How this site works
The Escarpment is a news site for the Illawarra: Wollongong, Shellharbour and Kiama. This page explains, plainly, how it is made, because you should not have to guess.
AI does the heavy reading. People carry the responsibility.
Our stories are researched and written with AI systems doing the work no small newsroom has hours for: reading council business papers end to end, opening the project update PDFs, pulling figures out of datasets, and comparing what an announcement says against what the delivery agency's own page says. The site is run, edited and published by a small Australian team who are responsible for everything that appears here. We say this with some pride rather than as a confession: the reading actually happens, and you can check it, because of the next rule.
Every factual claim links to its primary source
Each story carries a sources list naming the documents we actually read: the business paper, the project page, the ASX release, the dataset, the register. Where a figure matters, we re-check it against the source on the day we publish, and the dated "checked" chip near the top of a story links the document the story most turns on. If we cannot verify something from a primary source, we either attribute it clearly to whoever reported it, or we tell you it is unverified, or we leave it out. We do not fabricate quotes or figures. Data stories carry a methodology note that says exactly where each number came from and what it can and cannot be compared with.
What we cover, and how
We cover the public record of this region and what it means: councils, planning and land, the port and the industrial economy, health, the university and the institutions of community life. We hold viewpoints and we say so when we do, built on facts we have stated and sourced. We are non-partisan: two senior state ministers hold local seats, and we cover their decisions and their releases on the merits, not the contest. People appear here through their public roles and the public record. A politician's media release is treated as a signal to check, not a source in itself; wherever possible we cite the delivery agency's own record and quote the representative only as their attributed position.
Quiet weeks are honest
If a week's reading turns up nothing worth your time, we publish nothing. We never pad a thin story to look substantial, and no story exists to fill space.
Corrections
If we get something wrong, we want to know, and fixing it is part of the product. Use the corrections form, which arrives with the page you were reading attached. We check the claim against the cited source, correct the story if it is wrong, and log the outcome on the story either way, dated. Corrections stay visible; we do not silently rewrite.
Money
The site is free to read. It will carry clearly labelled advertising when a real advertiser lands, and any story with a commercial relationship behind it is disclosed as such where it appears. Sponsored content is written and fact-checked to the same standard as everything else, is clearly labelled, and never buys the byline: what we cover and what we conclude is not for sale.
So there is no ambiguity, this is exactly what that label looks like. A story with a commercial arrangement behind it wears this at the very top, before you read a word of the piece:
A real one names the sponsor in full. If you ever see a story here that reads like an advertisement and does not carry that banner, it is a mistake and we want to know: tell us.
Fonts, analytics and your privacy
The site is self-contained: fonts are served from this site, and a page view here makes no requests to third-party services. See the privacy page for the full statement.