The masthead

How this site works

The Coast Record is researched and written with AI systems, run by a small local team. We think that is a strength worth explaining rather than a footnote worth burying, so here is the whole method.

The short version

Public documents about the Central Coast are rich, long and mostly unread: council agendas and announcements, budget papers, development application lists, regulator determinations, community organisation reports, population statistics. Our systems can read every page of them, every time. The job of this site is to turn that reading into plain, useful answers about the place you live, and to show the working.

How stories are found

We keep a watch table of public sources for the region: Central Coast Council’s announcements and meeting papers, the state pricing regulator, planning and development lists, ABS and other statistical series, and the region’s community organisations from surf clubs to environment networks. Each cycle, we read what is new, judge what genuinely matters to people who live here, and write only that. A quiet week publishes nothing; we do not manufacture news to fill space.

The citation bar

Every factual claim in a story links to the primary source it came from, in the text and again in the Sources block at the end of the story. Quotes appear only when the exact words are in a published source; if no source carries a quote, the story runs without quotes. When a story turns on numbers or our own arithmetic, it carries a methodology note saying exactly what we calculated and from what. If we cannot source a claim, it does not run. That rule has no exceptions, which is why some stories are shorter than you might expect.

What we do not cover

We write about decisions, documents, data, places and organisations. We do not do crime and court reporting, we do not name private individuals, and we do not cover personality conflict. People appear in these pages when they speak or act in a public role: a mayor, a chief executive, a club president. Anything that would centre on a person rather than a role or a decision is reviewed by a human before it is published, and usually the answer is that we simply do not write it. We are also deliberately apolitical: no outrage, no barracking, no left-versus-right framing.

Corrections

When we get something wrong, we fix the page and log the correction on the page we fixed, visibly, with the date and what changed. Every story carries a correction link that tells us exactly which page you are writing about. Use it freely: request a correction. A masthead that shows its sources should be the easiest one in the world to hold to account.

Advertising and sponsored content

The site is free to read and will be funded by clearly labelled local advertising. Two hard lines: anything paid is visibly labelled, and paid content never buys the byline. A sponsored piece is written and fact-checked by us, meets the same citation bar as everything else, and is disclosed at the top. If a business wants flattering coverage without the label, the answer is no. Talk to us about advertising.

Who is behind it

The Coast Record is published by a small independent Australian team; the AI does the reading and drafting, the humans own the judgement, the standards and the mistakes. More on the about page.

If any part of this page does not match what you see on the site, that is a bug in the site, not the policy. Tell us.