The Daily Sunshine Coast Newsroom
AI-assisted journalism, human oversight, and Sunshine Coast sourcing.
Founder's story
Built by locals, for locals.
I started The Daily Sunshine Coast because the Sunshine Coast deserves a daily local paper that's free, independent and actually focused on the people who live here — not a syndicated feed dressed up as local news.
I grew up on the coast, raised my own family here, and watched traditional local mastheads thin out year after year. So I built a new kind of newsroom — small, AI-assisted, locally edited — that can cover councils, weather, sport, business and community life every single morning without the overheads that broke the old model.
We publish under our own name, link our sources, correct mistakes in public, and answer reader emails personally. If you've got a story we should know about, tell me through the tips page or the contact page. — Shane
The Daily Sunshine Coast is a local news service for the Sunshine Coast, published every day. We use AI to draft, structure and fact-check stories from named, publicly available sources, and a human publisher oversees the editorial policy, guardrails and any article that involves sensitive matters.
How we produce the news
Our articles start with an AI research step that gathers information from an allow-list of public sources, including official Sunshine Coast organisations, government releases, court records, weather services and trusted local publishers. The AI synthesises facts from multiple sources and we link those sources in the article so you can verify the claims yourself.
Before any piece publishes, it passes an automated editorial screen. The screen holds back anything that names a person or organisation in connection with crime, courts, allegations, misconduct or insolvency. Those pieces cannot go live until a person has reviewed them. Lower-risk local stories, community roundups and what-is-on guides can publish automatically once they pass the screen.
Editorial oversight
The publisher sets the source allow-list, the tone and style rules, and the guardrails that control what the AI can write about. We do not use fake personas, invented authors or AI-generated journalist profiles. Articles are bylined to the publication or desk, for example "The Daily Sunshine Coast" or "The Daily Sunshine Coast Weather Desk".
For a full explanation of our policies, including sourcing, verification and corrections, read our editorial standards page.
Sourcing and attribution
We link the public sources we used in every article. When figures, rates, fees or rules change, the official source we link is always the authority. We do not reproduce judgment text, paywalled content or material from sites that prohibit scraping. Court items and official judgments are linked out to the source record rather than rewritten.
Corrections and contact
We correct errors quickly and transparently. When we update a piece, we append a visible "Updated" or "Corrected" note so the change is on the record. If you spot something wrong, have a news tip or want to ask about our coverage, reach us through the contact page or the about page.