I run sixteen publications. There is one of me. I do not mean that as a boast. It is what I set out to prove.
In April I wrote that Mercury Local is not a publication, it's a publishing platform. Mercury Local is the company I built to run that platform, the one system every one of our papers sits on. We had three papers on it then: The Charlotte Mercury, The Farmington Mercury and Strolling Ballantyne. The bet was simple. Build the plumbing once, and the next paper costs a fraction of the first. Put an AI to work on the machinery, and one person can spend his hours on the only question that matters: what does this town need to know, and are we sure it is true?
Six months later, here is what happened, including the part I did not see coming.
The first people who wanted it weren't publishers
I built a platform to launch newspapers. The surprise was that local businesses wanted it too.
Their problem turned out to be the one local papers had. A business rents its website from one company, its email from another and its booking tool from a third, and it owns none of what those tools know about its own customers. So Mercury Local now does for a handful of local businesses what it does for our papers: their website, their email newsletter and the records behind them, in one system built and run for them. That is why mercurylocal.com leads with partner services now. It was not in the April plan. It follows directly from it.
The papers kept coming
The next paper did get cheaper. The newest, The East Hampton Mercury in Connecticut, went from idea to a live paper in a single day, September 24. Nobody built a website for it, because the website already existed. The day went to the work that should take a day: learning the town, filing its public sources, and deciding what it needed to read first.
A platform remembers
What I did not expect was how much the platform would become a memory.
Here is the example that made it real for me. The Farmington police department posts its arrest log online, one page for each weekday. When the next week comes around, each day's page is replaced by the new one, so a log stays up for about a week and then it is gone. The town keeps no archive. Since the start of September we save every one of those logs each morning, including the blank days, before it disappears. We are now the only lasting copy. Four days from August are gone for good, because at the time nobody was keeping them.
A website forgets. A platform built this way keeps every log, every source and every claim, and connects each person and public body to every story they appear in. In local news, I have come to think that memory is part of what we make, not a byproduct of it.
What I'd tell someone starting now
Don't build a publication. Build what a publication stands on, then put the first paper on it and let it prove the idea. Charlotte proved it. Farmington proved it in another market. East Hampton proved it in a day.
If this is your town, or your business
Two kinds of people should get in touch. If your town has lost its paper, or never had one, I want to hear what it needs. If you run a local business that rents every tool it depends on and owns none of them, I want to hear that too. Tell us here.
The cost of giving a town its own paper keeps falling. The standard for what goes in it does not. That was the bet in April, and it still is.