I've spent the last year building editorial machinery that publishes across six sites, turns government meeting transcripts into records we can search, and keeps a research file on every beat.
This week the most important thing I wrote was about a police blotter.
Before it was a police log, a blotter was the rough book where a clerk jotted things down before they were copied into the permanent record. The Farmington Police Department's version is an arrest log it posts on weekday mornings. It's public. It's free. It is about as glamorous as a parking ticket.
Patch covers it. So do we. Same source document, same raw data, very different results. I laid out exactly how different on Mercury Local: Same Arrest Log. Two Very Different Versions.
The least glamorous beat in local news turns out to be the cleanest test of whether anyone is actually doing local news. Everyone gets the same document. The only variable is what you do with it.