What Sets Our Election Hub Apart
Charlotte voters heading into the 2025 municipal races have no shortage of “election coverage” to click on. But where you land makes all the difference. Compare our Election 2025 hub with QC News’s early voting write-up and the contrast is hard to miss.
Organization versus Scatter
At Mercury, the hub is an actual map of the campaign terrain—separate sections for the mayor’s race, at-large contests, district breakdowns, candidate profiles, and explainers on gerrymandering and turnout math. Readers don’t have to guess where to find information. Competitor sites mostly serve up a vertical feed of stories, indistinguishable from their daily churn. You get a timestamp, a few lines about dates, then a link carousel that sends you away from the subject at hand.
Reading Without Interruption
Our hub is clean. No auto-play video pushing toothpaste, no sidebar “Best Reviews” for air fryers. Just reporting. Ads and overlays are stripped out so the story comes first. Contrast that with QC News’s portal—large banners, mid-article promos for their parent company, and pop-ups that fracture attention before you reach the bottom of a paragraph. Tim Wu’s Attention Merchants warned that once you surrender real estate to ads, you’ve lost the reader’s trust; we’ve taken that to heart.
Depth over Brevity
Take our Republican council guide: each candidate’s résumé, voting record, policy priorities, and political headwinds laid out in long form. It reads like a briefing, not a bulletin. Competitors rarely go beyond the “what” and almost never reach the “why.” As David Ogilvy reminded his copywriters, “Do your homework. Long factual copy still works”. That’s the model we follow.
Resources for Voters
Key dates, turnout trends, and district explainers are all in one place on our hub. You can jump from the mayor’s profile to the mechanics of early voting without leaving the site. Competitors rarely compile that information; readers are left to chase it across separate pages—or worse, external links.
The Ads We Don’t Run
Here’s the subtext: QC News and similar outlets aren’t bad actors, they’re participants in an advertising economy built on clutter. As Ken Auletta chronicled in Frenemies, publishers chase short-term revenue by jamming more placements onto the page, hoping to squeeze a few more cents from programmatic ads. We’ve chosen the opposite path: no surveillance-driven ad units, no clickbait, and no “related stories” that whisk you off to unrelated celebrity scandals.
The result? Readers stick with the piece. And in a low-turnout city where “one in eight voices decide” who runs local government, keeping attention on the substance isn’t just a design choice—it’s civic infrastructure.
About the Author
I write this fueled by an unwise amount of cold brew (my hand still shakes when typing “council district guide”). I’m Peter Cellino, founder of Mercury Local. Message me anytime on Bluesky @pc51.bsky.social. And don’t miss the rest of our notes on the Mercury Local blog.
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This article, “What Sets Our Election Hub Apart,” by Peter Cellino is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0.
“What Sets Our Election Hub Apart”
by Peter Cellino, Mercury Local (CC BY-ND 4.0)