High Tide every morning at 7 and Low Tide every evening at 7, Eastern: the latest stories from the Jersey Shore. Take one or both.
Four counties, north to south
The drop-off site outside the Ocean County Library in Toms River will be open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Oct. 24 as part of National Prescription Drug Take Back Day.
The National Weather Service said up to one foot of water could cover low-lying areas near shorelines and tidal waterways from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 20.
County commissioners said the top rating, which Ocean County has held since 2010, lets it borrow at lower interest rates for roads, bridges and county buildings.
Justin Martin, 36, is accused of burning a woman in a wooded area of Plumsted Township and driving off, leaving her stranded, Ocean County prosecutors said. She was taken to a Philadelphia burn center and is in stable condition.
Kenneth Grant, 58, admitted to two March robberies in which prosecutors said he showed a gun and demanded cash. The state will seek 15 years in prison when he is sentenced in January.
The three parcels, totaling about 90 acres, were approved in September through the county's Natural Lands Trust Fund. Voters will be asked in November whether to raise the fund's tax rate.
The plan, compiled by the county's Mental Health Board, sets priorities including housing, crisis response and help for young people moving from child to adult behavioral health services.
Tuesday, Oct. 20
Coastal Flood Advisory
Coastal Flood Advisory issued October 20 at 5:07AM EDT until October 20 at 9:00PM EDT by NWS Mount Holly NJ
Ocean, Atlantic and Cape May counties · From 3 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 20, until 9 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 20
Alerts that last hours or days. Short-notice warnings, such as for tornadoes, severe thunderstorms or flash floods, are not listed here.
Ocean County
This Afternoon
High 67°F
Sunny
Wind N 15 mph
Tonight
Low 45°F
Partly Cloudy
Wind NE 10 to 20 mph
Next High tide 3:18 p.m., 4.2 ft at Seaside Heights, ocean
Tide times and heights are predictions, in feet above mean lower low water, not observations: wind and storms change the actual water level.
Forecasts and alerts: National Weather Service. Tides: NOAA predictions.
Statewide news that matters at the Shore: new laws, the state budget, statewide policy and alerts, and major cases with reach across New Jersey.
The latest stories published by The New Jersey Tide, by email: High Tide every morning at 7 and Low Tide every evening at 7, Eastern time.
Each edition lists the stories the Tide has published since your last edition, each with its headline, a short summary and a link to the story, so a story reaches you once whether you take one edition or both. An edition with nothing new is not sent.
We will email you a link to confirm, and nothing else arrives until you press Confirm on the page it opens. Every edition has an Unsubscribe link, and if your email app shows its own Unsubscribe button, that works too. We never sell your address, and we share it only with the service that sends the emails; the privacy policy says what we keep.
What we publish, where it comes from, and what it is not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every brief on this site is drafted by software. This page explains how they are made, what they are checked for, and what the system refuses to write.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every brief is saved as a draft, and an editor reads it before it is published.
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.
What the Tide records when you read it, what it never does, and the choices you have.
Last updated: October 19, 2026
This policy covers www.newjerseytide.com, the website of The New Jersey Tide (“the Tide”, “we”), and the Tide’s newsletter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Tide’s own code sets no cookies. Three kinds may appear all the same:
Our server itself, which keeps the daily totals described above, runs on a machine we rent from DigitalOcean. Apart from the advertising and the embedded content described below, the site runs no third-party analytics or tracking code: no Google Analytics and no social-media pixels.
The Tide may show ads served by Google. When it does:
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.
Some stories include a video, map, document or social-media post from another service, such as YouTube, Vimeo, X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Spotify or Google. That part of the story is loaded from the service itself, just as if you visited it: the service receives your IP address and browser details, may set or read its own cookies, and handles what it collects under its own privacy policy. To show a post from X, Instagram, Facebook or TikTok, the story also loads that service’s own code. Stories with no embedded content load none of this, and nothing is embedded on this page, the About pages or the newsletter.
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 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:
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
If we change how the site handles information, we will update this page and the date at the top.
Questions about this policy, or a request about information we hold, go to [email protected].