What One Meeting Gave Us
Charlotte's council met for six hours on September 28. The curfew got the headlines. We wrote seven stories from the whole meeting, and found a vote that was never announced.
Note 22 · Oct 3, 2026
My AI Offered to Build Something We Already Had
At the end of August, my AI offered to build me something we already had. It was one of six times that day it told me something didn't exist. The fix wasn't a smarter AI.
Read the noteA poster series, 5 prints
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.
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 its chief executive has said no person touches it before it sends. We pointed our AI at the town's own records instead, starting with an arrest log the town doesn't keep.
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, local businesses who wanted it too, and an arrest log that would have vanished.
I Wrote About a Police Blotter. It's the Most Important Thing on the Site This Week.
A year building editorial machinery, and this week's most important piece is about a police blotter. The least glamorous beat in local news is the cleanest test of who's doing the work.
The Prompt Is the Policy: AI Governance in a Four-Pub Operation
The rules that govern Mercury Local weren't designed. They were decided one failure at a time, the way the common law was. Eleven rules, eleven mistakes, one person who signs the corrections.
The Paywall Is a Confession
A turnpike charged tolls on a road people already used. A paywall on a local paper charges a toll on a road nobody's driving yet. Independence requires readers.
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