Sources

Source order

When sources disagree, the most direct record normally gets the most weight.

• Official records: City of Burlington, Halton Region, election records, agendas, minutes, votes, budgets and formal decisions.
• Direct sources: candidate websites, organizations speaking for themselves and first-party public statements.
• Local reporting: established reporting for interviews, events, context and developments that are not fully described in a government record.
• Public discussion: useful for finding questions residents are asking, but not treated as polling or proof.

Daily news monitor

An automated monitor checks a defined group of Burlington sources several times a day. It covers City Hall, elections, schools, events, food, recreation, wildlife, transit and regional decisions with a direct Burlington consequence.

The monitor verifies that a destination page exists, removes duplicate and generic navigation links, and can refresh the Latest list. It does not invent a reported fact or automatically turn an unverified social post into an article. Longer stories require direct sources, clear attribution and an editorial review before publication.

A Toronto, Oakville, Hamilton, Ontario or regional story appears only when the Burlington connection is specific and useful. Social posts can identify leads, but the post itself is not proof.

What reaches the homepage

Evidence, Burlington relevance and image rights are pass-or-fail checks. Eligible stories are then sorted by how relevant they are today, how many local readers they serve, what is genuinely new, how recognizable the subject is and whether the story changes a decision or explains a real stake.

Seasonal stories have expiry dates. A spring wildlife story remains searchable after migration ends, but it no longer displaces school reopening, an approaching festival or a current election update. The score guides placement; readers do not see a pseudo-precise number beside the headline.

GO train times

Burlington News uses official Metrolinx data for Burlington GO, Union Station and West Harbour on the Lakeshore West line. When a registered Metrolinx Open Data API key is available, the site can use scheduled journeys plus computed departure predictions and service status. When the API key is unavailable, the site falls back to the official GO Transit GTFS schedule and labels the times Scheduled.

Scheduled data is never described as live. The homepage also refuses stale generated GO data rather than presenting old departures as current.

Data used in this product or service is provided with the permission of Metrolinx. Metrolinx makes no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, with respect to the Data and assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or currency of the data used in this product or service.

Coverage and political framing

Ground News compares the mix of publishers covering the same event. Its political ratings apply to publications, not individual articles, and are averaged from outside rating organizations. Its coverage bar describes who covered a story; it does not prove the story itself is left- or right-wing.

Burlington does not have enough independent outlets covering every local issue to make a similar percentage reliable. For contested stories, Burlington News instead records the primary evidence, interested parties, independent reporting, requests for response and any important perspective the available record does not answer. The goal is better sourcing, not another badge.

What Burlington is talking about

This is a public conversation signal, not a poll. Public r/BurlingtonON posts are ranked primarily by recency, Burlington specificity and immediate local impact, with comments and votes used as smaller supporting signals. Fresh reports involving a collision, fire, road closure, outage, transit delay or similar local disruption can outrank an older high-engagement discussion.

Deleted, adult, promotional and stale posts are excluded. A high score does not make a claim true. Incident-like posts remain labelled as unverified community reports until an official source or established local reporting corroborates the underlying event. Facebook groups and private accounts are not scraped.

Headline standard

A headline must make sense without the image or deck beneath it. Before publication it is checked for clarity, specificity, factual support and genuine reader value. It should identify the real subject and tension rather than repeat a source-page label or rely on vague phrases such as “what to know.” Surprise is useful only when the reporting earns it.

Automated listings reject short navigation labels, repeated words, duplicate title-and-summary text and generic service-page headings. If a source does not provide enough information for an accurate editorial headline, it does not receive a news slot.

Election candidates

Candidate names and ballot placement come from the City of Burlington's official list. Candidate proposals are summarized as proposals, not as completed outcomes.

Candidate photos are shown only when the identity match is high-confidence. Candidate-supplied sites are checked first, then exact-name local candidate profiles. If the match is uncertain, the site keeps initials rather than guessing.

Local comments checked

A public comment can be useful because it may surface a specific claim that deserves checking. The comment itself is never the evidence.

The factual core is checked against primary records or reliable reporting. Opinion and motive stay labelled as opinion or unverified. For example, proving that someone sits on a board does not prove a conflict of interest; proving that taxes increased does not prove one councillor caused the entire increase.

• Verified: direct evidence supports the factual core.
• Partly verified: evidence supports only part of the claim or important context changes its meaning.
• Personal experience: a resident describes what happened to them; it is attributed but not generalized to everyone.
• Not verified: reliable supporting evidence was not located, so the claim is not presented as fact.

Promises and track records

A past commitment can be tracked when the original statement is specific enough to test and a dated source can be preserved. Outcomes are checked against later public records.

The site separates proposed, approved, funded, started and completed. A council-wide result is not credited to one person without evidence of that person's specific role. No overall “promises kept” percentage is published until there is a sufficiently complete and comparable record.

Images and reconstructions

Images should match the actual person, place or story. A public webpage is not automatically a licence to republish its photography. Burlington News uses original, public-domain, properly licensed or expressly permitted images and keeps the required credit close to the image.

Tourism Burlington media-gallery images are used only within their stated terms and with Tourism Burlington credit. Restaurant, Google Maps and social-media photos are not copied merely because they appear online.

An editorial illustration is not evidence. A reconstruction must be anchored to plans, photographs or measurements, labelled beside the image and separated from any historical photograph. If a detail is not established, the caption says what is interpreted rather than presenting it as a recovered plan.

Corrections

If something is wrong, outdated or misleadingly summarized, use Give feedback and include the page plus a stronger source. Corrections can be made without pretending the original source never existed.