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The future of news

Publishers, AI and who gets paid: the reading meter, local news, licensing, Meta and the crawlers, the story vault.

46 articles, newest first. Every article on this site is in exactly one of eight sections.

October 2026 43

• Breaking the story down before the agents do · A reply to Ole Reissmann's session at the News Product Alliance Summit, and what this newsroom already ships to the machines that read it 30 Oct · 7 min
• A book that looks like the team that made it · What the best visual books, Leanpub's Markua and learning research teach, and what an agent team can put on a printed page 30 Oct · 12 min
• Take it or leave it · Is Meta's crawling clause legal? The law that could reach it, the precedents against Meta, and the asymmetry at its heart 27 Oct · 15 min
• Meta's new terms and the news · What the crawling clause says, what has happened since mid-October, and why publishers should answer with their own machine-readable terms, not only with letters 27 Oct · 11 min
• One researcher for every newsroom · A research site that works as a light, focused Internet Archive for the sources our stories rest on, captured on a schedule into a pack a day, published by licence tier, and shared by the PHP site… 26 Oct · 7 min
• Feisty Duck, briefed · Ivan Ristić's cryptography and security news, newsletter, guide and history as an anchor for everything SSL, TLS and PKI, what it shares with our newsrooms, and how we could integrate with it 25 Oct · 7 min
• A call for help · Journalists, editors, students and teachers wanted for a live newsroom run with agents, where every role should have a human, we cannot pay yet, and what we can offer instead 25 Oct · 4 min
• Monstream, briefed · Continuous research streams run by AI agents, an integration API with signed webhooks, a free service from a small cryptography company, and how our newsrooms could use it, check it and contribute to… 25 Oct · 8 min
• Own the stack, and the trust · A reply to Bert Kok on who gets paid for journalism when AI sits between the newsroom and the reader, with agents that augment journalists rather than replace them, and a tour of what we have built 25 Oct · 9 min
• Local trust, certified upwards · Why local and niche publishers should take everything that has become commodity, certify the big outlets' stories about their patch and be paid for it, and why stories, like software, need someone to… 25 Oct · 7 min
• Sources and their shadows · The licence, the access, the links and the quotes of every reference, how a paywalled article can be seen through what others say about it, and paying the sources we use 25 Oct · 8 min
• Signed by the source · Asking the people and companies we quote to sign that we represent them correctly, why that is cheaper than every reader checking, and how readers go on the record too 24 Oct · 8 min
• A newsroom for one · The reading list I send by email became the first page of this newsroom for the people I write to, so it now says what it is, shows what they have read, and asks for an answer 24 Oct · 12 min
• The reading account, as built · The meter, the credit, Stripe top-ups and the account in your own vault are running today; checking each payment and signing it is what is proposed 21 Oct · 4 min
• Two years in, the opposite · An essay about burning out on AI that I could not buy, and why my two years of AI have been the most productive of my career 18 Oct · 6 min
• A section for publishers · Where to send someone new to this newsroom, and a site that keeps itself current 18 Oct · 6 min
• Reviews on the record · Other models, the editor and the desk check every article, and never the same text twice 18 Oct · 9 min
• On the record · Signed opinions from experts, paid when readers value them, and a share for the people whose ideas an article uses 18 Oct · 11 min
• Your reading, your controls · The meter charges for what you read, you can pause or reset it, and what you have read folds away in six ways 17 Oct · 13 min
• I just want to buy the article · What happened when I tried to pay Harvard Business Review for one piece I wanted to answer, the arithmetic of a subscription, and ten things HBR could sell a reader like me, most of them already… 17 Oct · 9 min
• Scrolled is not read · What the reading meter measures, what it should, highlights you can keep, and the page as the reader's own graph 16 Oct · 18 min
• Inside the Mesa Ranch desk · A page-by-page tour of an observation vault, from the cover to the knowledge graph you can play in time 15 Oct · 9 min
• When journalism becomes intelligence, built · An observation desk for one data-center buildout, from an atlas of 78 events to a community impact tracker, in a vault you can open 15 Oct · 9 min
• Your own newsroom · How a founder can tell their story by voice memo, with an agent that checks it and publishes it to GitHub Pages, and readers who pay a little if they find it useful 15 Oct · 11 min
• The wire as a graph · Start from what the reader sees, give every story and every name a long-lived ID, link every phrase of a short narrative, and a brief for the desks 14 Oct · 10 min
• Ways to read one article · The finished piece stays at the centre, and the reader picks the way in 12 Oct · 10 min
• Firing journalists is the worst thing a publication can do · What a hiring decision says about where a publisher is going, and who to hire instead 12 Oct · 10 min
• The site is an inbox · Deciding before reading, marks that build the reader's own graph, and why I could not write this brief until the vault existed 12 Oct · 13 min
• Two agents, one vault · The Industry Wire is written into an encrypted vault by one agent and drawn by newsroom.sgit.ai, which holds only the read key 12 Oct · 16 min
• The article remains a product · Jonathan Palmer's four outputs for a newsroom with no human readers, checked against one that runs 11 Oct · 15 min
• From me to you, in a link · A personal reading list, two briefs to build and use it, and the loop that makes it a day's work 11 Oct · 13 min
• The agent is the reader · Why agents will pay for graphs, personas and signed claims, because it is cheaper than not paying 11 Oct · 19 min
• A link to a persona · Send people to the newsroom as someone, not as nobody 10 Oct · 11 min
• Pay after you read · How a reading meter became a working business model in one afternoon, one release at a time 10 Oct · 18 min
• Pay to keep your persona · Readers should pay because it helps them, not because they feel they should 10 Oct · 9 min
• Who will game the reading meter? · Eight kinds of reader, nine ways to cheat, and the risks that will actually happen 10 Oct · 10 min
• Going live with the reading meter · Pay for what you read, go below zero if you like, and the numbers we will check in eight weeks 10 Oct · 13 min
• One article, five readers · A librarian, a cartographer, a historian, an explainer and a storyteller read the same piece 10 Oct · 15 min
• A meter in the browser · A penny a page, a history you keep, and a site that picks for you 10 Oct · 5 min
• The waiting room knew first · A live local story, and the gap where local information used to be 8 Oct · 10 min
• Liquid content needs water · Liquefy the journalist's notebook, not the finished product 7 Oct · 10 min
• The bridge, followed to the end · What one local story is worth when it is kept as a graph 7 Oct · 17 min
• Story vault underneath, Reader Skills on top · Why local journalism has the most to gain 7 Oct · 10 min

September 2026 3

• The reader was always the product · A corrected history of how news got into this mess 29 Sep · 19 min
• Sixteen thousand fetches, ten clicks, and a token bill nobody is sending · The case for paying publishers to be easy to read 28 Sep · 23 min
• The future of news is the story vault, not the paywall · A story is a graph of claims and evidence and the article is one projection of it; keep the graph in a vault and sell what the article was made from. 22 Sep · 35 min