What is nberra.com?

Canberra is well served by local journalism — ABC Canberra, Region Canberra, HerCanberra, CityNews, and others do genuinely good work covering the city. The problem isn't a shortage of stories. It's the noise: national political churn, syndicated national content, lifestyle pieces that happen to mention Canberra in the headline, and the sheer volume of publishing that makes it hard to spot the two or three things that actually matter on any given day if you live here.

nberra.com is a small attempt to solve that. Every thirty minutes, an automated pipeline pulls the latest items from a curated set of trusted Canberra sources and runs them through a local-relevance scoring system. Stories earn points for genuine civic significance — things like transport changes, planning decisions, school and health news, local elections, and suburb-level events that touch the day-to-day life of Canberra residents. They lose points for national noise, sponsored content, opinion columns, and stories that only tangentially connect to the ACT.

The scoring also enforces source diversity. No single publisher can dominate the page — there's a per-source cap that keeps the feed balanced across the outlets we track. The top story is chosen by a separate process that specifically prioritises civic importance over lifestyle interest, because a Woden planning decision matters more to most residents than a new café review, even if the café piece is a better read.

Weather comes first — deliberately. Canberra's climate is dramatic enough that knowing the day's conditions before anything else is genuinely useful. The 7-day forecast and current temperature are pulled from Open-Meteo's free forecast API and formatted with plain-language dress tips rather than meteorological jargon.

Events are drawn from Visit Canberra's listings and time-sorted so you can see at a glance what's on today before scrolling through things happening later. Every item links directly back to its original source. News summaries are either clearly marked publisher extracts or cautious paraphrases produced by a local language model and checked by automated safeguards; neither is a substitute for the original reporting.

Our source set

We currently aggregate from the following publishers and platforms:

• ABC Canberra
• Region Canberra
• HerCanberra
• CityNews
• Visit Canberra
• Open-Meteo

What the site adds

Each day the site assembles a short "Today in Canberra" overview from the weather, selected headlines and event times. It uses fixed, conservative sentence patterns rather than asking a model to connect unrelated stories. Each day's curation is preserved in the daily archive. The guides section covers slower-changing practical topics and links time-sensitive claims to official sources.

The editorial rule

The single question behind every inclusion decision is: would a person who lives in Canberra care about this because they live in Canberra? Not "is this Canberra news?" — that's too easy a bar. The test is local life relevance. That's what the scoring tries to approximate, imperfectly but honestly.

Accuracy, corrections and legal matters

nberra.com is an index, not a newsroom. We do not report, verify or fact-check the stories we link to — that work is done by the publishers whose headlines appear here. Summaries are condensed from the publisher's own feed or written by us from it, and condensing inevitably drops context. Treat every entry as a pointer to the original article, not as a substitute for reading it.

This matters most for legal and quasi-legal reporting. Court proceedings, police investigations, integrity and corruption inquiries, coronial matters and disciplinary findings all pass through our feed. Australian reporting conventions around these are precise for good reason: alleged, charged, found to have and convicted mean materially different things. Where a story falls into this category we deliberately do not paraphrase it — we keep the publisher's own wording, marked as a publisher extract, because a reworded allegation is a misstated allegation. Nothing on this site should be read as a finding of fact about any person or organisation.

We also never truncate a summary mid-sentence. If a story's opening cannot be shown intact within our layout, we show the headline and the source link alone rather than a fragment that could mislead.

If you find something inaccurate, out of date, unfairly framed, or that a publisher has since corrected or withdrawn, please tell us at hello@nberra.com. We will correct or remove it promptly — there is no editorial interest in keeping a wrong entry up.

Contact

This is an independent project, not affiliated with any of the publishers whose content it indexes. If you have questions, corrections, or suggestions, you can reach us at hello@nberra.com.