Mercury Local at Six Months: One Person, 16 Publications

I run sixteen publications. There is one of me. That isn't a boast. It's the thing I set out to prove.

In April I wrote that Mercury Local is a publishing platform, not a publication: one system every one of our papers sits on. Four ran on it then: The Charlotte Mercury, The Farmington Mercury, Strolling Ballantyne and Strolling Firethorne. 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 questions that matter: what does this town need to know, and are we sure it's true?

Six months on, here's what happened, including the part I didn't see coming.

The first customers 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. Three landlords, no deed. 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 we build and run for them. That's why mercurylocal.com leads with partner services now. It wasn't in the April plan. It follows directly from it.

The papers kept coming

The next paper did get cheaper. The newest town paper, The East Hampton Mercury in Connecticut, went from idea to 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.

Clay lasts longer

What I didn't expect was how much the platform would turn into a memory.

Clay tablets from Sumer have survived five thousand years. A Farmington arrest log lasts about a week. The police department posts its log on weekday mornings, and when the next week comes around, each one is replaced by the new one. The town keeps no archive. Since the start of September we've saved every log each morning, including the blank days, before it disappears. As far as we can find, ours is the only lasting copy. Four days from August are already gone for good, because 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've come to think 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 papers on it and let them prove the idea. Farmington, Ballantyne and Charlotte proved it at three different scales. 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 doesn't. That was the bet in April, and it still is.

Related coverage

• Patch's AI Reads the News. We Taught Ours to Read the Town.

• What One Meeting Gave Us