The Problem Isn't Missing Websites. It's Missing Journalism.
There is no shortage of local news websites. There is a shortage of local journalism. Those are not the same thing. Most of what fills the local news space in 2026 is a homepage plastered with clickbait designed to look like journalism, or a paywall in front of a skeleton operation running wire rewrites with a local dateline, or both. Medill's State of Local News report counted 213 counties in this country with no local news outlet at all. Fifty million Americans with limited or no access. But the places that technically still have coverage aren't much better off. The product got worse while the price went up. The industry has a word for that — enshittification — and it fits local news as well as it fits any platform that traded quality for margin until there was nothing left worth reading.
What I Built — and Why
I didn't set out to fill a gap. I set out to rebuild the newsroom from the ground up.
Mercury Local is the infrastructure — a single publishing platform that powers multiple independent local news publications. The Charlotte Mercury covers city government, sports, business, and culture. The Farmington Mercury covers a Connecticut town that lost serious local coverage a decade ago. Strolling Ballantyne covers a single Charlotte neighborhood at a level no outlet has ever attempted. Three publications, more than 800 articles, one shared architecture. Charlotte is the proof of concept. It is not the ceiling.
AI as Design Decision
The architecture is AI-assisted. That's a design decision, not a novelty. The economics of local news collapsed because the old model required a staffing level the revenue could no longer support. AI changes that cost structure fundamentally. It makes it possible to publish at the volume and consistency local coverage demands without the overhead that killed the last generation of newsrooms. The editorial judgment — what to cover, what matters, what standards to hold — is human. The production layer is not. That's the division of labor that makes this scale.
The World That's Coming
And it needs to scale, because the world is about to change again. Within a few years, most people won't open a browser to read the news. They'll ask their AI agent — Claude, ChatGPT, whatever comes next — to curate a morning briefing or generate a podcast from the sources they trust. The news experience will be personal, conversational, and assembled on demand. The publications that survive that shift will be the ones that earned attention before the agent asked. The ones that became a habit.
Our Bet
That's what we're building for. Not a paywall. Not a clickbait funnel. Not a print nostalgia play dressed up in a digital wrapper. We will never charge you to read what we publish. Our bet is simpler than that: if the coverage is good enough and consistent enough, people will come back. And when the AI agent asks "what sources do you want in your morning brief," we want to be the answer.
Every city in this country needs a version of what we built in Charlotte. Not because someone needs to check a box and fill a desert. Because the newsroom itself needs to be reimagined for an AI-first world — and nobody with a legacy cost structure and a dying business model is going to do it.