Mercury Local
Coverage (19 articles)
The page still listed the former mayor
We Built Our Own, No. 19. If somebody has to remember to update a page, it's going to go stale. So we stopped typing the page.
203 stories moved, no link broken
We Built Our Own, No. 18. We renamed a section "Town Hall" and readers landed on a federal sentencing. Fixing it meant moving 203 stories without breaking a link.
One pass, not three
We Built Our Own, No. 17. 133 plain-language fixes across three sites, made once, from one place.
Why we did not rent it
We Built Our Own, No. 16. A publication as a source, not a destination.
What AI actually did
We Built Our Own, No. 15. What I decided, what the machine built, what it got wrong.
Sixteen publications. One codebase
We Built Our Own, No. 14. A new publication is a row in a table and a DNS record.
One database is the whole company
We Built Our Own, No. 13. Every article, page, person, transcript and image, in one place.
The database says no
We Built Our Own, No. 12. Rules that fire whether or not anyone remembers.
Backups we can prove
We Built Our Own, No. 11. 11,357 objects mirrored off-site, and a restore drill that matched every hash.
The site checks itself every night
We Built Our Own, No. 10. Dozens of watchdogs. The first run found six problems nobody knew about.
Half a second, found in the layout
We Built Our Own, No. 09. 542 milliseconds to 208. Measure before you optimize.
The people, places and bodies behind the news
We Built Our Own, No. 08. Thousands of public profiles, built from the coverage.
Every article carries its receipts
We Built Our Own, No. 07. Thousands of sourced claims, one per sentence that needs one.
Analytics without a black box
We Built Our Own, No. 06. We self-hosted our own. Ten days later it took every site down.
The newsroom tool we built for ourselves
We Built Our Own, No. 05. Version two, seven blocks, one day.
Email we own
We Built Our Own, No. 04. One send path for every domain. No tracking sold to anyone.
The day we deleted the media server
We Built Our Own, No. 03. 1,006 images repointed in one sitting, and why permissions won.
Two weeks in March
We Built Our Own, No. 02. 813 articles, 7,124 images, one platform. Built by one publisher and an AI.
Three WordPress blogs and a rented app
We Built Our Own, No. 01. Where Mercury Local started, and why it could not stay there.