The phrase comes from Brian Alvey: a media business amasses attention and sells it. I've been sitting with that formulation for a week, and the more I turn it over, the more I think the local news industry got both halves wrong.

The Wrong Kind of Attention

Most local news operations amassed the wrong thing. They amassed impressions — clicks from a search result, shares from a feed, traffic from someone else's algorithm. Those numbers looked like attention. They were proximity.

Real attention is a person who knows your name. Who types your URL, or tells their neighbor about the story you published Tuesday. Who comes back not because they saw a headline in a feed but because this is where they learned what happened at the zoning meeting, and they trust you to tell them what happens at the next one.

That kind of attention doesn't arrive in a traffic spike. It builds. One beat, one meeting, one reader at a time.

The Wrong Way to Sell It

The other half — selling it — got distorted too. The industry sold attention by the impression. Cost per thousand. A reader who visited once from a Google result was worth the same as one who came back every day. The pricing model couldn't tell the difference, so the business couldn't either.

When you can't distinguish between a reader and a click, you optimize for clicks. That's how we got the headlines, the slideshows, the autoplay videos, the paywalls designed to convert a visitor into a subscriber before they've decided whether they trust you. The ad networks demanded it. The journalism suffered for it.

What Local Gets Right

The word "locally" changes the equation. Local attention is specific. It belongs to a place. It is earned from people who live there and care about what happens there — not because you tricked an algorithm, but because you covered the thing that mattered to them.

Mercury Local will never charge readers. That is a design decision, not a promotional claim. The bet is that sustained, free, beat-level coverage earns habitual trust — and habitual trust is the most valuable asset a local news operation can own. More valuable than a subscriber list. More durable than a traffic spike.

Alvey is right that a media business amasses attention and sells it. The version I'm building amasses it one neighborhood at a time — and what we're selling is the proof that it works.