notes
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.
Peter Cellino·Oct 2, 2026
Topic
Platform Thesis
notes
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, and local businesses who wanted it too.
Peter Cellino·Sep 27, 2026
notes
The Prompt Is the Policy: AI Governance in a Three-Pub Operation
Most conversations about AI governance treat it as a configuration problem. That is setup. At Mercury Local, governance is the document written after each failure — eleven rules, each one traceable…
Peter Cellino·Apr 11, 2026
notes
What Agentic Control Actually Means
Most people hear "AI-generated news" and picture a machine with no editor. Peter Cellino on what agentic control actually means — and why the bottleneck was never the writing.
Peter Cellino·Apr 7, 2026
notes
Mercury Local Is Not a Publication. It's a Publishing Platform.
Mercury Local is a single shared infrastructure that powers every publication we operate. One codebase. One database. One deployment pipeline.
Peter Cellino·Apr 5, 2026
notes
Multi-Agent Newsrooms: What the Architecture Actually Looks Like
Peter Cellino explains the multi-agent architecture behind Mercury Local — how specialized AI agents research, draft, critique, and fact-check each other's work before any human reads a word.
Peter Cellino·Mar 29, 2026
notes
The Soul of the Company Is a Markdown File
WordPress VIP's CTO calls them "obsidian vaults for your agent harness." We call it the system that runs The Charlotte Mercury. The model is a commodity. The documents you feed it are not.
Peter Cellino·Mar 26, 2026
notes
One Article Is Easy. An Operation Is the Work.
Mercury Local's publisher on the difference between getting AI to write one article and building an editorial operation that self-corrects, accumulates institutional knowledge, and produces…
Peter Cellino·Mar 26, 2026
notes
The Newsroom Is a System. I Built One.
Peter Cellino on why he built Mercury Local as AI-assisted infrastructure — the math behind local news, why rebuilding the old staffing model is the wrong assumption, and why the platform thesis…
Peter Cellino·Mar 24, 2026