About Barrhaven Bugle
Barrhaven Bugle is a weekly newsletter for people who live, work, shop, raise families, and build community in Barrhaven, Stonebridge, Half Moon Bay, and South Nepean. It exists to make local decisions, events, development, roads, schools, transit, and business notes easier to follow.
What each issue covers
Every issue is designed to be useful in under five minutes: one substantive local story, three community pulse items, a local business spotlight, development or council updates when relevant, and occasional sponsored sections that are clearly labelled.
How the Bugle is made: scripts, AI, and a human
We are open about how this paper gets put together, because a lot of people are asking that question about local news right now. There are three different things doing three different jobs here, and they are worth separating.
The scripts
Most of the daily work is done by ordinary code, not by AI. Scripts run on a schedule and go out to the same public sources a reporter would check: City of Ottawa releases and committee agendas, councillor newsletters, police and fire notices, school board and recreation pages, and the local news outlets. They collect what is new, put it in one place, and flag what has changed since yesterday. That is fetching and sorting. It has no opinion about any of it.
AI helped write those scripts. That is AI in a background role, the same way a spreadsheet formula someone helped you build is not making your decisions for you.
The AI
AI reads what the scripts collected and does the sorting a person would otherwise spend hours on. It ranks the day's stories against our published criteria (does this affect Barrhaven, how many people does it touch, is it something a reader would act on this week). It pulls dates and details out of announcements so events land on the calendar. It searches for images. It writes the summaries you see on the front page and in the newsletter. It assembles the pages of this website, and the site updates itself every day with the day's lead story rather than waiting for someone to press a button. It checks its own copy against our rules before any of that goes out.
AI also writes the first outbound note when we contact a business or an organization, and it reads what comes back. Inbound mail from a real person is passed to Jay to answer.
Where a fact matters, it is checked against the original source, not against the summary.
The human
Jay Tarzwell is the publisher. He rules on the leads, so what the paper chases and what it drops is his call. He edits and adds to the newsletter before it goes out, and he sends it himself: the Tuesday issue reaches your inbox only when a person presses publish. He approves every advertisement that appears here. He answers the mail readers and businesses send in. His own column is his own writing, with AI used to tidy it up.
If something in here is wrong, it is a human who got it wrong and a human who will correct it.
Corrections go to [email protected] and are published on our corrections page.
Contact
General: [email protected]
Tips: [email protected]
Corrections: [email protected]