How this site works

Who owns it

The Hunter Ledger is owned and published by Jezweb, a web business based in Newcastle, and edited under human direction. It is independent: not owned by a media group, not affiliated with any council, party or developer, and free to read with no paywall.

How stories are found

We keep a standing list of primary sources for Newcastle and Lake Macquarie: both councils’ meeting agendas, minutes and media releases, development application registers, the NSW planning portal, state regulators like IPART, transport project pages, ministerial releases, community organisations’ annual reports, and public data sets. An AI scout works through that list on a rotation, reading whole documents, including the 90-page agenda PDFs almost nobody else reads. When a cycle finds nothing worth your time, we publish nothing. We do not manufacture news to look busy.

How stories are written and checked

• Citation or it doesn’t run. Every factual claim in a story links to a primary source: the actual minutes PDF, the regulator’s table, the media release. Where the best public source is another outlet’s reporting, we say so in the story itself, and go one layer deeper when the primary document becomes available.
• No fabricated quotes, ever. If no source carries a quote, the story runs without quotes.
• Data stories show their working. Any story built on numbers carries a “How we read the numbers” note explaining what was read, from where, and what the figures do and do not mean. Charts are drawn to scale from the cited figures.
• Verification is part of the job. Where our own research notes and a primary document disagree, the document wins. It has already happened: while preparing our rate-peg story we found an error in our internal notes and corrected it against the regulator’s table before publishing.

What we deliberately don’t cover

The Ledger does civic and data journalism: decisions, projects, budgets, datasets, organisations and places. We do not do court or crime reporting that names people, and we do not cover personal controversy. Where a person appears in our pages, it is in their public role, doing their public job: a councillor moving a motion, an executive making an announcement. Any story that is genuinely about a person requires human review before it is published, and publishing it is the exception, not the rule.

Corrections

When we get something wrong, we correct the story, date the correction, and leave it visible on the page rather than quietly rewriting history. Every story carries a link to request a correction; the form records which page you came from so your report lands with context. A ledger you can trust is one where the crossings-out are still legible.

Advertising and sponsored content

The Ledger is funded by advertising from local businesses, not by readers. As of launch there is no advertising or sponsored content on the site. When there is, the rules are already set: sponsored or partner editorial is always labelled as such, in plain words, in the same honest register as everything else; advertisers get no say in news coverage; and a sponsored piece still follows the citation rule. If you run a local business and want to reach readers here, talk to us.

Why run a newsroom this way

Because the raw material of local news is public and rich, and most of it goes unread. Council business papers, regulator tables, annual reports: the information was always there. What has been missing is the treatment: someone to read all of it, connect it, and hand you the decision that affects your street with the source one click away. Software is good at reading everything. Owning what gets published, and answering for it, stays human.