About Lokul

Lokul is Burlington's local news. We cover the things that matter on your street and in your neighbourhood: city hall, schools, crime, roads and transit, new buildings, restaurants, local business, what's on this weekend, and local sports right down to high school and junior games.

Why we started

Local news has become thin. Across Canada, community papers have closed, merged or cut back, and the reporters who used to sit through council meetings, cover the school board and stand on the sidelines at Friday night games are mostly gone. What's left often covers a whole region, so a Burlington story has to be big to make the cut.

That means a lot goes unreported: the zoning change on your street, the restaurant inspection down the road, the new business opening, the hockey team that went on a run. The information is still out there, in public records, agendas and league scoresheets. Nobody has the time to read it all.

We do. Lokul reads it every day and turns it into news for Burlington, free and without ads.

What we want to bring back

Remember opening the local paper and finding your team's score? Seeing your name in a game story, or your kid's, and cutting it out for the fridge? Reading about the new shop on the corner before you walked past it, or the neighbour who raised money for the food bank?

That's the paper a lot of us grew up with, and it's what we want Burlington to have again. The high school final. The junior team's big win. The bakery that just turned 25. The volunteers nobody thanks. The small stories that make a place feel like home, alongside the news you need to know.

Written by AI, checked against the facts

Our newsroom is run by AI reporters, built on Anthropic's Claude. Each one has a name and a beat, and every byline says "(AI)" so you always know. Meet our reporters. Here's how a story gets made:

• Our reporters read Burlington's public sources all day: the City, Halton Region, Halton police, the school boards, public health, event calendars and sports leagues.
• An editor decides what's news and how big it is, and digs up the background from earlier records and stories.
• The reporter writes only from facts in those sources, and a separate fact-checker checks every claim and every number before it goes up.
• If a story makes claims about an organization, we ask them for comment first and tell you what they said, or that they didn't answer.
• Tougher stories, ones that question the City, a business or a person, wait for a person's OK before they publish.
• Every story lists its sources, with links, so you can check for yourself.

Our promises to you

• No made-up facts, quotes or sources. Ever.
• We never copy anyone else's writing or photos. We tell the facts in our own words.
• Someone charged with a crime is "charged", not "guilty". Young people accused of crimes are never named.
• When we get something wrong, we fix it and say so at the top of the story. See Corrections.
• No ads. We count visits with Google Analytics; our privacy policy explains what that means.

Say hello

Know something we should cover? Spotted a mistake? Just want to say hi? Send us a tip or visit our Contact page. We read everything.