About The Antigonish Reel
The Antigonish Reel is a public local information utility for Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Its purpose is to give residents a dependable local reference point grounded in the ideas of the Antigonish Movement: practical local usefulness, mutual aid, community responsibility, and trust built through service rather than hype.
The Reel helps people answer ordinary local questions quickly, without requiring an account or dependence on a large platform. It curates a daily digest of what's happening locally, surfaces weather and road conditions, lists upcoming events and public notices, and accepts community submissions through a calm, moderated intake. It does not chase scale, it does not run analytics or advertising, and it does not pretend to be more than it is.
Who runs this
The Reel is operated by Colin Duggan in Antigonish. It runs as a single-operator civic utility, not a staffed newsroom. Decisions about what gets published, how submissions are handled, and what counts as a correction are made by the operator, transparently. The contact form reaches the operator directly.
What the Reel is not
- Not a full news outlet, opinion publication, or breaking-news desk.
- Not a social network or public forum. There are no comments, accounts, or feeds personalised to readers.
- Not the official emergency or public-notice authority. Where the Reel surfaces alerts or notices, the source link is the authoritative reference.
- Not a provider of medical, legal, or financial advice.
- Not a multi-town platform. V1 covers Antigonish only.
What you can trust
The Reel earns trust through usefulness and clarity, not through volume. After visiting the site, a reader should be able to trust that the information is locally relevant, current enough to be useful, and practical rather than performative. Sources are visible. Staleness is acknowledged when present. Corrections are real and have a path.
The primary promise is usefulness and reliability, not comprehensiveness.
Standards
Corrections
Mistakes get corrected. If you spot a factual error or a problem with how something is described, the contact form accepts correction requests. Reviewed corrections lead to either a public correction note on the affected item, a quiet edit where public visibility is not in the public interest, or a polite explanation if the request can't be acted on.
Specific review timing, the exact form of the correction note, and edge cases for sensitive content (obituaries, medical references) are documented as those surfaces ship.
Privacy
The Reel does not run third-party analytics, advertising, or reader-identifying trackers. Public reading does not require an account.
Personal data the site collects (intake submissions, contact form messages, contributor records) is kept deliberately small and is handled per a published retention policy. The contact form includes a submission-and-privacy posture note.
Event submissions. When you submit an event we collect a contact email (required, for follow-up if a detail needs clarifying), an optional contact name, and your IP address (for rate-limiting and spam triage). Your contact details are never published with the event. We retain this information for ninety days after we review your submission and at most one hundred and eighty days from when you sent it; after that, contact and IP fields are automatically nulled in our database while the rest of the row is kept for our moderation audit trail.
Moderation posture
Submissions, contact-form messages, and correction requests are reviewed before they affect what readers see. The Reel is an editorial utility, not a public forum, and it does not promise to publish or respond to every message it receives.
Sensitive content categories (obituaries, medical information) get extra review per the relevant surface's published standards.
Why this exists
Small towns are often poorly served by the available "local news online" options: generic templates spun up across thousands of communities, social platforms optimised for outrage, or no coverage at all. Antigonish has a stronger civic tradition than most: the Antigonish Movement, the adult-education extension at St. Francis Xavier University, a tartan, a Highland Games. The Reel exists to offer a civic-utility website that fits the place: calm, practical, locally grounded, built to last.
