About the desk
The register
Canadian Desk is a national desk filed from Halifax. It keeps one register for three coasts and writes each item against the document behind it.
Desk / Halifax
Open from the first tide to the last call. Corrections are dated and signed by the desk.
The method
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Name the document. Name the source. Date the change. Publish the correction.
Why a register
A feed moves quickly and forgets quickly. A register moves at the speed of the document and remembers what it printed. The desk chose the register because Canada is governed by paper: orders in council, tariffs, tenders, dockets, budgets and the long appendices that explain what a number means.
The register is read in order. A reader can follow a decision from the first filing to the final order and see where the language changed. That is more useful than a stream of alerts, and it is easier to correct when a document turns out to be wrong.
The desk is not neutral in the sense of having no view. It is neutral in the sense of having no side: it does not take instructions from a government, a company or a source. It takes instructions from the document. When the document is silent, the register says so.
Desk
No. 09
How the desk is run
The desk is a small room with a long table. Three berths file into one register: Atlantic from Halifax, Central from Montreal, Pacific from Vancouver. The North is covered from the Central berth. The berths do not compete for the front page; they file into the same order.
Each berth reads the official record, the trade press, the price and the person who has to act. The desk does not publish a story until it can name the document behind the change. That rule is the editorial policy, and it is applied the same way on every coast.
The desk takes corrections through the contact form. A correction is published on the corrected item and dated. The desk does not remove an item for commercial reasons and does not publish sponsored material in the news register. The register is the record, and the record is the product.
Readers who want the full index can use the sitemap or the machine resources listed in the llms files. Human readers can follow the register through the front page and the about and contact pages. The archive is kept for crawlers and for readers who need the full chronological list.
The desk's reading
The desk reads the same four things at each berth: the official record, the trade press, the price and the person who has to act on it. The reading is not a summary. It is a comparison. When the four readings disagree, the disagreement is written down rather than smoothed over, and the document that settles it is named in the line.
The archive is the record. The register is the current edition. The archive is the full list, and the register is the order in which the list is read. The two are linked by the same slug and the same date, so a reader who starts at the front page can follow a line back to the filing that started it.
The desk is not a platform. It does not host comments, it does not sell a newsletter and it does not run a feed. It publishes a register and a contact form, and it keeps the record. That is the whole product.