in-Chief runs the editorial calendar and makes every assignment, edit, and publish decision. Nothing on the business side sits in that chain. No sponsor, advertiser, or affiliate partner sees the calendar, the story queue, or a draft before publish, and none of them previews editorial in any form. The first time a sponsor sees our coverage is the moment you do.

Sponsorship buys placement: a labeled module on the pages a sponsor chooses, a labeled slot in the weekly newsletter, or exclusive partner placement across a vertical. Every one of those placements is marked Sponsored and names the sponsor.

Sponsorship does not buy draft access, calendar visibility, story selection, timing, framing, review scores, pros and cons, rankings in comparisons, directory placement, or a word of editorial copy. There is no price for any of those.

The canonical firewall policy was adopted on May 18, 2026, signed by the Founder and co-signed by the Editor-in-Chief, and last amended on August 12, 2026. Amendments are dated, and this page reflects the current version. What follows is the reader-facing version of each rule.

These categories cannot advertise or sponsor on blackhealth.org regardless of budget or relationship:

• Opioid manufacturers, including rebranded or successor entities. Permanent.
• Tobacco, vaping, and nicotine delivery products, including reduced-harm variants. Permanent.
• Prescription weight-loss drugs marketed as cosmetic weight loss. The same drug can advertise when the campaign presents it as obesity care or diabetes care.
• Predatory fertility clinics and unregulated reproductive marketplaces, including uncredentialed egg brokering and unlicensed surrogacy platforms.
• Supplement brands making unsubstantiated cure claims. OTC supplement advertising is accepted only when the claims are FDA-compliant.
• Telehealth platforms under active, unresolved regulatory sanction for patient-data misuse or controlled-substance prescribing, whether by the FTC, DOJ, DEA, or a state licensing board, including any platform whose executives face unresolved criminal charges over prescribing practices.

The telehealth ban is criteria-based and tracks the status of the sanction, not the brand name. A platform is banned while its regulatory matter is active or unremediated. A platform whose action is resolved, meaning the settlement is paid, compliance obligations are met, and no later violations exist, becomes eligible only under mandatory disclosure: every review and every piece of coverage of that platform names the regulatory action and its outcome prominently, we check the platform's current data practices before any partnership begins, and a new sanction reinstates the ban immediately. Each per-brand determination is recorded in our partnerships log when a partnership is considered.

This list is a floor. The Editor-in-Chief or the Founder can add a category at any time. Removing one requires both of their sign-offs plus a public statement of the reason. It sits alongside the prohibited advertiser list in our advertising and sponsorship policy, which separately bans skin lightening products, unproven treatments marketed as cures, unsupported weight-loss claims, predatory lending and medical credit products, and advertising that targets readers by race without transparent disclosure.

Sponsors do not influence which products, conditions, or stories we cover: not by suggestion, not by offering budget tied to coverage, and not by withholding it. Any approach that tries is documented in our partnerships log and escalated to the Founder within 24 hours.

A sponsor's placement does not run on a page whose editorial names that sponsor's product as a step for the reader to take. The reverse is also enforced: an article that names a product as a reader action does not carry that product's sponsor placement, regardless of who paid. This prevents any appearance that an editorial mention was bought. Different-category adjacency is fine: a vaccine maker's placement can run on a maternal-health article, and cannot run on an article about that same vaccine.

Programmatic display ads are placed by auction, not by hand. We do not pair a display ad with a page, so an auction-placed ad appearing near related coverage is machine placement, never a purchased pairing. The adjacency rule binds every placement we sell directly.

Every placement we sell carries the label Sponsored followed by the sponsor's name. We do not use softer wording such as "supported by" or "presented by", because those imply endorsement instead of disclosure. Sponsor creative cannot be styled to imitate our editorial typography, headlines, or layout; the boundary between sponsor material and Black Health editorial is visually unambiguous on every page. Affiliate relationships are disclosed on the page before the first affiliate link appears.

When an article cites a named expert, study author, or institutional source with a known financial relationship to a current sponsor, our research lead flags the relationship in the article's evidence memo and the Editor-in-Chief decides whether the source stays with disclosure or is replaced. The disclosure is a fixed sentence, not a paraphrase: "Dr. [Name] has disclosed research funding from [Sponsor] in the past [N] years." If the relationship is current: "Dr. [Name] currently receives research funding from [Sponsor]."

When an active sponsor's product is named in an article as a reader action, that article cannot carry the sponsor's placement no matter how the disclosure resolves. Rule 3 applies on top of the disclosure.

Our coverage of drugs, medical products, health policy, and health systems is editorially independent. Sponsorship buys placement, never words. Sponsors gain no access, influence, or favor through advertising, and sponsorship does not move the timing, framing, or selection of a single piece of coverage.

If something on this site looks paid and is not labeled, tell us. If a paid relationship influenced content, we correct the page publicly with a dated note; we do not make silent edits. The same address works for a display ad that appears to fall in a banned category: we do not place individual programmatic ads, but we block advertisers through our ad network.

This page is the reader-facing summary of our editorial firewall. Three related pages complete the picture:

• Advertising and sponsorship policy: revenue sources, labeling, and prohibited advertisers.
• Advertise with us: the placement products we currently sell.
• Editorial standards: how we source, review, and correct our coverage.