I live in Campbell River, on Vancouver Island. My adult children live in other cities — far enough away that their local news never reaches me, close enough that I want to know it.
I wanted to know what was actually going on in their towns. Not in a vague way — the council decision, the fire, the highway closure, the thing they'd mention on the phone that I'd have no context for.
Trying to do that meant a different news site for every town, every day. Each one wanted me to accept cookies, watch a video I hadn't asked for, and then stay for another eleven stories engineered to keep me there. I'd go looking for one place and come out twenty minutes later having read about nothing in particular, still not knowing whether the fire was anywhere near them.
So I built the thing I wanted. One brief, once a day, about the places I care about. It ends. There is no feed underneath it.
It uses AI, and I'd rather say that plainly than have you find it further down. Claude searches the web each morning and writes a short brief for your city.
But it isn't generating fake photographs, or a synthetic presenter, or inventing detail to fill a page. It reads what actual reporters published today, tells you in a few lines what happened, and links you straight to their article. If something matters to you, you go and read the real thing. That's the whole design, and it's why every item carries its source — including the awkward cases where the link isn't as good as we'd like, which are marked rather than hidden.
Most technology I use is built to keep me on it longer. I wanted something that tells me what I need and is then finished.
Me. Mark Myles, in Campbell River, British Columbia. Kin Wire is operated by Onyx Custom Motorcycles Inc., a real Canadian company that I own and that has been around longer than this project has.
It was one person, not a team. Email hello@kinwire.ca and I'm still the one who reads it.
Kin Wire closed on 3 November 2026. The section that used to sit here asked whether it would still be around, and answered that it was paid for by subscriptions — $3 or $8 a month — and by nothing else: no advertising, no selling anything about you, no investor. That meant it survived if enough people found it worth paying for, and it didn't if they didn't.
They didn't. I talked to people who were exactly who I built it for, and none of them would pay for it. The honest version is that the thing it competes with is free and already has everyone in it: the town Facebook group, and a phone call to the person you're worried about.
I'd rather leave that written down than take the site down and say nothing. The last national brief is still here, the city samples are still here, and what I believed about the incentives still holds — nothing here ever made more money if you spent longer on it. The brief ended because a brief that ends was the product.
Readers' data is deleted on 3 December 2026 — accounts, email addresses and stored briefs. Everyone who had an account was told by email. If you had one and would rather not wait, the Delete account button in the app does it immediately, and signing in still works for exactly that.
Tell me — hello@kinwire.ca still comes to me. Every report turned into a fix: a stale source being presented as news, items arriving without a link, an email that said the wrong thing while it was still loading. That was the useful kind of message and I'd still rather have it than a compliment.
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