About the news archive

Treefingers ran a news desk from 2003 to 2006, kept going by a few fans who posted what they heard, often on a tip from a reader. When the site came back in 2026 we wanted the years before and after the desk filled in too, so the band's story can be read the way it unfolded.

Each story starts from what was reported at the time: the music papers, newspapers, radio, and the band's own posts. We tell it in our own words, the way a fan desk would have told it on the day. A story set in 1997 doesn't know what happened in 1998.

The date above the headline is the day the story is about. The line under it says when we wrote it up. The old desk posts were rewritten the same way and still carry the name of the editor who first posted them.

The writing and the checking are done with AI tools working from the sources, and a person reviews every year of the archive before it goes up.

Every fact comes from one of the sources listed under the story, from the site's own records, or from the plain public record. A concert story is checked against its show page and setlist, a release story against the release. The draft then goes to a checker who didn't write it, and anything the sources don't back up comes out.

The sources are numbered at the foot of each story, and a quotation carries the number of the one it came from. When they disagree on something that matters, the story says so plainly rather than picking a side.

We don't guess to fill a gap. If no setlist from a night survives, the story says so once and moves on. A photograph appears only where someone has looked at it and made sure it shows who the story is about.

We'd like to know. The make a suggestion tab on any story sends a note to the archive, and a fix is kept on record so it stays fixed.

Treefingers is a noncommercial fan site. It is not an official Radiohead site and is not run by the band, their label or their management.