The New Jersey Tide publishes short news briefs about the Jersey Shore — Monmouth, Ocean, Atlantic and Cape May counties. It covers what public agencies put on the record: arrests and criminal charges, court outcomes, police investigations, and the decisions of county and city government. Its New Jersey section carries statewide news that matters at the Shore: new laws, the state budget, statewide policy and alerts, and major cases with reach across the state.

How the Tide is made

The Tide has no reporters. Every brief on this site is drafted by AI from a press release that a public agency has already published, or from public data published by government agencies, and runs under the byline “Tide Bot.” It draws on law enforcement agencies and on local, county, state and federal government.

A brief is a summary of one public announcement, and nothing more. Nobody interviews anyone for it, attends a hearing, or checks the agency’s account against other sources. What a brief reports is attributed to the agency that announced it, and when someone has been charged rather than convicted, the brief says so. The full account of how the briefs are written, what they are checked for, and what the system is not allowed to write is here: How we use AI.

Why it exists

Much of what prosecutors, police and local governments at the Shore announce is posted on agency websites that few people read. The Tide gathers those announcements in one place and writes them up in plain language, so that people who live here can see what their public officials are doing.

Tell us when we are wrong

If we have published something inaccurate, write to [email protected], say which brief and what is wrong with it, and we will correct it on the page. The same address reaches us about anything else.

If you arrived here from the line at the bottom of a brief, this is how that brief was written.

The New Jersey Tide uses AI to write short news briefs about the Jersey Shore from press releases published by public agencies (law enforcement, and local, county, state and federal government) and from public data published by government agencies. The system reads the public announcement and summarizes it. Every brief runs under the byline “Tide Bot” and carries a line at the bottom saying how it was made.

A brief is a summary of a single public document, or of the public data about a single event. It attributes what it reports to the agency that issued it and never states a contested fact in our own voice. Where someone has been charged rather than convicted, it says that the charges are accusations and that the person is presumed innocent. It adds no interviews, no outside reporting and no opinion.

What the system will not write

Some releases are set aside before anything is drafted. A fixed set of rules — the kill-list — refuses releases about sexual assault, human trafficking or the sexual abuse of children; cases involving a minor; suicide or self-harm; a search for a suspect who is still at large; and shootings by police or deaths following an encounter with police. Those stories need a reporter’s judgment rather than a summary, and the Tide does not have reporters. Routine speeding stops are left out as well. An editor can overrule the list for a single release; when that happens, the decision is recorded under the editor’s name.

The other checks

Several agencies often announce the same case. When a brief is drafted, the desk checks it against the stories already published on the site, and a brief that repeats one is held back and marked for an editor. A release about New Jersey as a whole is first checked for whether it is statewide news that matters at the Shore: one that is not is set aside, and one that is a political statement or is about an election is held for an editor rather than published automatically. A brief drafted from public data is compared with the earlier briefs about the same event instead, and one that would repeat them is not written; its figures, dates and times are checked against the data, and a brief that does not match is held for an editor. The drafting system also records anything in its draft that it wants a person to check; those notes are kept for the editors and are not part of the published brief.

Who reads a brief before it publishes

Briefs the desk drafts from agency press releases publish automatically: no editor reads them before they go live. The automated checks described above run on every release, and nothing else stands between a press release and a published brief. The exception is a brief drafted from material an editor supplies, which is saved as a draft and published by that editor.

Corrections

If a brief is wrong, tell us and we will correct it on the page. Write to [email protected] and say which brief and what is wrong with it. A machine drafted it; the responsibility for it is entirely ours.

Last updated: October 16, 2026

This policy covers www.newjerseytide.com, the website of The New Jersey Tide (“the Tide”, “we”), and the Tide’s newsletter.

The short version

• You can read everything on the Tide without an account. Nothing on the site asks for your name, and the only thing that asks for your email address is the newsletter, if you choose to sign up.
• The Tide’s own code sets no cookies. Cloudflare, which runs the site, may set a security cookie, and ads served by Google use cookies, as explained below.
• We count visits, not visitors: our server keeps daily totals for each page, with no IP address, browser details or other identifier attached.
• Our newsletter carries no tracking: we record nothing about whether you open an edition or what you click in it.
• We never sell or rent information about our readers.

What your browser keeps

So that each story and page is counted once a day rather than once a click, the site keeps a small record in your browser’s local storage, under the name nes_v: which stories and pages this browser has opened, how many times, and when. Entries more than 24 hours old are no longer used, and are removed the next time the site updates the record. The record stays on your device. It is not a cookie, and it is never sent to us. Clearing your browser’s data for this site removes it.

What our server records

The first time in 24 hours that this browser opens a page, it tells our server which page it was, and the server adds one to that page’s total for the day. The pages it counts are a fixed list: the homepage, the county and town pages, the New Jersey page, the About, How We Use AI, Privacy, Search and Newsletter pages, and one shared total for all stories. When that page is a story, the server also adds one to the story’s overall total and to its total for the day; the overall totals decide the “Most read” list.

With the first of these reports after the site loads, your browser also sends the address of the page that linked you here, as the browser reports it, if there was one. The server keeps only that site’s name, such as google.com, adds one to its total for the day, and discards the rest of the address at once. Pages you open after that are recorded only as moves within the site.

None of these totals carries your IP address, your browser’s details or any identifier, so they cannot be traced back to you.

Your IP address

Like every website, ours can only answer your browser by knowing its internet (IP) address. Our server never writes IP addresses to its database, its files or its logs. It holds them in memory only, to limit abuse. A reader meets two such checks. The first is on story views: the server remembers, in memory, that an address has just viewed a story, so that a single address counts as at most one view of a story an hour, which stops anyone pushing a story up the “Most read” list by reloading it. An entry stops counting after an hour, and it is dropped when that list fills up (the oldest go first) or when the server restarts. The second is on the newsletter’s signup form: one IP address (or, for IPv6, one home or office network) can submit it at most five times an hour, which stops anyone using the form to flood strangers’ inboxes. Each attempt stops counting after an hour; the server clears old entries as the list grows, and all of them when it restarts. The same kind of in-memory check limits password attempts on the editors’ sign-in page, which readers never use.

Searching

Search runs entirely in your browser, against the stories the page has already loaded. What you type is not sent to our server, and we do not record it. The words do appear in the page’s address (/search?q=…), so if you reload or share that address, it reaches Cloudflare like any other web address.

Cookies

The Tide’s own code sets no cookies. Two kinds may appear all the same:

• Cloudflare, which delivers and protects the site, may set a strictly necessary security cookie, for example while it checks whether a visitor is a person or an automated program.
• When the Tide shows ads, Google and its partners use advertising cookies, which Google’s ad code may store under this site’s address as well as its own, as described under “Advertising” below.

The services that see your visit

• Cloudflare hosts the site and delivers every page, and every request to our server passes through it. To do that and to protect the site from attacks, it processes your IP address and the details of each request, such as the address requested and your browser’s description of itself. Its privacy policy is at cloudflare.com/privacypolicy.
• Google Fonts supplies the site’s typefaces. To show them, your browser fetches them from Google’s servers, which receive your IP address and browser details with that request. Google explains how it handles that information at developers.google.com/fonts/faq/privacy.
• Google AdSense serves ads when the Tide shows them; see “Advertising”.
• Cloudflare’s email service sends the newsletter to readers who sign up; see “The newsletter”.

Our server itself, which keeps the daily totals described above, runs on a machine we rent from DigitalOcean. Apart from the advertising described below, the site runs no third-party analytics or tracking code: no Google Analytics and no social-media pixels.

Advertising

The Tide may show ads served by Google. When it does:

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or other websites.
• Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and/or other sites on the internet.
• You can opt out of personalized advertising in Google’s Ads Settings. You can also opt out of many third-party vendors’ use of cookies for personalized advertising at www.aboutads.info.
• Visitors in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are shown a consent message, provided by Google, that asks for their choice before their information is used for ads.

How Google uses information from the sites that show its ads is explained at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. Ads appear only on the homepage, on stories, and on the county, town and New Jersey pages, each one labeled “Advertisement”. They never appear on this page, the About pages, the newsletter page, search results or error pages, never inside the note at the end of a story that says how it was made, and never in the newsletter itself.

Email

If you write to [email protected], Cloudflare Email Routing forwards your message to the editors’ inbox, where the email provider that hosts it stores it like any other email. We use what you send, including your address, to read it, to reply, and to act on it, for example by correcting a story. We do not add you to any mailing list. A reply to the newsletter reaches the same inbox the same way.

The newsletter

The Tide sends two editions by email, High Tide every morning at 7 and Low Tide every evening at 7, Eastern time, to readers who ask for them on the newsletter page. If you sign up, we keep:

• your email address as you typed it, and a lower-case copy, so that one address cannot sign up twice;
• which editions you chose;
• whether your subscription is waiting for you to confirm it, active, or ended;
• a random key that identifies your subscription in the links of our emails;
• when you signed up, when we last sent you the confirmation email and how many times we have (at most three for each signup), when you confirmed, and when you unsubscribed, if you have;
• for each edition we send you, whether it was sent, bounced or failed, the error the email service reported if it did not go through, and when.

We use these only to send you the editions you chose, and to stop when you ask. None of it carries your IP address or your browser’s details. The emails contain no images and no tracking: every link goes straight to a page on this site, and we record nothing about whether you open an edition or what you click in it. A story you open from an email is counted like any other visit, as described above.

Signing up takes two steps: we email you a link, and nothing else is sent to you until you press Confirm on the page it opens. If you never confirm, you hear nothing more from us; the confirmation email is sent again only if someone submits your address again, and never more than three times. Every edition has an Unsubscribe link, and if your email app shows its own unsubscribe button, that works too; either one stops every edition at once. An address our email service reports as permanently undeliverable is unsubscribed for you. The link in each email carries your subscription’s key: the newsletter page takes it out of the address bar as soon as it opens, and it is never part of what our server counts.

The emails are sent through Cloudflare’s email service, which receives your address and each message so that it can deliver them, on our behalf. We never sell, rent or share your address with anyone else.

We keep these records after you unsubscribe, and if you never confirm; we do not delete them on a schedule. To have yours deleted, write to [email protected].

Accounts

Readers have no accounts. The only accounts are the editors’, on a separate site for publishing. Signing in there starts a session: a random key that the browser keeps until its tab is closed, and that our server stores only in scrambled (hashed) form and stops accepting after 14 days, or as soon as the editor signs out.

Selling and sharing

We do not sell or rent information about our readers. We share it with no one except the services named on this page, which handle it to run the site, to send the newsletter and, when ads are shown, to serve them.

Children

The Tide is a general news site and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has sent us some, write to us and we will delete it.

Links to other sites

The site links to a few others, such as Audience Builders, which built it, and the Google and Cloudflare pages named here. Those sites have privacy policies of their own.

Changes to this policy

If we change how the site handles information, we will update this page and the date at the top.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or a request about information we hold, go to [email protected].