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The bridge, followed to the end: what changed in v1.3.0
From v1.2.0 (2026-10-08, e328e3beb) to v1.3.0 (2026-10-08, 7d88785be), paragraph by paragraph.
0 paragraphs added, 0 removed, 6 changed in place, 58 unchanged. About 43 words added and 0 removed. Insertions are marked like this, deletions like this; unchanged runs are folded to one line; figures appear as their file names.
34 unchanged paragraphs, under The journalism is getting the date right, Newsworthy on five days, needed on fifty-seven, Three readers, three graphs, one story…
!shot bw-money-v3.webp | images/ | Who paid, and where it went: £2,707 from 1,596 readers and businesses, three institutions and an agent; 60% to the Courier, which pays the reporter's base salary out of it, a 20% top-upcommission to the reporter, 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. The reporter is on the Courier's payroll: sixty per cent goes to the Courier, which pays her base salary out of it, and twenty per cent comes to her as a top-upcommission on every use, £541 on top of her salary for one story kept right for seven weeks, and still arriving after the bridge reopens. The base is what any newsroom pays; the top-upcommission is what grows with the story, and with the outlet: the larger and more prominent the paper, the larger the top-upcommission the same work earns. Ten per cent goes 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.
5 unchanged paragraphs, under Version 0.2: what it cost, and what it keeps earning
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 partybusiness is in profit:profit and the reporter is well paid: the Courier makes £274 after paying her salary, the infrastructure share covers its costs with £20 to spare, and the reporter'sreporter, top-upwho ofis £541paid onrather athan in profit, earns her base salary of £930 comesplus toa commission of £541, £1,471 in all, 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.
1 unchanged paragraph
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-upcommission 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.
1 unchanged paragraph
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-upcommission together.
12 unchanged paragraphs, under Version 0.3: a professional finish, and the reporter in profit
The model was corrected in the same version, as described above: the reporter is on the Courier's payroll with a top-upcommission from every use, the reporting was sized by the first week's payments, and every partybusiness ends the closure in profit. (In version 0.3.1 her row was corrected to show pay, base salary plus commission, rather than a profit: her salary is the Courier's cost, not hers.) And beside each story, the vault now records what the editor expected against what the town paid for.
5 unchanged paragraphs, under What the simulation is for