The Denman Firestarter: a newspaper you can check

2026-09-06

Denman lost its newspaper a long time ago. What replaced it was a community newsletter, a few Facebook groups, and a regional paper based in Courtenay that covers the islands when something goes wrong. Meanwhile the body that decides what you may build on your own land meets in public, records those meetings, and publishes no register of its decisions at all.

So we have started one. The Denman Firestarter — named for what every islander eventually does with a newspaper, and for what a newspaper is sometimes for.

The rule that makes it worth reading

Anyone can say they check their facts. We made it mechanical. Before an article publishes, software fetches every source we cite and refuses the piece if one does not load. Where we hold the document ourselves — the minutes, the agendas, the bylaws, and the transcripts of about a thousand meeting recordings — it checks that the passage we quoted actually appears in it. Not approximately. Exactly. Every figure of two digits or more has to trace back to something we gathered, or the article does not run.

That last check is the one nobody else can do, and it is only possible because of work that had nothing to do with journalism when it started: years of mirroring public documents and transcribing meetings that would otherwise exist only as video nobody watches.

Reports and opinion, kept apart

This paper has a point of view. We think free markets should be the default and regulation the exception that has to justify itself. We would rather tell you that on the standards page than let it leak into the reporting.

So reports carry facts and citations, and nothing else — enforced in software, not just in policy: a report containing evaluative language will not publish. Argument lives in Analysis, labelled on every page. If you find an opinion in a report, that is a defect, and we want to hear about it.

What happened to the old news feed

Since 2018 this site compiled thousands of items automatically from community sources. It was useful and it was not journalism, so it now lives at the Denman Community Record, labelled for what it is.

We also withdrew part of it. Some items cited nothing but a post in a closed Facebook group — an address most readers cannot open, and therefore a claim nobody could check. And because those posts were written by neighbours rather than officials, the feed summarised them in our own words rather than quoting people. Then it printed those summaries inside quotation marks. That was wrong, we fixed it, and we are telling you about it here rather than hoping you do not notice. It is the reason the corrections page exists before the first correction does.

A print edition is coming, on the kind of paper that comes off on your hands.