Our standards

The Denman Firestarter — First for news. Second for kindling.
Published by Firestarter. Our standards · Corrections · Feed

Who publishes this

The Denman Firestarter is published by Firestarter, Tony Aly’s own company. It is a private project — not a society, a co-operative or a charity — and it takes no public money. It is the first paper of an intended Canada-wide series of local papers built the same way.

What we believe, said plainly

We think free markets should be the default and regulation the exception that has to justify itself, rather than the other way round. We think land use on these islands has been governed by a body that publishes no register of its own decisions, and that this is a problem a newspaper can actually do something about.

That view belongs in Analysis, and nowhere else. Our reports say what happened and cite where we got it. If you find an opinion in a report, that is a defect and we want to hear about it. The distinction is enforced in software rather than only in policy: a report containing evaluative language will not publish.

How a claim gets published

Every article passes an automated gate before it goes out. Five checks:

  1. Sourced. Every claim carries a numbered footnote pointing at a source with a real label and address. A source nothing cites is removed.
  2. Resolvable. Every source URL is fetched at publication and must answer. A citation you cannot open is a citation you cannot check, so it does not count. This is why we do not cite posts in closed groups, even when that is where we first heard something.
  3. Contained. Where we hold the document itself — meeting minutes, agendas, bylaws, and the transcripts of about a thousand meeting recordings — the passage we quote must actually appear in it. Not approximately: exactly. If it does not, the article does not publish.
  4. Traceable. Every figure of two digits or more must trace back to something we gathered. An invented number stops the press.
  5. Neutral, in the reporting lane. Evaluative language, statements about what ought to happen, and attribution verbs that smuggle in a judgment are refused in a report.

An article that fails any check is not published. It waits in a queue with the reasons attached. We would rather run short than run unchecked.

Fairness: the other side

A report can be perfectly sourced and still be unfair, because being supported and being fair are different questions. An accusation nobody had to answer is not reporting, however well cited it is. So these are the norms we hold ourselves to, and where the software can enforce one, it does:

  1. If we report that a named body or official got something wrong, the same article carries their answer, or says we asked and what happened. Automatic. A report that makes an allegation and carries no response is refused.
  2. A contested claim rests on more than one source. Automatic. An allegation resting on a single source is refused.
  3. We quote people in their own words, from the record, and say when we are summarising instead. Automatic. A quotation must appear verbatim in a document we hold.
  4. A report says what happened. Whether it was good or bad belongs in Analysis, labelled. Automatic. Evaluative language will not publish in the reporting lane.
  5. Anyone we criticise can answer, and we publish the answer in full, at the same prominence. Editorial. Send it to corrections and we print it.
  6. We correct in public, dated, on the article and in a running list. We never quietly edit. Editorial, with the dates enforced in the schema.
  7. Private individuals are not the subject of reports. Institutions and public officials acting publicly are. Editorial, and the beat generator is never handed a member of the public's words.

Two of those are mechanical. If a report says a named public body failed, breached, misled or was at fault, and the same piece carries no answer from that body and no line saying we asked them, it does not publish. Nor does an allegation resting on a single source. The article waits in the queue with the reason attached until the other side is in it.

This cuts against us, and that is the point: the publisher of this paper also runs a campaign against the Islands Trust. The campaign argues. The paper reports, and the body it reports on gets to answer in the same piece.

How we use machines

This paper is assembled with software, including language models, and we would rather say so than have you work it out. Machines draft from documents we hold and check their own citations against those documents. They do not decide what is true: the gate above does, mechanically, and it refuses far more than it passes. Where a quotation appears in quotation marks, it was captured verbatim from the source; where we have summarised something in our own words, we say so instead. We got exactly that wrong on an earlier automated feed and published the correction.

Corrections

We publish every correction, dated, on the article and in a running list. An article’s first publication date never moves; its updated date does, and the article says so when the two differ. We do not quietly edit. corrections@denmanisland.co

What we will not do

Interests we have to declare

Tony Aly is involved with Camp Denman, also known as Elk Haven. Wherever that site, its history, or any public-record file about it is discussed, that relationship is disclosed on the page itself. He also publishes abolishislandstrust.org, which campaigns for the abolition of the Islands Trust, and denmantown.org, which campaigns for incorporation. Those are advocacy sites and they say so. This is a newspaper, and the separation between the reporting here and the campaigning there is the thing we are most concerned to get right. Full ownership and transparency statement.

Money from the people we report on

On 17 March 2026 the Denman Island Local Trust Committee amended its Public Notification Bylaw No. 259, deleting the words “in publications locally produced and distributed on Denman Island” and replacing them with “in a newspaper that publishes at least once a month on Denman Island”. It gave the amended bylaw third reading and forwarded it to the Islands Trust Executive Committee, which approved it on 3 June 2026 (motion EC-2026-058, under section 27 of the Islands Trust Act). The rule is in force.

Correction, 6 September 2026: this page previously said we had searched the Trust-wide minutes and found no record of that approval. That was wrong. The approval was in the minutes we hold the whole time; our search was faulty and we reported its result as a finding. The lesson is the one this page is about — we have corrected it here and recorded it.

A weekly newspaper on Denman Island satisfies that requirement. So the body whose decisions this paper exists to report may become a paying customer of it — while the same publisher runs a campaign to abolish that body. That is the sharpest conflict of interest this operation has, and you should not have to work it out for yourself.

What we commit to. If we ever accept statutory-notice money, or any other money, from the Islands Trust or from any public body we cover: we publish the amount, who paid it and what for, on this page. Every report about that body carries the disclosure for as long as it is true. And it buys nothing — not a story, not a spiking, not a softer adjective. We would rather tell you about the money and be doubted than take it quietly and be believed.

As of the date of this page we have taken no money from the Islands Trust or from any other public body, and none is owed to us.

The archive that came before

Between 2018 and 2026 this site compiled 3,989 items automatically from community sources. That archive is preserved at the Denman Community Record, labelled for what it is. It is not the work of this newsroom and it was not held to the standards above.

Related private projects: abolishislandstrust.org · denmantown.org