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The bridge, followed to the end: what changed in v1.2.0
From v1.1.0 (2026-10-08, a071264ce) to v1.2.0 (2026-10-08, e328e3beb), paragraph by paragraph.
16 paragraphs added, 9 removed, 12 changed in place, 36 unchanged. About 1,229 words added and 648 removed. Insertions are marked like this, deletions like this; unchanged runs are folded to one line; figures appear as their file names.
← v1.1.0 · all versions · v1.3.0 →
2 unchanged paragraphs
!shot bw-paper.webpbw-paper-v3.webp | images/ | The Wendmouth Courier on 2 November, in the simulation: the headline is one projection of the story graph, and the tracker beside it shows every source's reopening date. Everything in the simulation is fictional.
4 unchanged paragraphs, under The journalism is getting the date right
!shot bw-conflict.webpbw-conflict-v3.webp | images/ | Three answers to the only question that mattered, as the newsroom held them on 15 October: an official estimate, a documented contract and an expert assessment, each with its evidence and a confidence that comes from how independent that evidence is.
5 unchanged paragraphs, under Newsworthy on five days, needed on fifty-seven
!shot bw-timeline.webpbw-timeline-v3.webp | images/ | Top: what each source said the reopening date would be, day by day. Bottom: the five days the paper led with the story, against the fifty-seven days readers needed its current state.
1 unchanged paragraph
!shot collage-front-pages.webpcollage-front-pages-v3.webp | ../demos/vaults/bridge-simulation/images/ | The Courier on the five days the bridge was news, each front page one projection of the story graph with the tracker beside it, and the fifty-seven days in between that readers needed it.
2 unchanged paragraphs, under Three readers, three graphs, one story
!shot bw-meet.webpbw-meet-v3.webp | images/ | Three readers' graphs meet the story graph at shared anchors: the bridge, the footbridge, the bypass, a bus route and a stop. Green claims are current; grey ones have been superseded and are kept.
2 unchanged paragraphs
!shot bw-hannah-graph.webpbw-hannah-graph-v3.webp | images/ | Hannah's graph meets the story graph: her home, her children's school, her routines and routes on the left, held on her device; the anchors both graphs share; the claims that reach her through them.
2 unchanged paragraphs
!shot bw-hannah-phone.webpbw-hannah-phone-v3.webp | images/ | What Hannah received, as WhatsApp messages from the tracker: seven messages over seven weeks, each one about her route, each with its source. | small
6 unchanged paragraphs, under With accurate information, and without it, The buyers who do not read the paper
!shot bw-agent.webpbw-agent-v3.webp | images/ | One question an agent asks every morning: is the bridge open, and when will it be? Searching on its own, it reads six pages, spends about sixteen cents and finds the council's first page; asking the newsroom, it spends about two cents and is right.
2 unchanged paragraphs, under Where the money goes
!shot bw-money.webpbw-money-v3.webp | images/ | Who paid, and where it went: £2,707 from 1,596 readers and businesses, fourthree institutions and an agent; 35%60% to the Courier, which pays the reporter's base salary out of it, a 20% top-up to the reporter, 45% to the Courier, 10% to the evidence contributors, 10% to infrastructure and payments. The prices, volumes and split are assumptions written in the vault's build script.
In the simulation, one closure earns £2,707. Most of it, £2,408, is small amounts from the town: 1,240 people following the bridge for thirty pence a week while it was closed, forty-six businesses on a business tracker, 310 people paying per alert, five thousand skill runs at two pence. The institutions and the agent add £291. Thirty-fiveThe reporter is on the Courier's payroll: sixty per cent goes to the reporter,Courier, £948which pays her base salary out of it, and twenty per cent comes to her as a top-up on every use, £541 on top of her salary for one story kept right for seven weeks;weeks, forty-fiveand still arriving after the bridge reopens. The base is what any newsroom pays; the top-up is what grows with the story, and with the outlet: the larger and more prominent the paper, the larger the top-up the same work earns. Ten per cent to the Courier; ten per centgoes to infrastructure and payments; and ten per cent to the people whose evidence the claims rest on, shared by how many claims each supported. Priya, the resident who photographed the site notice, the footbridge sign and the first traffic, receives £203. The cycle club that logged the bypass queues twice a day receives £68.
4 unchanged paragraphs, under Version 0.2: what it cost, and what it keeps earning
[figure collage-views.webp] The vault, view by view: twenty of its twenty-two views, the nine new in version 0.2 outlined.
Costs and profit. The fixed cost is mostly the reporting, and it comes first: 50 hours of the reporter's time and 7.5 of the editor's, £2,040 with a legal read, set-up and the platform. The variable costs, payments, alerts, compute and hosting, follow use and come to 9.3% of revenue. During the closure the Courier makes £678, the infrastructure share covers its costs with £20 to spare, and the reporter is under water: her share is about £19 an hour against a cost basis of £30. The story breaks even on 20 November, day forty, and the scale chart says why the town mattered: below about 1,500 followers it would not have paid for its reporting, and above that every follower is margin.
[figure el-economics-charts.webp] Revenue against cost, day by day, crossing on 20 November; and the same story with more or fewer followers, where fixed costs stay put and variable costs follow use.
Two years on. The story stopped being news on 4 December. It kept selling. A council post-incident review, loss adjusters handling business-interruption claims, the county's inspections of eight bridges of the same design, a second fund ahead of the contractor's results, a procurement watchdog, a university research group, an insurer and two other towns with the same bridge all buy the record of what was known, when, and from whom. Over two years the bridge earns £4,378 and £1,181 of profit. After the reopening, 96% of its revenue comes from institutions and agents rather than the town: the revenue moves from the local reader to the players who want the data. The reporter's effective rate rises from £20 an hour at the reopening to £25.54, and Priya's three photographs have earned her £328.
[figure el-projection-chart.webp] Revenue by month over two years, by who paid: the town in October and November, institutions and agents after that, against a cost that is almost all in the first two months.
The next stories, and the payment as a signal. The bridge is the first story in the Courier's graph, not the last. The vault plays out eleven more over two years: a school catchment change, the footbridge resurfacing, the county's sister-bridge inspections, a business rates review, a bus timetable, a wharf flood-defence overrun, a contractor's pattern across three councils, a car park, winter floods, a school meals contract and night closures on the bypass. Each starts with the council, the procurement portal, the routes and the contributors already in the graph, which saves 157 of 331 reporting hours. And each is sized by what people paid for in its first week, from readers and from institutions asking ahead: six are investigated, five get a tracker, and the footbridge resurfacing, which few people needed, gets a brief, three hours and a £73 loss that keeps the graph complete. That is the argument made concrete: a bridge nobody cares about earns no payments and gets no investigation, and the first payments are what tell the newsroom where to dig. By the second year 41% of revenue comes from stories more than three months old, the twelve together earn £26,523 and £13,969 of profit, and across all of them the reporter earns £53 an hour.
[figure el-stories-chart.webp] Revenue by month across twelve stories: stories in their first three months in blue, the long tail of older stories in orange, which grows with every story added.
[figure collage-views-v3.webp] The vault, view by view: twenty of its twenty-three views, in the Day theme, the nine added in version 0.2 outlined.
Costs and profit. The fixed cost is mostly the reporting, and it comes first: 31 hours of the reporter's time and 4.5 of the editor's, both paid by the Courier, £1,350 with a legal read, set-up and the platform. Thirty-one hours is what the first week's payments justified: enough to dig into the contract and find the engineer, not enough to camp on the bridge, because an hour that does not pay for itself is an hour the next story needs. The variable costs, payments, alerts, compute and hosting, follow use and come to 9.3% of revenue. During the closure every party is in profit: the Courier makes £274 after paying her salary, the infrastructure share covers its costs with £20 to spare, and the reporter's top-up of £541 on a base of £930 comes to about £47 an hour against a base rate of £30. The story breaks even on 5 November, day twenty-five, and the scale chart says why the town mattered: below about 1,000 followers it would not have paid for its reporting, and above that every follower is margin.
[figure el-economics-charts-v3.webp] Revenue against cost, day by day, crossing on 5 November; and the same story with more or fewer followers, where fixed costs stay put and variable costs follow use.
Two years on. The story stopped being news on 4 December. It kept selling. A council post-incident review, loss adjusters handling business-interruption claims, the county's inspections of eight bridges of the same design, a second fund ahead of the contractor's results, a procurement watchdog, a university research group, an insurer and two other towns with the same bridge all buy the record of what was known, when, and from whom. Over two years the bridge earns £4,378 and £1,871 of profit. After the reopening, 96% of its revenue comes from institutions and agents rather than the town: the revenue moves from the local reader to the players who want the data. The reporter's base stops when the work stops and her top-up does not, so her effective rate rises from £48 an hour at the reopening to £51, and Priya's three photographs have earned her £328.
[figure el-projection-chart-v3.webp] Revenue by month over two years, by who paid: the town in October and November, institutions and agents after that, against a cost that is almost all in the first two months.
The next stories, and the payment as a signal. The bridge is the first story in the Courier's graph, not the last. The vault plays out eleven more over two years: a school catchment change, the footbridge resurfacing, the county's sister-bridge inspections, a business rates review, a bus timetable, a wharf flood-defence overrun, a contractor's pattern across three councils, a car park, winter floods, a school meals contract and night closures on the bypass. Each starts with the council, the procurement portal, the routes and the contributors already in the graph, which saves 157 of 310 reporting hours. And each is sized by what people paid for in its first week, from readers and from institutions asking ahead: six are investigated, five get a tracker, and the footbridge resurfacing, which few people needed, gets a brief, an hour, and roughly breaks even. That is the argument made concrete: a bridge nobody cares about earns no payments and gets no investigation, and the first payments are what tell the newsroom where to dig. By the second year 41% of revenue comes from stories more than three months old, the twelve together earn £26,523 and £14,731 of profit, and across all of them the reporter earns £65 an hour, base and top-up together.
The money is also the bluntest editor in the building, and an honest one. Beside each story the vault records what the editor expected before the first week and what the town paid for. They agree on five of twelve. On four the town cared more, starting with the bridge itself, which the newsroom expected to be a week of roadworks; on three it cared less. A newsroom close to its community knows a lot about what matters to it, and the community, paying for what it needs, still knows more.
[figure el-stories-chart-v3.webp] Revenue by month across twelve stories: stories in their first three months in blue, the long tail of older stories in orange, which grows with every story added.
2 unchanged paragraphs
!shot el-council.webpel-council-v3.webp | ../demos/vaults/bridge-simulation/images/ | The relief scheme without and with the tracker: when the budget was set, who heard about it, who was paid, and what it cost the council to process.
1 unchanged paragraph
[figure el-ask.webp] A simulated model query: when will it reopen, asked on 16 October, answered from the three live claims with citations, and the context the model would be given.
[figure el-api.webp] The story as an API: every endpoint a GET, every response a file in the vault.
[figure el-ask-v3.webp] A simulated model query: when will it reopen, asked on 16 October, answered from the three live claims with citations, and the context the model would be given.
[figure el-api-v3.webp] The story as an API: every endpoint a GET, every response a file in the vault.
Version 0.3: a professional finish, and the reporter in profit
The vault is also a demonstration of what a vault can be, so version 0.3 is a design and quality pass. The navigation is five numbered groups, the story, the people, the economics, the data and the vault itself, with an icon for each view, the three readers as people rather than indented lines, counts read from the data, and Previous and Next so the views read as a sequence. It has four themes, the same Night, Day, Paper and Ember as secrets.sgit.ai, with every colour a token valued in one file, so a theme is one block there and charts restyle in place.
[figure collage-themes-v3.webp] Four themes, one set of tokens: the same view in Night, Day, Paper and Ember.
Underneath, an architect agent reviewed the code against the estate's guidance, the vault-app rules on sgit.ai, coding.sgit.ai and nfrs.sgit.ai, and a developer agent applied it. Every view now renders through a template that escapes by default, so data in the vault cannot become markup; a view that cannot load its data says so instead of going blank; the interactive views keep keyboard focus; every chart has a text summary; and a gate of 44 checks, from the bundle contract and byte-for-byte downloads to theme completeness and contrast, fails the build if any of it regresses. The reviews and the decisions are in the vault, as BRIEF-CORRECTIONS.md and REALITY.md.
The model was corrected in the same version, as described above: the reporter is on the Courier's payroll with a top-up from every use, the reporting was sized by the first week's payments, and every party ends the closure in profit. And beside each story, the vault now records what the editor expected against what the town paid for.
[figure el-editor-town-v3.webp] What the editor expected, and what the town paid for: five of twelve agreed; the town cared more about the bridge than the newsroom did.
2 unchanged paragraphs, under What the simulation is for
*Revised on 8 October 2026 for the vault's versionversions 0.2,0.2 and 0.3, from a second voice note asking for the costs, the profitability over time, the next stories, the trust, the council, an accountant agent, simulated model queries and an API.*
1 unchanged paragraph