Last updated: September 29, 2026

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Warmland Magazine covers Lake Cowichan, Youbou, Honeymoon Bay, Mesachie Lake and the wider Cowichan Valley. This page sets out how we decide what goes in it.

 

It exists because we write about businesses and we also sell advertising to businesses, and anyone reading is entitled to know how those two things relate. The short answer is that they do not.

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Who makes this

Warmland Magazine is published and edited by Bill Reburn. Some articles are written by contributors, who are credited by name. Editorial decisions are mine, and so is the responsibility when something is wrong.

 

How we choose what to cover

We cover what we think is worth someone's time. That means places and events a visitor would be glad to know about, and things a local might have walked past for years without looking at properly.

 

Nobody pays to be written about. There is no fee, no placement charge, and no arrangement under which coverage can be bought.

 

We also cover things that are not commercial at all -  trails, parks, the river, volunteer societies, community halls, the museum. A good deal of what makes this valley worth visiting is not for sale, and a magazine that only wrote about businesses would be describing a different place.

 

Advertising and editorial

Advertising supports the magazine. It does not influence it.

 

Buying advertising does not get you written about, get you written about more favourably, or get an unflattering detail removed. Declining to advertise does not get you left out. If you have advertised with us and we write something about your business, we write what we think is true.

 

Our monthly Local Spotlight is free and will stay free. It is not an advertising product and it cannot be purchased.

 

What decides a Spotlight is whether there is something worth telling and whether the owner will sit down and talk about it. Often that is a business already familiar with the magazine, because those are the people who pick up the phone. Sometimes it is a place that has never heard of us and is not especially interested - if the business is good, it runs anyway. Supporting the magazine does not earn a Spotlight, and having nothing to do with us does not cost you one.

 

Sponsored content

If a business pays for an article, that article will say so at the top, before the copy, every time. Not in a policy page, not in small print at the bottom, and not with a word that could be mistaken for something else.

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Canadian law requires this and we would do it anyway, because the value of everything else on this site depends on a reader being able to tell the difference.

 

Accuracy

We check what we publish. Hours, prices, addresses, distances, seasons and business names are verified against the business itself or a primary source wherever possible.

 

We also get things wrong. This is a small operation covering a place where opening hours change, businesses close for the season, trails wash out and events move without much warning. Some of what is here will be out of date before you read it.

 

Nothing published here claims an experience that did not happen. If an article describes a place in the first person, the person writing it was there.

 

Telling us we are wrong

Email hello@warmlandmagazine.com. You do not need to be the business concerned, and you do not need to be polite about it.

 

Straightforward errors - a wrong address, a closed business, a misspelled name - are corrected as soon as we see them. Where a correction changes the substance of an article, we note at the foot of the piece that it was corrected and when. We do not quietly rewrite something and pretend it always said that.

 

What we do not publish

Complaints or accusations about named local businesses, whether they arrive as a submission, a newsletter reply or a comment on our social pages. This is a small community and an unverified claim about somebody's livelihood can do real damage that we are in no position to assess. If you have had a bad experience somewhere, take it up with the business or with Consumer Protection BC.

 

Anything that is untrue, hateful, harassing or discriminatory. Anyone else's personal information. Advertising dressed up as a submission.

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Contributors

Contributors keep ownership of their work and are credited by name, with a short note about who they are and a link wherever they would like one.

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We are clear with contributors about what we can and cannot offer before they write anything, and that offer is set out publicly rather than negotiated in private.

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Images

Photographs of a named place or business should be photographs of that place or business.

 

Where we use a stock or generic image, we do not caption or describe it as a specific local location. That applies to the caption a reader sees and to the alternative text a search engine reads.

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The obvious conflict, stated plainly

This is a town of around three thousand people. The publisher lives here, shops here, and knows a good number of the people written about on this site. Some of them are advertisers. Some are neighbours. Some are both.

 

Pretending otherwise would be ridiculous. What we can promise is that the relationship does not decide the coverage, and that if we ever write about something we have a direct financial interest in beyond advertising, we will say so in the article.

 

Changes

We may update this policy. The current version is the one on this page, with the date it last changed shown at the top.