A New Look Is Not a New Tool
I asked for a new look for the tool I run sixteen publications from. I got two, hated both, and it turned out the colors were never the problem.
Note 23 · Oct 2, 2026
One Meeting Is Not One Story
Charlotte's council met for six hours on a Monday night. We got seven stories out of it, and found out that only one of the night's vote counts could be confirmed anywhere else.
Read the noteEight marks, eight palettes
Patch Taught a Machine to Read the News. We Taught Ours to Read the Town.
Patch's AI newsletter reaches nearly a million subscribers, and no person touches it before it sends. We pointed our AI at the town's own records instead, starting with an arrest log nobody else keeps.
One person, sixteen publications, six months
In April I said Mercury Local was a platform. Six months on: sixteen publications, a paper launched in a day, and local businesses who wanted it too.
I Wrote About a Police Blotter. It's the Most Important Thing on the Site This Week.
Peter Cellino spent a year building AI-assisted editorial infrastructure. Today he wrote about a police blotter. It's not ironic — it's the point.
The Prompt Is the Policy: AI Governance in a Three-Pub Operation
Most conversations about AI governance treat it as a configuration problem. That is setup. At Mercury Local, governance is the document written after each failure — eleven rules, each one traceable to a specific mistake the system made and will not make the same way again.
Independence Requires Readers
Richard Tofel and Dan Kennedy make the best available argument for reader-revenue journalism — and they're right. The logic holds. But the conclusion that follows — that paywalls are therefore a tool of independence — is where I'd push back.
The Paywall Is a Confession
Gannett has 1.45 million digital subscribers across 200 local papers — about 7,000 each, and falling. A paywall on a declining local paper is not a rescue. It's the trade that finishes the decline.
Elsewhere
Opens on Mercury Local