Every local news site looks the same. Same WordPress theme, same headline stack, same stock hero images. Swap the logo and the city name and you couldn't tell one from another. That's a template problem. But it's not the real problem.
The real problem is that they all sound the same, too.
Templates Are Layout. Voice Is Identity.
Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP, described a version of this on The AI Report. WordPress gives editors infinite choices — any font, any color, any layout. VIP's job is to lock that down: a governance plugin that constrains those choices to match brand guidelines. Two fonts, three colors, done.
That's the visual layer. But the editorial layer — what the publication actually sounds like — is where most local news operations have no governance at all. A reporter writes in their own style. An editor rewrites it in theirs. A freelancer submits something that reads like a different publication entirely. There's no system enforcing consistency because nobody documented what consistency means.
What a Voice Profile Actually Does
We run Mercury Local — The Charlotte Mercury, The Farmington Mercury, Strolling Ballantyne. Each publication has a distinct editorial voice, and each writer has a documented voice profile: patterns they use, patterns they avoid, sentence rhythms, word choices, structural habits. Not suggestions. Constraints.
When an AI drafts an article under a specific byline, it loads that profile first. Every sentence gets measured against it. The result doesn't sound like "AI writing." It sounds like that writer, in that publication, covering that beat.
This is not a style guide pinned to a Slack channel that nobody reads. It's an operational constraint built into the production pipeline — the same way Alvey's governance plugin constrains a designer to brand-approved fonts. Except it constrains prose to a documented editorial identity.
The Distinction That Matters
A template tells you what the page looks like. A voice tells you what the publication is. Readers don't come back because of your layout. They come back because the coverage reads like it was written by someone who knows the neighborhood, the beat, the history — and sounds the same way every time.
Most local news operations invested in the template. Almost none invested in the voice. That's the gap.