How We Report
Most local news tells you what happened. We try to tell you what it means for you — who is affected, what it costs, and what happens next.
Here is how a HighOnCity story gets made.
We start with what a city is actually saying
Every day we read the things your city publishes and most people never see: council releases, police and fire communications, transit notices, provincial and federal announcements, court schedules, agency filings and statistical releases. We read them across all six cities we cover.
Most of it is not a story. Some of it is.
Some of our reporting begins where other reporting ends
Before writing, we work out what a reader would still want to know. A funding announcement that does not say how many people it serves. A closure that does not say for how long. A cut that does not say who loses out.
Those questions get written down, and they go looking for answers.
We look for those answers in four places
Our own archive. If we have covered this before, that history belongs in the story. A single incident reads differently when you know it is the third this year.
Everything we have gathered. We hold far more source material than we publish. A federal announcement with no local angle often sits beside a local report that supplies one.
Where several organisations covered the same event, we read all of them, not the first one. Each usually holds something the others missed. If they disagree on something that matters, we tell you they disagree.
One caveat we hold ourselves to: several papers running the same wire copy is one account, not several. We do not treat that as confirmation.
The public record. Government sites, statistics agencies, court and oversight bodies, and the websites of the organisations named in the story. We go to the primary source wherever we can: the filing rather than the write-up, the release rather than the rewrite. A company's own statement about its own decision is a primary source, and we read it rather than someone's summary of it.
What residents are saying. Where people are publicly discussing something, that tells us what a community is worried about. We use it to show the question being asked, never as a statement of fact, and we do not quote individuals.
When nobody has answered, we ask
If a question matters and the record does not answer it, we write to the body that can — a city department, a police service, a transit agency, a company.
When they reply with real information, we publish it as a story marked HOC Exclusive, and we say what they told us and what they did not.
That label has a specific meaning: the central information came from questions we put directly to a named organisation, and answers given to us. It does not mean we were first to report the underlying event.
When they do not reply, we say that too.
We check the numbers
Every figure in a story is checked against the document it came from. If a number cannot be traced to a source, it does not run.
Where we have more than one account of an event, each figure is checked against all of them. A number that two independent accounts agree on is on firmer ground than one only a single account carries, and we track which is which.
We do not do arithmetic on other people's statistics. If a poll reports that 28 per cent of people said yes, we do not report that 72 per cent said no — surveys have undecided respondents, and the difference is not ours to invent.
We stay with a story
When something develops, we add a dated update to the original story rather than starting again from scratch.
An updated story comes back to the top of the page marked UPDATED, showing how long ago the update landed rather than when the story first ran. We never change the original publication date — a story from Tuesday stays a story from Tuesday, even when Thursday added something to it.
We tell you when we are wrong
Accuracy matters more to us than speed. If we find an error we fix it, whether or not anyone reported it.
We keep a record of our corrections. If we published something false, we fix it and we say what it was.
If you spot something wrong, tell us. It is the single most useful thing a reader can do.
About the technology
We are a small operation covering six cities, and we use software to do it — including automated systems that help us gather source material, check figures, search public records and draft copy.
We are open about that, and it changes nothing about who is accountable. Everything published here is the responsibility of Power Brand Ca. If a story is wrong, that is on us, not on a tool.
Our editorial standards, in full, are on the Editorial Standards page.
