A newsroom of four, funded by readers.
Arisam Journal started in 2021 as a newsletter about one neighbourhood council meeting. It is now four reporters covering housing, transit and the things that happen between the two.
This week
CommunityThe volunteers who kept the food bank open all winter
The depot ran out of shelf space in November and never caught up. Six volunteers describe the eleven weeks they spent keeping a three-day emergency service open every day of the week.
TransitA bus route, redrawn by the people who ride it
Riders on the 41 kept their own tally of missed connections for four months and carried it to the transit board in a ring binder. The route that came back is not the one the board first proposed, and the changes follow that tally almost line for line. Two of the three restored stops are the ones riders wrote down most often.
HousingWhat the new zoning actually changes
The by-law runs to ninety pages and alters what can be built on roughly a third of the ward. We read all of it, then asked three residents what it means for the street they already live on.
EnvironmentA community garden finds a second season
The allotment lost its lease in March and had the plots back by June, on a licence that runs a year at a time. What happened in between took a councillor, a land registry search and a great many unpaid hours.
- In brief
Also this week
The library board has deferred its decision on Saturday hours to October, after a third consultation drew eleven people. A second pharmacy on the main strip closed this month, leaving one for the whole ward and a forty-minute bus ride to the next. Snow clearing contracts go out to tender in three weeks, a full season earlier than usual, which the works department says is about price rather than the forecast. The ward's oldest hardware shop, sold in June, is keeping its name and all four of its staff. And the footbridge over the creek reopens on the 20th, nine weeks later than promised.
Housing
12 stories
Transit
9 stories
Community
8 stories
Environment
5 stories
Business
6 stories
Sport
4 stories
- 4
- Reporters
- 2,180
- Members
- 88%
- Funded by members
I learned the rezoning was going to committee from your Tuesday email, not from the notice taped to the fence.
Priya Raman · Member since 2023
Four reporters, and one of them still phoned me back twice to check a date I had given her wrong.
Gordon Hale · Ward 12
The newsroom
Nadia Osei
Editor
Ray Fontaine
Transit
Mei Lin
Housing
Ivan Petrov
Photography
What we do
Four reporters, one beat each, and a standing rule: every claim goes back to the person it concerns before it runs.
See what we coverReport locally
The meetings nobody else covers, and the people affected by what happens in them.
Correct openly
Published at the foot of the original article, with the date and what changed.
Answer to readers
No advertising and no owner with a stake in the outcome — just a membership.
What should we be paying attention to?
The next good story might start with something you noticed on your own street.
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