News aggregation policy
We link, we credit, we don't compete.
Queenstown.com aggregates local journalism — it does not publish it. Our News section exists to send readers to the people doing the reporting: Crux, Mountain Scene, the Otago Daily Times, RNZ, Stuff and the Queenstown Lakes District Council. This page sets out exactly what we take, what we never take, and how to reach us if something isn't right.
What we commit to
The boundaries, stated plainly
These aren't aspirations — each one describes a limit built into our ingestion pipeline.
We link to the original, always
Every item carries the publisher's name and a link back to the article on their site. Reading the story happens on the publisher's page, not ours — that is the entire point of the section.
We never store or display article bodies
Our ingestion adapters extract headline, byline, publication time and Open Graph metadata only. Full article text is never fetched into our database, and there is no code path that would publish it.
Summaries are short and original
Where we show a summary it is a one- or two-sentence original abstract, written to help a reader decide whether to click through. We do not reproduce a publisher's lede, and where there isn't enough accessible material to summarise fairly, we show no summary at all.
We identify ourselves when we fetch
Our crawler sends a descriptive User-Agent naming Queenstown.com and linking to this page. We fetch at a low rate with small concurrency and deliberate delays, and we cap how many items we take per run.
We filter for local relevance
Items from national feeds are only kept if they actually name a place in the Queenstown Lakes district. We are not trying to mirror a publisher's whole output — only the part that is genuinely about this district.
We are a referrer, not a competitor
We do not run advertising against aggregated headlines in a way that substitutes for the original, and we do not rewrite another outlet's reporting into our own article. Local journalism here is something we point people at, not something we replace.
About images
We are conservative with pictures
Most items in our News feed carry no image, and we are comfortable with that. Where a thumbnail does appear it comes from the metadata a publisher chose to expose for sharing. We treat the presence of that metadata as an invitation to link, not a licence to reuse a photograph however we like — so we keep thumbnails small, we keep them attributed, and we would rather show a clean headline than a picture we have no right to.
If you are a publisher or photographer and you would prefer we did not display a particular image, tell us and we will remove it.
For publishers
Talk to us — we'd rather get it right
If you publish local news and you want your attribution changed, your summaries handled differently, an item removed, or your outlet added or taken out of our feed entirely, we will action it. We would much rather have a working relationship with a local newsroom than an argument about a headline.
We are also happy to ingest a feed of your choosing instead of reading your public pages — if you would prefer to control exactly what we see, send us the endpoint and we will use it.