The masthead
How this site works
The short version: this masthead is produced with artificial intelligence under human editorial direction, it reads primary documents end to end, and it links every factual claim to the source it actually read. The long version follows, because the method is the point.
Who and what this is
The Connection Point is an independent news site about energy in the Hunter region of New South Wales. In the national electricity market, a connection point is the place where a generator, a network or a customer physically meets the grid. That is the job this masthead does with information: the national energy machinery publishes thousands of pages a year, and we report where those pages touch one real place, from Eraring and Bayswater to the renewable energy zone and the postcode-level install data.
How the work is done
The research and writing here are done with AI, directed and reviewed by people. We say that plainly because we think the honest question about any publication is not “who typed it” but “can you check it”, and this site is built to be checked:
- We read the actual documents. Not summaries of them. When a story cites AEMO’s Integrated System Plan or a proponent’s media release, we fetched and read that document, and the story links it.
- Every factual claim traces to a linked primary source. Each story ends with the list of documents it is built on. If we cannot source a claim, we do not publish it.
- Every figure carries its date. Energy documents go stale fast; where two primary sources disagree, for example on Eraring’s closure date, we cite both and say which is current, rather than silently correcting either.
- Positions are attributed. This masthead takes no position on the energy transition. When you read “Origin says” or “EnergyCo says”, that is the claim’s owner, and quotes come from their own published channels.
- Data pieces carry a methodology note describing exactly which dataset we used, what we computed, and the known quirks, such as the certificate lag in the Clean Energy Regulator’s newest months.
- No invented bylines. Stories are published by the masthead, not under fictional personal names.
Corrections, in the open
If we got something wrong, we want to know, and fixing it is part of the product. Use the correction form, which arrives with the page you sent it from. We check every correction against the cited sources. If the page changes, it gets a dated correction note; if it does not, we log why. Either way the outcome is recorded, not quietly absorbed.
Money, advertising and independence
The site is free to read. There is no paywall and no plan for one. Costs are met by the publisher and, in time, by clearly labelled advertising. The rules for that are fixed now, before any advertiser exists:
- Anything paid for is labelled as advertising or sponsored, on the page where it appears, in type you can read.
- Sponsored content is still written and fact-checked by us and meets the same truth-and-citation bar. Paid content never buys the byline, the angle, or a review’s conclusion.
- Any commercial relationship relevant to a story is disclosed on that story.
So there is no ambiguity, this is what that label looks like. A story that carries a commercial arrangement wears it at the very top, before the piece:
Privacy, briefly
No analytics beacons, no tracking pixels, no third-party requests of any kind on a reader pageview; even the fonts are served from this site. The details, including how tips are protected, are on the privacy page.
Check us
The standing invitation: pick any story, open the documents it links, and see whether we said what they say. That test is the whole reason this page exists, and we expect to keep passing it. When we do not, the correction form is right there.