Meet the Team
Welcome to our launch of The Cumberlander. Our inaugural issue will be out during the summer. We hope readership interest will excite businesses to advertise in our pages going forward.
We aim to expand staff as soon as possible, but for now we are a dedicated and hopeful team of two that both reside and work in Cumberland.
Chantal Weill
CO-PUBLISHER
After spending decades in online publishing design at some of Canada’s largest media companies like Rogers Media, Corus Entertainment, Virgin Mobile, and later as a solo website developer for cultural, educational and publishing projects, the idea of story-telling began to rub off. Chantal is going back to her pre-internet days to reconnect with her passion for public interest writing. She holds degrees in Political Science and Communication from SFU; and a post-bacc in Book and Magazine Publishing from Centennial College.
Jason Stewart
CO-PUBLISHER
Jason Stewart has traversed the media terrain, from his first love, motion picture film where he launched his career after receiving a degree from Concordia University. Working with a number of small and large film producers on feature films, shorts, commercials and music videos in the analogue world, Jason eventually made the move to digital to become both a professional photographer, and an ecommerce project manager for the film production industry. He also wrote for city blogs, mainly expressing his love for food, wine and urban issues.
Our Promises to You
Our Funding Policy
The Cumberlander is 100% funded by locals. While local advertising will make up the bulk of our revenue, we do accept small donations from readers as well. We are completely transparent about our ad rates (view rate card here) .
We do not accept government funding of any kind, nor do we partipate in partnerships with non-profits or think tanks of any ideological stripe. We are committed to independent journalism, and that means no institutional funding.
Our AI Policy
We use ChatGPT. We use it in two ways: as a search engine, and as a spell-checker (and even with that it wants to interfere in our writing too much). With AI, just as in regular searches, we refer to the source documents every single time. We do not use generative AI in our articles, although we may use it to do tedious research chores like arranging timelines or spreadsheet filtering. We do not use it for summarizing large documents (like council meeting agendas) because it is bad at it, and we’d rather spend time with the primary material than tweaking up some epic prompt.
Our Data Policy
Since we are print-only newspaper, we’re not gathering a lot of data on you. Our website uses cookies the normal way, to make the site load quickly, and to perform basic site analytics for traffic reporting.
If you make a donation, please note that we store only necessary data (name, email, other form entry details you fill in). We use the secure encrypted payment gateway, Stripe, so we do not store credit card info.
In compliance with PIPEDA, you have the right to access the data we hold, correct inaccuracies, or withdraw consent.
Our Sources Policy
We will avoid that very bad and increasingly popular new trend in today’s journalism of using soley anonymous sources. We will only use them if it is unavoidable for safety or livelihood reasons, and even then, it would have to be super important, and we will do our damndest to get other attributed sources on-the-record to back them up. Otherwise, why should you dear reader, trust that source?
All background, or off-the-record information shared with us will remain private.
We are not crazy about stories that source only documents or second hand accounts. Our goal is to have original human sources behind every investigative news story.