Local news, kept as evidence

A bridge closure followed to the end, a hospital outage nobody could check from home, and the case that local journalism has the most to gain from keeping its reporting as a graph.

The story vault was argued in September as a different shape for news: the reporting kept as a graph of claims and evidence, the article as one projection of it. In two days of October it met a practical test, and the test was local.

Story vault underneath, Reader Skills on top takes Markus Franz's Reader Skills and finds that each one is an operation the story graph already supports. The bridge, followed to the end plays his bridge example out as a simulation, with a published vault: a story newsworthy on five days and needed on fifty-seven. Its economics were corrected the next day, and the correction is recorded on the site.

The waiting room knew first is the same idea on a live story: a hospital IT outage that only the people already in the waiting room knew about, with the evidence kept in a vault while the story was still moving. Liquid content needs water answers FT Strategies: what makes content liquid is the reporting inside it, so liquefy the journalist's notebook, not the finished article.

The two September pieces underneath are the future of news is a story vault, not a paywall and how news got here.

The articles

2026-10-07News & evidence5 threadsStory vault underneath, Reader Skills on top: why local journalism has the most to gainMarkus Franz's Reader Skills on top, the story vault underneath: each skill is a graph query, and local stories can pay back down their chain of sources.

2026-10-07News & evidence5 threadsThe bridge, followed to the end: what one local story is worth when it is kept as a graphA bridge closure simulated on a story vault: newsworthy on 5 days, needed on 57, used by three readers, four buyers and an agent, and paid back to its sources.

2026-10-08News & evidence2 threadsThe waiting room knew first: a live local story, and the gap where local information used to beStaff at two London hospitals said the IT was down; nothing a local could check showed it. A live local story about where local information comes from now.

2026-10-07News & evidence7 threadsLiquid content needs water: liquefy the journalist's notebook, not the finished productA reply to FT Strategies on liquid content: the water is the reporting, so liquefy the journalist's notebook, keep the writing theirs, and pay per use.

2026-09-22News & evidence7 threadsThe future of news is the story vault, not the paywallA 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.

2026-09-29News & evidence6 threadsThe reader was always the product: a corrected history of how news got into this messNews has sold the reader to advertisers since 1833; the web took the monopoly, the platforms made the reader measurable, and AI took the traffic.

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