How this site works

The South Coast is a news site for Shoalhaven, Eurobodalla and Bega Valley, from Berry to the Victorian border. It is made in a particular way, and you should know exactly how.

Where the stories come from

Not from press releases. The decisions that shape this coast are written down in documents almost nobody reads to the end: three councils’ business papers and minutes, the Milton Ulladulla bypass environmental impact statement, Health Infrastructure’s project pages, the Reconstruction Authority’s program tables, water allocation statements, Forestry Corporation harvest plans and the EPA’s public registers. We keep a working list of those sources and read them in rotation, in full, cycle after cycle. The stories are what those documents say and what it means for you, and the connections between them that only show up when someone reads all of it.

Every factual claim links to the document it came from

Each story ends with a list of the documents we actually read, and the claims in the text link to them. Where a figure matters, we check it against the source on the day we publish. If we cannot verify something from a primary source we attribute it to whoever said it and say so, or leave it out. No invented quotes, no invented figures, ever. Stories built on data carry a methodology note: where each number came from, how we calculated anything we calculated, and what it can and cannot be compared with.

Stories are researched and drafted with AI, and checked by people

We say this plainly because we are proud of it. AI does the reading no small newsroom has the hours for: a 400-page agenda, every chapter of an EIS, a decade of allocation statements. It drafts from those documents and nothing else. Every draft is then checked against the documents it cites before it is published, by the small Australian team who run this site and are responsible for every word on it. The reading is machine-assisted. The judgement and the responsibility are ours.

What we cover, and how

Councils, the highway, the hospitals, bushfire and storm recovery, water, the forests and marine parks, the towns and their economies. When we hold a view we say so, and it rests on facts we have stated and sourced. We are non-partisan, which matters on a coast where the loudest topics invite a side: forestry, the Batemans Bay emergency department, the bypass route. We cover them from the documents. Members of parliament, mayors and councillors appear through their public roles and the public record, and a media release is a signal to go and check, never a source in itself. Recovery is written on program figures and named organisations, never on private grief.

Quiet weeks are honest

If a cycle’s reading turns up nothing worth your time, we publish nothing. A thin story is never padded to look substantial, and nothing is manufactured to fill a gap.

Corrections

If we get something wrong, tell us through the corrections form. We check the claim against the cited source, fix the story if it is wrong, and add a dated note to the story saying what changed. The note stays. We do not quietly rewrite.

Money

The site is free to read. It will carry clearly labelled advertising when a real advertiser takes a slot, and any story with a commercial relationship behind it says so where the reader meets it. Sponsored content is researched, written and checked by us to the same standard as everything else, is labelled, and never buys the byline: what we cover and what we conclude is not for sale. This is what that label looks like, at the top of a story, before the first paragraph:

A story that reads like an advertisement and carries no such label is a mistake, and we want to hear about it: tell us.

Fonts, analytics and your privacy

Reading a page here makes no request to any third party: the fonts are served from this site, and there are no external scripts, embeds or trackers. The privacy page has the full statement.