Changelog
Every release of The Lantern, what changed in it, and when it reached the live site.
The Lantern is in beta. Running 0.9.69 · 81 releases since .
Everything that reached the live site is listed here, newest first — including the fixes, because a list of only the good news is an advertisement rather than a record. Where a release corrected something the paper had got wrong, it says so and says for how long. Versions stay below 1.0.0 while The Lantern is a pilot; that number is reserved for when it stops being one, not for when it feels finished.
0.9.69Live now
Log in and Sign up, in words
When you are not signed in, the top of every page now says Log in / Sign up instead of showing a person icon.
- The account control at the top right was an outline person icon, which did not say you could sign in or create an account. It now reads Log in / Sign up, each going straight to the right form. Once you are signed in, the icon and its menu return.
0.9.68
Account page: closer together, and the same caption as every illustration
The sign-in page's drawing and form sit closer together, and the drawing is now captioned like every other illustration on the site.
- The drawing on the sign-in page was captioned differently from the illustrations on stories. It now reads "Illustration generated by Sunset Media", like the rest. The credits page and our standards page explain how the illustrations are made.
0.9.67
A friendlier way in
The sign-in and create-account page has been redesigned around a drawing of a neighbour reading the paper under a porch lantern.
- Signing in, creating an account and resetting a password now happen on one card, with Sign in and Create account tabs at the top so both are easy to find. The page says plainly what an account is for, and that reading The Lantern never needs one.
- The drawing was made with AI in the same style as the paper's article illustrations, and is labelled as such beneath it.
0.9.66
Save stories, follow what you care about
Your account page now holds your saved stories, what you follow, how you sign in, and a copy of your data.
- A Save button on every article keeps it on your account page to read later.
- Follow a section, or a running story from "The story so far", and it is listed on your account page. Email updates for what you follow are not switched on yet.
- Your account page shows how you sign in. If you signed up with Google you can now set a password, and you can link or unlink Google.
- "Download my data" gives you one file with everything the paper holds about your account. The privacy page lists what that is.
0.9.65
Sign in with Google
You can now create an account or sign in with your Google account.
- "Continue with Google" on the account page signs you in with your Google account. If you already have an account with the same email address, it signs you into that one.
- We ask Google only for your email address; the privacy page sets out exactly what Google shares.
0.9.64
Confirm your email, and password reset by email
New accounts get an email to confirm the address, and a forgotten password can now be reset by email.
- Creating an account now sends a link to confirm your email address. Until you open it, your account page shows a reminder with a button to send it again.
- "Forgot password" now emails you a reset link. Until today the paper could not send email at all, and the account page asked readers to write to us instead.
- The privacy page now names our email provider, which receives your address only to deliver these emails.
0.9.63
A shorter illustration credit
Illustration captions now read "Illustration generated by Sunset Media".
- The caption under each generated illustration is shortened to "Illustration generated by Sunset Media". How the illustrations are made with AI, and checked by software, is set out on the credits and How we work pages.
0.9.62
Illustrations credited to Sunset Media
Every illustration generated for a story now credits Sunset Media, which produces them for the paper.
- The caption under each generated illustration now reads "Illustration generated with AI for this story by Sunset Media", with a link to Sunset Media's website. The credits and How we work pages say the same.
0.9.61
The story so far
Stories that are part of a longer one now show what came before, with a page for the whole of it.
- An article that belongs to a running story - Ohio gas prices, the county's jobless rate, a nursing home's inspections, a water system's violations, City Council's meetings - now ends with "The story so far": the stories that came before it, and a link to all of them on one page, newest first.
0.9.60
How we work
A new page sets out, in one place, how The Lantern makes its news and what it does and does not check.
- "How we work" gathers the paper's standards on one page: where stories come from, how software writes them, what the fact-check catches and what it cannot, how private people are kept out of machine-written stories, how pictures are made, and how corrections work. It is linked from the footer, the menu and the About page.
- The footer's credits link now reads "Picture credits", since most pictures on the site are illustrations rather than photographs.
0.9.59
Your money this week
The Business page now opens with the numbers a household checks: mortgage rates, the price of gas, inflation and the county's jobless rate.
- The stock-market box on the Business page is replaced by "Your money this week": the average 30-year mortgage rate, Ohio's price of regular gas, inflation and Clark County's jobless rate, each with its move since the last figure and a link to the agency that publishes it.
- The stock figures it replaced came from an unofficial source rather than a public record. They are gone from the Business page.
- New on the Business page and on By the numbers: weekly mortgage rates, monthly inflation, and the number of applications to start a business in Ohio each month. Mortgage rates and inflation are national figures, and new business applications are counted statewide; no figures are published for New Carlisle itself.
0.9.58
An illustration for every new story
New stories now carry an illustration made for them, generated with AI and labelled as such.
- Each new story gets an illustration of its own: a scene written from the published headline, drawn in the paper's house style in black ink with one colour on the thing the story is about. Its caption says it was generated with AI.
- Before an illustration appears, software checks it for lettering, for whether it shows the intended scene, and for anyone shown hurt or in danger. No person reviews each one; the credits page explains the whole process.
- Older stories keep the line drawings they had.
0.9.57
World news moves into the menu
World news is now reached from the menu at the top left rather than from the row of sections.
- World news and From the Capital now head the menu at the top left. World news no longer has its own tab in the row of New Carlisle sections; on phones it is in the Menu panel.
- The menu carries the paper's name in its nameplate lettering.
0.9.56
A new typeface for reading
Articles, summaries and section headings are now set in a new serif typeface, chosen to sit beside the new headline type.
- Story text, summaries and the headings inside articles are set in a new serif typeface, designed for reading on screens.
- Articles drafted by our software can now connect a story to the one before it on the same subject, such as a hearing to the vote that scheduled it. Each connection is cited and checked like every other sentence.
0.9.55
A correction to how we handle applicants' names
A county rezoning article named the private residents who applied and their agent, which our rules forbid. It has been rewritten, and the software now removes such names before an article is drafted.
- From 22 to 24 October an article about a Clark County rezoning hearing named the two residents who filed the request and the agent acting for them. The Lantern does not name private citizens in software-drafted stories, and the people who apply for a rezoning or a variance are private citizens. The article has been rewritten without their names.
- The software now removes the names of private applicants, petitioners and their agents from a filing before any article is drafted from it, as it already did for residents who speak at public comment. Businesses, churches and public bodies that apply are still named.
0.9.54
New section pages and a new headline type
Every section now opens with its top story and a grid of the rest, headlines are set in a new typeface, and a menu sits at the top left.
- Each section page now leads with its biggest story and three more beside it, then a grid of everything else with a drawing for each. The description of what a section covers is folded away at the bottom.
- Story and page titles are set in a new serif typeface, larger and easier to scan.
- On the front page the weather comes first in the side column, then stories from partner newsrooms. The column of headlines on the left now runs the length of the page and ends with a link to every story.
- A menu at the top left gathers the sections, world news, sign-in, and the other papers Lantern Media is preparing.
- Environment essays from The Conversation now appear on the Environment page, republished under its licence with the authors' names.
0.9.53
Recent articles rewritten, and weekdays checked
The past two weeks of articles were redrafted in the new house style, and the automatic fact-check now checks the day of the week.
- Articles about the last two weeks' records were redrafted in the new house style. A new version replaced an article only when it passed the fact-check and read better; each article kept its address and its date.
- The fact-check now checks weekdays. One rewritten weather article said a fog advisory came on Tuesday morning when it was issued on Wednesday, October 21; it has been corrected. An article now has to name a weekday that matches a date in the records it cites.
- Where a published article fails the fact-check and no accurate rewrite is produced, the article is replaced by the record itself, labelled as such.
0.9.52
Clearer, shorter articles
The software that drafts the paper's articles now follows a written house style, and each draft is checked against it.
- Articles now lead with the news in a sentence or two, use plain headings, and keep sentences short. Meeting times, addresses and ordinance numbers move to where a reader needs them.
- Articles no longer describe the paper's own archive ("one of 314 recalls this paper has logged") or fill space with what a record does not say. Those lines told a reader nothing about their town.
- A draft that breaks the house style gets one rewrite. A draft is never held back for its style alone: accuracy is still the only test for publishing.
- The World tab no longer pins travel advisories that carry a future date to the top of the list.
0.9.51
Sources you can click through
Citations now open the government agency's own page, and the filing under each article reads in plain English.
- Each citation in an article, and each entry in its source list, now links to the agency's own page for that record: the recall notice, the vote, the agenda, the dataset. They open in a new tab.
- The source filing at the foot of each article now names its fields in plain English and writes dates out in full. Map coordinates and web addresses are replaced by one link to the original.
- Ohio reporting from partner newsrooms now sits at the top of the front page's side column.
- The high school sports schedule has been removed from the front page.
0.9.50
Wastewater, health estimates, jobs, the Mad River and the month's weather
Five more public-record sources for New Carlisle, and two more world news links.
- Health & Safety reports COVID, flu and RSV levels in Clark County's wastewater, measured at Springfield's treatment plant, in the weeks they reach Moderate or above, and when they fall back. Wastewater tends to rise before doctors' visits do.
- Health & Safety also carries the CDC's yearly health estimates for New Carlisle itself, from obesity and smoking to checkups and loneliness, each beside the Clark County figure with its margin of error.
- Business carries the Census Bureau's count of employers and jobs in the 45344 and across Clark County, year by year since 2018.
- Environment reports the Mad River near Springfield and near Dayton on any day it reaches the National Weather Service's action or flood stage, and each month's weather at Springfield against the 30-year normal.
- The World tab now also links to UN News and to the State Department's newest travel advisory changes.
0.9.49
The county commissioners, Ohio in Congress, and vehicle recalls
Five new public-record sources: Clark County's agendas and news, how Ohio's House members vote, the bills New Carlisle's lawmakers introduce, and major vehicle recalls.
- The City desk now carries the Clark County commissioners' agendas and minutes, and the articles report what is on the agenda itself, not just that one was posted. The county's own news releases and road notices appear there too.
- From the Capital now reports from the public record: how each of Ohio's U.S. House members voted on every bill that reached a final vote, with New Carlisle's own representative first, and every bill introduced by that representative or by Ohio's two senators. Other Ohio members' bills appear once they pass a committee or a chamber.
- Vehicle recalls from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration appear on Health & Safety and Roads: those covering at least 50,000 vehicles, or carrying a do-not-drive or park-outside warning. Like product recalls, they are national, and each one says so.
- From January 3, 2027, New Carlisle is in Ohio's 4th congressional district under the state's new map; until then it is in the 15th. The vote reports follow that change on the day.
0.9.48
One look, and markets on the Business page
The dark theme is gone, and the market prices moved from the front page to the Business desk.
- The paper now has a single light design. The dark theme and its switch are removed, and a theme choice your browser had saved is cleared.
- The market outlook moved from the front page's sidebar to the top of the Business desk.
0.9.47
Today's count
The corner beside the nameplate now says how many new stories the paper has published today.
- The top right of the masthead shows how many new New Carlisle stories went up today, counted from midnight, and links to the full list. A story counts on the day its article is written and checked.
0.9.47
Crime figures: two false updates withdrawn
For one day, the Public Safety articles said the FBI had lowered the sheriff's monthly crime counts. It had not; the mistake was ours, and the notes are gone.
- ⚠️ On October 19, eleven monthly crime articles were marked Updated and showed lower totals - March 2026 read 4 offenses instead of 8. The FBI had not changed anything. Part of the FBI's data did not reach us that morning, and the paper counted the missing violent offenses as none. The next morning the figures were right again, with a second note on each article. Both sets of notes are removed. The paper now refuses to update these articles from incomplete data.
- The Ohio comparison figure in those articles is an FBI estimate that shifts slightly as more police agencies report. A shift in that estimate alone no longer marks an article as Updated; the sheriff's own figures do.
0.9.46
New Carlisle by the numbers
A new page charts jobs, gas prices, population, household income and school enrollment from the government's own figures, with a plain sentence under each chart saying what changed.
- New Carlisle by the numbers, reached from the Data, Ohio and Business desks: Clark County and Ohio unemployment, Ohio's weekly jobless claims and gas prices, New Carlisle's population and median household income, and enrollment at Tecumseh Local Schools. Each chart says where its figures come from and links there, and every number is also in a table under the chart.
- The sentence under each chart is worked out from the same figures, comparing like with like: a month with the same month a year earlier, a week with the same week. Where the matching figure is missing, the page says nothing rather than compare the wrong things.
- Below the charts, national data explainers from USAFacts, as headlines that open the original.
0.9.45
One search, and a tidier masthead
The search box beside the front page is gone; the Search button at the top left is now easier to spot, and the corner beside the nameplate shows only the latest story.
- There were two ways to search the archive on the front page. The box in the sidebar is gone, and the Search button at the top left of every page now has a border so it reads as a button.
- The corner to the right of the nameplate now shows just the latest story on one line; the line beneath it is gone.
0.9.44
Tell us things
New ways to reach the paper: tips, corrections, letters and columns for the opinion page, and obituaries, each with its own short form.
- The front page and every article now carry short invitations: send a tip, report an error, write for the opinion page, or send an obituary. Each goes to the newsroom inbox, where a person reads it.
- The paper does not sell advertising, so the advertising card and rate card are gone. So is the job listing: there is no vacancy.
- A new section, From the Capital, carries reporting on Ohio's statehouse and state government from Signal Statewide, republished under its terms with its reporters' bylines. The Lantern did not report or edit these stories, and each one links to the original.
0.9.43
A World tab, and who publishes the paper
World news has its own tab in the section bar, and the About page now explains that The New Carlisle Lantern is published by Lantern Media.
- World headlines from other newsrooms now have their own tab in the bar under the nameplate, beside Ohio, instead of a small link in the corner.
- The About page is rewritten: The New Carlisle Lantern is published by Lantern Media, a nonprofit working to bring public-record news to Ohio communities, starting here. The page no longer names the people behind it.
0.9.42
The New Carlisle Lantern, with shorter headlines
The paper's name now carries the town, headlines on the front page and the desks are short enough to read at a glance, and the weather comes from the National Weather Service.
- The nameplate reads The New Carlisle Lantern, and the empty band that sat above the front page is gone.
- ⚠️ That band said the Ohio flag was at full staff, every day. Nothing checked: it was fixed text, and on the day we removed it the Governor had ordered flags to half-staff. The paper cannot yet read the Governor's flag orders, so it no longer says anything about the flag. It will again only when it can check.
- Headlines were the agencies' own titles, and some ran past a hundred characters: a recall headline could carry the full legal wording of the hazard, and a roadwork headline every cross street. Cards on the front page and the desks now show a short headline in the style of a news summary - who, what, and the one thing that matters. Where the article was written and passed the fact-check, its headline is used; otherwise the agency's title is shortened by removing words, never by adding any. The article page still carries the full title.
- The top right of the masthead now links to the newest story instead of repeating the weather, which is already in the front page's sidebar.
- The weather card now reports the National Weather Service's forecast and readings for New Carlisle, and links to the Weather Service's own forecast page so you can check it.
- Markets now sit above the Tecumseh schedule in the sidebar.
- Photographs beside stories are replaced by line drawings made for the paper. The photo library kept showing things that were not here - other towns' signs, and once a flooded street in another country on a Clark County flood warning - and a reader takes a picture above a headline as a picture of the story. Every post from the past week has a drawing of its own, and older posts use a drawing of their subject. None shows a real place or person. They were drawn with an AI assistant, as drawings written in code, and each was looked at before going on the site; the credits page says so.
- The partner-newsroom box on the front page now shows only stories about Ohio. Our partners report nationally, so some days it will hold one or two stories and some days none, and on those days it does not appear.
0.9.41
Weather warnings within the hour, and no unwritten stories
Weather alerts, road closures and unhealthy-air days now reach the paper within about fifteen minutes instead of the next morning, and a new record appears only once its article has been written and checked.
- The paper gathered every source once a day, at six in the morning. That is fine for a council packet and useless for a storm: in the week before this change, weather alerts reached readers between five and fifteen hours after the National Weather Service issued them. Weather alerts, road closures and air-quality warnings are now checked about every fifteen minutes and written up straight away.
- ⚠️ Since 11 October, about one new article in seven reached readers as a bare record with no story written - a draft had failed the fact-check, or the writer had nothing to work from. New records now stay off the site entirely - the front page, the desks, search and the article page itself - until their article is written and has passed the check. A draft that fails the check gets one more attempt, corrected for what the check found, and is checked again in full.
- City council packets are the exception for now. The paper cannot yet read the packet documents themselves, so it had been publishing them with nothing but a date and a link. They will appear once the documents can be read.
0.9.40
Articles written for neighbours, with figures you can follow
Articles drafted by software now read more like a local paper and less like a database, round some figures for readability with every rounding still checked, and fix two wrong sentences in the plainly assembled articles.
- Before switching software drafting back on, we wrote twenty test articles from real New Carlisle and Ohio records and read every one. They are now written in plainer, warmer language for people who live here: what changes for you first, official wording translated into everyday English, and no opinions or praise or blame.
- Articles now use one or two figures in a sentence rather than a string of them, and round some for readability - “about $120,000”, “just over $1.8 million”. A rounded figure is checked against the record just as an exact one is, and the exact figures are listed at the end of each article. The corrections page explains how.
- ⚠️ The test articles found that the comparisons we hand the writer could be misread. An average was labelled in a way that let it be described as covering a year it did not include, and a series of 43 months could be described as eight, because the writer saw only its most recent entries. Both are fixed: comparisons now cover everything on file, say when they start, and give the dates of highs and lows. None of the test articles was published.
- ⚠️ Two errors in the plainly assembled articles, which readers have seen: an unchanged figure was summarised as “Unchanged than the previous figure on file by 0.0%”, and a change in an unemployment rate was given as a percentage of itself in the summary line, which made a move of 0.8 percentage points read as a 25% jump. Both now read correctly.
0.9.39
Fewer requests behind every page
Pages ask our server for less in the background, and our privacy page now lists the two small things kept in your browser to make that possible.
- Every page used to ask our server whether you were signed in, and for the weather, each time it loaded. A browser that has never signed in no longer asks at all, and the weather is fetched at most once every ten minutes. Article pages now load with no background requests to us beyond the page count.
- To do that, your browser keeps the last weather reading for ten minutes and, only if you have signed in on it, a note saying so. Neither leaves your device; the privacy page now says this.
- Each page also carries less code: the full list of these release notes was being sent to every reader just to print the version number at the foot of the page.
0.9.38
Lighter pages
Every page now downloads about half as much typeface data, with no change to how anything looks.
- The paper's typefaces carried letters for many alphabets on every page. They are now split so a page downloads only the letters it uses - about half as much on a typical visit, which matters most on a slow phone connection. Accented and other less common letters still appear in the paper's own type; they are fetched only when a page needs them.
0.9.37
Correction: campaign-money totals, and a year of them
Six articles about June 2026 campaign contributions showed lowered totals with a false note saying the Federal Election Commission had revised them. Their totals are restored, and the coverage now spans the last twelve months.
- From the evening of October 6 to October 7, six articles about money New Carlisle donors gave in June 2026 showed totals that had dropped - ActBlue from $2,367 to $1,536 - with an “Updated” note saying the FEC had changed the record. It had not. Our system read only the most recent contributions, so the oldest month it saw was cut off part-way, and the cut moved as new contributions arrived. The original totals were right; they are restored and the false notes removed.
- The same flaw meant seven articles about May 2026 had been under-counted since they were first published - one by more than $600. They now show the full month.
- We now read every contribution from the last twelve whole months, so 182 committee-months that were never fetched before are now on file, and a month is left out entirely rather than published short. A new check that watches for records being “revised” day after day is what caught this, on its first day.
0.9.36
Faster article photos, and cleaner old city notices
Articles whose photograph is the first thing on screen now show it sooner, and ten older city records no longer display web-page code in their summaries.
- On a phone, an article's photograph is often the first thing you see, but it waited until the rest of the page had loaded before it started downloading. It now starts straight away, which brings those articles up in well under two seconds on a good connection.
- Eight older City of New Carlisle records - fee schedules, forms and studies - showed fragments of web-page code such as “[vc_row][vc_column]” where their summary should be, and two showed a coded character in place of an ellipsis. They were stored before we fixed how the city's text is cleaned, and the fix never reached them. They now read as plain text.
0.9.35
Road headlines say what happened, and where
Traffic incidents now say whether it was a crash or a breakdown, where on the road, and what was blocked. Planned closures carry their dates.
- Every traffic incident on the Roads desk was headlined the same way - “Traffic incident on I-75 South S” - with a stray direction letter, no word of what happened and no place. Because we never repeat a headline on a page, several different crashes and breakdowns could not all be shown. They now read like “Crash on I-75 South beyond SR-48/Main St/Grand Ave, left lane blocked”.
- The state's traffic system does not publish when an incident was reported, so these articles carry no date, and each one now says so rather than leaving you to assume one.
- Weekly closures of the same stretch of road had identical headlines, so only one week appeared. Closure headlines now include their dates.
0.9.34
Every job opening shown, and lighter desk pages
Two different city job openings shared one headline, so only one appeared on the City desk. Each now names its role. Desk pages also download far less for their small pictures.
- The city titles every vacancy “Position Open”. We do not show the same headline twice on a page, so when the city advertised for a water treatment plant operator and a wastewater treatment plant operator, only one of the two openings appeared on the City desk. Headlines for city vacancies now name the role when the city's notice does.
- The small square pictures beside each desk story were being downloaded at the size of a full-width photograph - several times what a phone shows - which slowed the main picture at the top of the page. They are now fetched at the size they appear, and the top picture uses a slightly smaller file that looks the same.
0.9.33
Faster desks, and one meeting notice where there were three
Desk pages now arrive with their stories already on them, and the city's standing meeting notices appear once, with the venue the city currently gives.
- The desks - City, Business, Ohio and the rest - used to load an empty page and then fetch their stories. They now arrive complete, which on a weak phone signal brings the first story up in well under half the time it used to take.
- The city posts each board's meeting notice many times and edits whichever copy it likes. We kept every copy we had ever seen, so the City desk could list a board three times and show the copy with an older venue - for the Board of Zoning Appeals, the Heritage Hall shelter house on West Jefferson rather than Heritage Hall on West Washington Street, the address the city's current notice gives. Now only the copy the city edited most recently is listed, and a link to an older copy leads to it.
0.9.32
The “Updated” note now appears straight away
The note on a revised article showed only once the article had been rewritten in your browser. It is now part of the page from the first moment.
- The previous release rewrites an article when the agency revises its record. Until the rewrite finished, the page showed the record without the “Updated” note - so a reader who arrived first, and anything that reads the page without running it, saw the new figure with nothing saying it had changed. The note is now shown whether or not the article has been rewritten yet.
0.9.31
When an agency revises a record, the article follows - and says so
Articles now update when the public body that published a record revises it, with a note at the top saying what changed.
- We compared the records behind our articles with what each agency publishes today and found about a hundred that had been revised since we first stored them - federal award amounts changed, a city closure date corrected, monthly crime and employment figures restated. The paper kept showing the original versions. That was wrong by our own rule: when an article and its filing disagree, the filing is right.
- Now, when an agency changes the facts in a record, the article is rewritten from the new version and carries an “Updated” note listing what changed, from what, to what. Our own rewording is not labelled as an agency revision, and a figure that vanishes from a feed is kept rather than erased.
- On phones, some city articles could be scrolled sideways because a long web address in the figures did not wrap. Fixed.
0.9.30
What the automatic check does not cover, said plainly
The corrections page now says that a sentence with no figure in it is not checked at all, and describes a new safeguard against filings that try to instruct the drafting software.
- The page explained which figures the automatic check compares against the record, but not that a sentence without a figure is not checked. That is the largest thing it does not cover, and the page now says so.
- Records come from many government systems. If the text of one ever addresses the drafting software rather than a reader, no draft is attempted for it: the article is assembled mechanically and says why. No such record has been found; the safeguard is in place before one is.
0.9.29
Articles open faster, and open on iPhones
Articles now arrive with their text already in the page, and a fault that could stop an article loading in Safari is fixed.
- Some readers using Safari - on iPhones and Macs - could open an article and see only its frame: the text never arrived. The way pages were stored for quick delivery could hand Safari a compressed copy it cannot read. Fixed earlier today; we do not know how long it had been happening, because nothing reported it.
- Articles used to open empty and then fetch their text. They now arrive with it, as the front page does since the previous release. On a slow phone signal the text appears in under half the time.
- Published dates now follow New Carlisle's clock rather than the server's.
0.9.28
The front page arrives with its stories
The front page now arrives with the day's stories already in it, instead of loading them after it opens. On a slow phone signal the lead story appears in about half the time.
- Until today the front page opened empty and then asked for each desk's stories one by one, so on a weak signal the lead story could take several seconds to appear. The edition is now put together before the page is sent, refreshed every five minutes, the way the desk pages already were. If that ever fails, the page falls back to loading the stories itself, as before.
- A correction to the previous release: it said about a hundred articles still showed old formatting faults. That figure was wrong. Checking every stored article found two, and both have been rewritten.
- Routine security maintenance.
0.9.27
A lighter front page
Three panels on the front page were each loading their contents twice. They now load once.
- The market, school-sports and partner-newsroom panels beside the front page asked for their contents a second time as soon as the day's stories arrived. On a slow phone signal that was wasted data and a slower page. Fixed.
0.9.26
A stricter check on every figure, and cleaner articles
The automatic check that stands between a software-drafted article and publication is now much stricter: every figure and date must appear in the record its own sentence cites.
- We tested the old check by feeding it drafts with deliberate errors — a dollar amount made from the digits of a ZIP code, a figure taken from a different record, a percentage, a date that does not exist. It let every one through, because it only asked whether the digits appeared anywhere among the records it had been given. No software-drafted article has been published yet, so none of those errors reached a reader. The check now compares each sentence against the record that sentence cites, and catches all of them.
- It still cannot tell whether a true number is used honestly in its sentence, or whether “rose” should have been “fell”. The corrections page says so.
- Some articles assembled from older filings showed website formatting codes, a doubled “Purpose:”, a figure cut short, or a sentence broken after “U.S.”. Articles written from now on are cleaned as they are written; about a hundred already published still show the old text until they are rewritten.
0.9.25
The front page can no longer get stuck
If the front page ever showed “This page couldn’t load” and kept showing it after a reload, that is fixed. The page now recovers by itself.
- To appear instantly on a return visit, the front page keeps a copy of the last edition in your browser. Some copies saved earlier could crash the page, and because the crash happened before a fresh edition could replace the copy, reloading crashed it again until the browser’s saved data was cleared. Saved copies are now checked before they are used, a bad one is discarded, and if a page ever fails for that reason it clears the copy and tries again.
- The temperature unit and light/dark choice no longer break where a browser blocks saved data; the choice simply lasts for that visit.
- When the paper’s archive is briefly unreachable, pages now say so in words rather than failing silently.
0.9.24
Partner articles keep their links
Links inside italic or bold passages of republished articles now work. Since those articles arrived earlier today, some showed their links as raw text in brackets.
- Republished articles often end with an italic line pointing to more of the newsroom’s reporting. The link inside it was printed as raw markup rather than as a link — about eighty links across the partner desks. They now work, as the newsrooms’ licences expect.
- Links now appear only in articles a person or a partner newsroom wrote. Stories the paper writes from public filings never carry one, so text inside a filing can never become a link on this site.
- An article address that does not exist now says so properly to browsers and search engines, instead of showing a “could not be found” page that claimed to be a real one.
- Records from the two cities the paper no longer covers could be opened at a New Carlisle address and appeared under this paper’s name. They no longer can: a New Carlisle address shows only New Carlisle’s record.
- Routine security maintenance.
0.9.23
Account security, and one sign-in to repeat
If you have an account you will be asked to sign in once more. Sign-ins are now stored in a form that is useless to anyone who reads them, and two gaps in how accounts were protected are closed.
- Until today, changing your account’s email address left you signed in on every other device, and a password-reset link already sent to your old address kept working for up to two hours. Both now end the moment the address changes.
- The account settings that ask for your current password now limit how many times it can be guessed, as signing in already did.
- Routine security maintenance.
0.9.22
A quieter top line
The top of every page no longer repeats the town’s name. The link to the world front now sits beside the community finder in the top right; the town stands under the nameplate.
- The row above the nameplate used to list every edition, which meant “New Carlisle, Ohio” appeared twice within an inch. It now offers only somewhere else to go — the world front from the local paper, and the local paper from the world front — beside the box that finds your community.
0.9.21
The town under the nameplate, and the community finder is back
The masthead now says New Carlisle, Ohio directly beneath The Lantern, and the “Find your community” box has returned to the top right.
- This is New Carlisle’s paper, and the masthead should say so before anything else does. The town’s name now sits directly under the nameplate on every page of the local edition, in the same small capitals the dateline uses.
- The community finder is back in the top right of the masthead. It searches the editions the paper actually publishes — New Carlisle and the world front today — and says plainly when nothing matches, rather than suggesting a town exists that does not.
0.9.20
Partner newsrooms get their readership count without seeing you
Newsrooms whose articles we republish ask to count how often they are read. Our server now reports each counted view to them itself, so no tracking image ever loads in your browser.
- Yesterday's note said partner newsrooms' tracking images were simply stripped, which kept the privacy promise but left their reasonable request unmet. Now, when the paper's own page tally counts a view of a republished article, our server tells the newsroom “one more reading” — nothing about you, your address or your browser goes with it, and a view we decline to count (a browser sending Do Not Track, for instance) is not reported to them either.
- The privacy page describes this in the same words. Nothing else changed.
0.9.19
Articles from partner newsrooms, under their own bylines
The paper now republishes reporting from newsrooms that license it for exactly that — The Conversation, KFF Health News, Chalkbeat, The Hechinger Report, The 74, ProPublica, The 19th, Grist and NASA — on three new desks and alongside the records on three existing ones. Every piece is labelled as republished, carries its author's byline and links to the original.
- Three desks are new: Science & Tech, Arts & Entertainment, and a Life & Culture desk that finally has something on it. Business, Schools and Health & Safety keep their public records and add a block of partner reporting beneath them. The front page carries the six newest partner stories in its right-hand column.
- ⚠️ Be clear about what this is. These articles were reported, written and checked by the newsrooms named on them, not by The Lantern, and none of this paper's own checks apply to them: there is no public filing underneath an essay, so nothing can be checked against one. The label on every desk, every row and every article says so, and the article page links to the original before the first paragraph.
- Each outlet publishes under a licence that invites republication — Creative Commons for most, public domain for NASA. The text is reproduced unedited. Photographs are not: the licences cover words, not pictures, so the page tells you the original carries them. A few outlets publish only a summary in their feeds; for those the paper shows the summary and sends you to the original rather than copying the rest.
- Nothing here is drafted by software, and nothing here reaches the software that writes the paper's record-based articles.
0.9.18
An Ohio desk, and two editions retired
The New Carlisle paper has a new Ohio desk carrying statewide figures and filings beside the town's own. The New York City and Chicago editions, which covered two cities this paper does not report on, are gone.
- A new desk, Ohio, sits in the New Carlisle toolbar after Roads. It carries the state's unemployment rate each month, the number of new unemployment-insurance claims Ohioans file each week, every food, drug and device recall whose distribution reached Ohio, and the official notices the City of Springfield publishes as the Clark County seat. Each of those also appears on its subject desk, so the state jobs figure sits next to the county's on Business; the Ohio page gathers the statewide view in one place.
- Three of those feeds are new public-record sources: the Bureau of Labor Statistics' statewide series, the U.S. Department of Labor's weekly claims report, and Springfield's own website. A fourth new source is local rather than statewide: the U.S. Drought Monitor's weekly map of Clark County, published only in weeks when some part of the county is dry and in the first clear week after a dry spell. It reaches back to 2023, so this autumn's map can be read against September 2024, when extreme drought covered 94% of the county.
- Every one of these is a filing from an official source, checked the same way as the rest of the paper, and every article links to the record it came from. Nothing here is drafted by software yet, for the reason the changelog has given since August.
- The New York City and Chicago editions are retired. They were built in August from the data behind the paper's original prototype, and they published those cities' public records without anyone at The Lantern covering either place. The edition row now lists New Carlisle and the world front only. Nothing was deleted: the records remain behind the standing-watch tool, which is unchanged.
0.9.17
The masthead sits on the page
The new masthead was drawn as a slightly different shade from the page around it — easiest to see in the dark setting, as a faint box behind the paper's name. It now shares the page's own background.
- This came in with today's masthead redesign and was live for a few hours. It was a display fault only: nothing on the page was missing or wrong.
- On a phone the bar at the top still has a solid background, on purpose — it stays in place while the page scrolls underneath it.
0.9.16
The paper looks like a paper
The top of every page is now a newspaper masthead: the paper's name in the middle, today's date and which edition you are reading on one side, and on New Carlisle pages the current weather on the other.
- The bar across the top of the site has been redesigned as a masthead. It shows the date the town is on — Eastern time, wherever you are reading from — which edition you are in, and a line saying what kind of paper that edition is: the New Carlisle edition is written from the public record, and the world edition carries other newsrooms' headlines rather than reporting of its own.
- Headlines and the rest of the page have new typefaces, chosen so a headline fits beside a photograph without running to many lines.
- The sections, the editions, search, the light and dark setting and your account are all still there. On a phone they sit behind the Menu button, as before.
- The world edition's front page used to print the same sentence five times — that these are other newsrooms' headlines, not our reporting — once at the top and again above every section. It now says it once, at the top, before any headline. Every section still carries its “Elsewhere” label and every headline still names the outlet that wrote it.
- Nothing about how stories are made or checked changed.
0.9.15
A label said more than the check does
The desk pages, the About page and the note under a reported story all said every figure in an article is checked against its filing. The automatic check covers dollar amounts, large numbers and years, and the wording now says so.
- Since 9 August the label at the top of each record desk has read “Every figure checked against the filing”, and the About page and the closing note on a reported story said the same thing in a sentence. That overstated what the software does, and it has been changed today to say what it does do.
- What the check actually does: before an article drafted by software can publish, every dollar amount, every number of four or more digits and every year in it must appear in the public record it was written from, or the draft is withheld and a mechanically assembled article runs instead. Smaller numbers and percentages are not checked that way. The corrections page has described this accurately all along; the shorter labels did not.
- ⚠️ How long it mattered. In early August a few dozen software-drafted articles were live under this check. Since 12 August every article on the site has been assembled mechanically from its record, so the check has had nothing to withhold and no smaller number or percentage has been drafted by software in that time. We changed the words before that stops being true rather than after.
- Nothing about how articles are made changed today. Only the words describing it did.
0.9.14
Routine security maintenance
We updated some of the software the site is built on, to take a security fix its makers had published.
- Nothing about the site changed for readers, and nothing was wrong with it before. Software the paper is built from had a security fix published, and we took it promptly rather than waiting.
- We are deliberately not naming the component or the versions involved. A public list of exactly which software a site runs, and which release it moved off, is a useful thing to hand someone looking for a way in — so this note stays general on purpose.
- This was found by an automatic check that reads published security advisories against the paper's software every week.
0.9.13
The paper stops keeping you waiting
If you were the first person to open The Lantern after a quiet few hours, you used to wait around half a minute for the page. That is fixed — it now loads straight away.
- Until today, the first visit after a quiet spell was slow. The systems that serve the paper went to sleep when nobody was reading, and the next person to arrive had to wait for them to wake — around thirty seconds, and occasionally the page simply failed rather than loading slowly. Overnight and early morning were the worst times for it, which is exactly when a local paper ought to be quickest.
- The paper now loads immediately whether or not anyone has read it recently. A page that used to take about thirty seconds on a cold start takes about a fifth of a second.
- ⚠️ This was a known problem, not a new one. It came from a deliberate trade made at launch to keep running costs down, and it stayed that way for months. We would rather say plainly that readers were waiting all that time than present the fix as an improvement out of nowhere.
- ⚠️ There was also a gap of roughly half an hour during the changeover when the site could not be reached at all over a secure connection. If you tried to visit and got a connection error rather than a slow page, that was us. It is over, and nothing was lost.
- Nothing about the journalism changed today — the same public records, the same labelling on every story, the same links to the filings underneath.
0.9.12
The front page stopped sliding sideways on phones
On a narrow phone the front page could be dragged sideways, with the right-hand edge of every headline cut off. It was one recall notice doing it, and it is fixed.
- If you read The Lantern on a phone, the front page could be pushed sideways — about a fingertip's worth on a common handset, and a good deal more on a small one. The right edge of the page sat off-screen, so headlines and dates were clipped and the whole page slid under your thumb as you scrolled.
- The cause was a single recall notice. Product recalls are filed by federal agencies under the manufacturer's registered name, and some of those names are one very long word with no space or hyphen anywhere in them — the one that did this is thirty-six letters. A word that cannot be broken cannot be wrapped, so it forced the column wider than the phone, and everything else on the page was stretched to match.
- ⚠️ We had fixed this exact problem before, in August, and the fix missed this one spot. It was written as a list of the places record text appears, and one card type was left off the list. It is no longer a list: the rule now sits on the cards themselves, so it covers anything they hold today or later.
- ⚠️ Why it went unnoticed. We have an automated check whose only job is to catch the page sliding sideways, and it had been running against a blank page — so it passed every time while testing nothing. It now runs against real filings, including the awkward ones that have broken the layout before, and this was the first thing it found. We would rather say that plainly than quietly fix the page.
- The same fault was latent in eight other places on the site that had not been triggered yet. All of them are fixed, not just the one that showed.
0.9.11
Easier to read, and usable without a mouse
Faint grey text is now dark enough to read, dark mode stopped being switched off behind your back on the world pages, and there is a way to skip past the navigation to the story.
- Several small pieces of text were too faint. Timestamps beside world headlines were the worst of it, and the same fault made the green figure on the markets panel, the source badge on an article and the little source tags inside a story all sit just below the contrast the accessibility guidelines ask for. All of them are darker now. Nothing moved and nothing was resized — only the colours.
- ⚠️ Dark mode was being turned off behind your back on the world pages. If you had chosen the dark theme, or your device asks for it, those pages flashed dark and then loaded light — every visit, and your choice was thrown away rather than remembered. The cause was the “20m ago” timestamps: the page was built with the time frozen at the moment we published it, your browser worked out the real figure, the two disagreed, and the page rebuilt itself from scratch and lost the theme on the way. That has been happening since the world pages launched on 18 August. The timestamps are now worked out in your browser, which is the only place that knows what time it is for you.
- There is now a “Skip to main content” link. Press Tab when a page loads and it is the first thing you reach. Without it, anyone reading with a keyboard or a screen reader had to move through eleven section links, the search box and the account menu on every single page before getting to the first word of the story. There was no way past it before, which is a plain failure against the most basic level of the accessibility guidelines, and it had been that way from the start.
- The search box now shows a visible outline when your keyboard is in it. Previously nothing at all changed when it took focus, so if you were not using a mouse there was no way to tell where you were typing.
- ⚠️ How far this was checked, so the claim is not wider than the work. Every page was tested automatically against the AA level of the international accessibility guidelines, in both light and dark themes, at desktop and phone widths, and the faults above are all that was found — plus the keyboard problems, which no automatic test can see and which had to be found by hand. Automatic testing is a floor rather than a verdict: it is good at colour and structure and cannot judge whether a page makes sense to somebody using it. If something here is hard to read or hard to use, we would like to hear about it — the contact form is on the about page.
0.9.10
An error message that stopped blaming you
When the archive was still waking up, several pages showed a raw technical error that read as though you had made too many requests. You hadn't. They now say what is actually happening.
- A reader sent us a screenshot of the watches page showing “Error: 429 : Too Many Requests”. Nobody had made too many requests: the paper's own archive was asleep and still waking up, and the page was passing a technical code straight through as if it described something you had done.
- It now says the archive is waking up and to try again in a moment, which is the truth. Where the limit really is ours — filling in a form too many times in a row, which we do restrict to keep the tip line usable — you get that message instead, and it says so plainly.
- This was wrong on the watches pages, the search page and the community forms, including the tip line. The tip line was the worst of it: the message explaining what had happened was being thrown away and replaced with a bare code, on the form we most want somebody to be able to finish.
- ⚠️ It was a wording fault, not a fix for the underlying slowness. The archive can still be slow to wake, and separate work on that is under way.
0.9.9
New York and Chicago have their own editions
The 39,608 New York and Chicago records that used to sit on the world page now have editions of their own, with sections, because a building permit is news where it was filed.
- New York City and Chicago are now editions in their own right, alongside New Carlisle. Each has its own front page and its own sections — New York: crime, property, environment. Chicago: crime, development, business, health, schools, environment.
- Yesterday those records came off the world page, which left them searchable but with nowhere to read them. This is where they belong: the public record is local by nature, and it reads as news in the place it was filed rather than on a world page.
- ⚠️ These two editions publish the records themselves, unedited, each linked to the filing it came from. No story has been written from them and nothing in them was drafted by software. That is a narrower promise than the New Carlisle edition makes, and the label on every page says so.
- They also have no photographs. The Lantern's picture library was chosen and checked for a small town in Ohio, and using it here would mean illustrating a Chicago story with a picture chosen for somewhere else. These editions are text until that work is done properly.
- One thing we caught before publishing: Chicago's first front page was 22 of 30 business licences, because the city files far more of those than anything else. A front page ordered purely by what arrived most recently is a page about whoever files most often, which is not the same as what matters. All six sections are now represented.
0.9.8
The world edition is a news page now
The New York and Chicago edition was publishing building permits as world news. It now carries the day's headlines from four newsrooms, in four sections, and says plainly that it did not report them.
- The global edition has four sections — World, Politics, Business and Technology — each carrying the day's headlines from BBC, The New York Times, NPR and Al Jazeera. Each one links straight to the newsroom that wrote it.
- ⚠️ The Lantern does not report these stories, and the page says so under the masthead, on every section and beside every headline. You get the headline, who wrote it and when, and a link to their site — never their article text. This paper's own journalism is the public record of the communities it covers, and that has not changed.
- What this replaces: until today that edition led with public records from New York and Chicago — on one recent morning its front-page story was a $7,500 permit for a shop sign. Those are real records and they matter to somebody, but not as world news, and not as a front page.
- New York and Chicago are becoming their own editions, the way New Carlisle is, because a building permit is news where it was filed. Until then those 39,608 records are still searchable and can still be watched; nothing was deleted.
- The toolbar now carries the sections, with watches gathered into a single “Your Watches” control set apart from them — sections are what the paper publishes, watches are something you do with it.
0.9.7
The label on every article said the wrong thing
For five days every article carried an internal code where the sentence explaining how it was written should have been. That is fixed, and the paper says what it was showing.
- ⚠️ From 13 to 18 August, every article on this site displayed the word “ai-failed” where its label should have been. That label is the sentence telling you how a story was made, and it is the thing this paper asks you to judge it on. Instead it showed a code meant for the people who build the site.
- What it should have said, and now says, is “Assembled from the record” — which is what those articles are. Each was put together mechanically from the public filing it links to, with no AI draft, because the drafting step failed. The articles themselves were correct throughout and nothing about how they were written has changed; only the label was wrong.
- The paper writes stories two ways, and the label is how you tell which you are reading. Leaving a code there for five days meant readers could not tell. That is worse than most bugs on a site whose whole claim is that you can check its work.
- An unfamiliar label can no longer reach a page at all: where the paper does not have a plain-English sentence for how a story was made, it now says so in plain English rather than printing its own shorthand.
- New York and Chicago edition: world headlines from other newsrooms have moved out of the sidebar and onto the page, and there are now twenty-four rather than seven. They are still headlines only, still each one labelled with the newsroom that wrote it, and every one still links out to that newsroom. The Lantern does not report these stories and does not reproduce them.
- The box for finding a community in the toolbar was too narrow for its own label, which read “Find your commur” on most screens. It fits now.
0.9.6
Saying which stories are checked, and how
The paper can now carry stories written by people as well as assembled from records, and every page that described how it checks its work has been rewritten to describe both.
- The Lantern can now publish a story written by a person — a reporter at a meeting, a letter, an obituary — alongside the ones assembled from public records. None has been published yet.
- ⚠️ These two kinds of story are checked very differently, and the paper now says so everywhere rather than describing one process. An article written from a public filing has every figure checked against that filing before it publishes. A story a person reported has no filing underneath it, so that check cannot run at all.
- A reported story carries a byline and a label saying it was not machine-checked. That is a weaker guarantee than the rest of the paper offers, and the corrections page says so in those words rather than leaving it to be inferred.
- The about page, the corrections page, the footer and the label on every article were all rewritten together, because a promise that appears in four places drifts if only one is changed.
- World headlines on the New York and Chicago edition now show each outlet's own picture where the feed provides one. Nothing is ever substituted: where an outlet sends no image, the story appears without one rather than borrowing a photograph from elsewhere.
0.9.5
World headlines, clearly labelled as someone else's
The New York and Chicago edition now carries a rail of world headlines from other newsrooms — links out, never rewritten, and never on the New Carlisle edition.
- New: a world headlines panel on the New York and Chicago edition, drawing from the BBC, The New York Times, NPR and Al Jazeera. Each item names the newsroom that reported it and links straight to them.
- Headlines only. The Lantern does not rewrite, summarise or republish any of this reporting — it is a set of links to other people's work, and the panel says so above the list as well as on every line.
- ⚠️ This appears on the New York and Chicago edition alone. The New Carlisle edition publishes from the public record and nothing else, and that does not change; a community only carries a rail like this if it has been set up to.
- No single newsroom can take over the panel — at most three headlines from any one of them.
0.9.4
New York on the New York page
The front page of the New York and Chicago edition had become entirely Chicago, and printed some stories twice.
- ⚠️ New York had disappeared from its own front page. Chicago's records arrive roughly ten times as often, so a page ordered purely by date was a Chicago page — and New York's most recent records are six weeks older, which meant no amount of looking further down the list would have found them. Both cities now appear.
- The page reaches back further as a result, and that is the trade rather than a fault: a sale recorded in Queens in June can now sit beside a Chicago licence issued this week. The alternative was a page that could never show New York at all, under a masthead that promises both.
- ⚠️ Seven stories were appearing twice on the same page — once in the main feed and again in the subject sections below it, each time with a different photograph, which reads as two stories that disagree. A headline can now appear only once anywhere on the page.
- Chicago still leads the page, because it genuinely files more. The point was never an even split; it was that one city should not erase the other.
0.9.3
An environment desk for New York and Chicago
The New York and Chicago edition now covers the big industrial polluters in both cities — who holds a federal permit, when they were last inspected, and what they have been fined.
- New: an environment desk for the New York and Chicago edition, covering the facilities the federal government classes as major — the significant permit holders, with real limits on what they may discharge. Sixty in Chicago, nineteen in New York City, each with an inspection, a penalty or a formal enforcement action on record.
- The desk covers major facilities rather than every permitted one, and says so. Chicago has nearly 21,000 registered addresses and New York over 29,000, but the overwhelming majority are a registry number attached to a building with no regulatory history at all. Listing them would be a longer page and a less useful one.
- Each entry says when the facility was last inspected, whether federal records list it in violation, and when it last faced formal enforcement — with a link to the federal record it came from.
- This edition now covers seven of the eight subjects the New Carlisle edition does.
0.9.2
Each edition keeps its own news, and Chicago gets a schools desk
The global edition was showing New Carlisle's weather and headlines as its own; it now shows only its own cities, and it covers Chicago's schools for the first time.
- ⚠️ The New York and Chicago edition had been publishing New Carlisle's news. Its front page led with weather warnings for a county in Ohio, showed that town's forecast in the rail, and counted the whole archive — every record from every community — as its own. Each edition now shows only the records that belong to it.
- The rail on that edition carries the weather for New York City and for Chicago, which is what it covers, rather than for a town in Ohio.
- Its counters now describe that edition alone: what it holds and how many sources feed it, not the size of everything the paper has ever collected.
- New: a schools desk for the New York and Chicago edition, starting with Chicago Public Schools. Seven years of enrolment for the district and for its twenty-five largest schools, and seven years of what the district takes in and spends — $5.27bn in 2015 to $7.45bn in 2020.
- That desk covers the twenty-five largest schools of the district's 643, and says so rather than implying it is all of them. Enrolment figures run to the 2024-25 school year; the financial ones lag four years further, which is how the federal collection publishes them.
- The schools desk is built from the same federal collection, and the same code, as the Tecumseh coverage in New Carlisle. Adding a place should mean adding sources rather than rebuilding the paper, and this is the first time that has actually been true.
0.9.1
Photographs that arrive
Photographs were taking as long as eight seconds to appear, which on screen is indistinguishable from a picture that is simply missing.
- ⚠️ A reader reported that the lead photograph on the front page was not loading. It was loading — it was taking up to eight seconds to arrive, and an empty frame looks the same either way. Photographs now arrive in about a second.
- Two things were wrong, and both are fixed. The site was preparing versions of each photograph far larger than the original, which cannot add any detail and took several seconds of work to produce; and it was converting every photograph into a format that costs roughly eight times as much to prepare for a saving of about three percent. Neither was worth what a reader was waiting for.
- The paper now refuses to publish a build in which any photograph is missing, uncredited, or recorded at the wrong size. Every photograph here is a freely licensed picture that has to be credited, and a missing credit is a licence breach rather than an oversight.
- Every photograph in the library is now checked automatically for whether it actually arrives, and how quickly.
0.9.0
A published record
The Lantern now publishes its own release history, and every page carries the version you are reading.
- A changelog at /changelog, listing every release since the first working edition on 3 July — including the fixes, because a list of only good news is an advertisement rather than a record.
- The footer carries the running version and links to it, so a correction or a bug report can say which build it happened on.
- The Lantern is labelled beta, and will be until the pilot stops being a pilot. The version number says the same thing for anyone who reads them.
- The changelog page needs nothing from the newsroom's servers to render, which is deliberate: the most likely moment to come looking for it is just after something changed or broke.
0.8.2
Photographs at the size they were meant to be
Every photograph on the site had been rendering at its own full height instead of the shape its slot asked for, and the weather panel had been blank for three days.
- ⚠️ Photographs were the wrong size everywhere, and had been since 13 August. Each one rendered at its own stored height rather than the shape the page asked for, so a lead image stood more than twice as tall as intended and a small card showed a picture five times too tall. Every slot on every page is now the shape it was designed to be.
- ⚠️ The weather panel had been empty since 13 August. It was quietly being blocked by the site's own security rules, and because it fails silently an empty panel looked exactly like one still loading. The forecast now comes through the paper's own servers, which also means the weather service is no longer told the address of everyone who opens the front page.
- Two photographs were removed. One was the interior of a building in another city with a bank's signage in the frame; one was a care home in another country. Neither belonged on a story about New Carlisle, and both broke rules this paper had already written down for itself.
- Photographs are now drawn only from images that could honestly illustrate the subject. A drinking-water violation used to be able to fall through to a picture of a shop front; it draws a water tower.
- The front page now says outright that the photographs are library images chosen to suit the subject — never pictures of the record, the place, or the people in it. Article pages already said so; the front page, where most people arrive, said nothing.
- A product recall filed under a forty-character company name with nothing to break on was pushing the Health & Safety desk sideways on a phone. Headlines can now wrap mid-word when the filing leaves no other option.
- The soft ink-wash background was being drawn at twice its intended size on high-resolution screens, so most phones and laptops only ever saw the top-left quarter of it.
- Routine security maintenance.
0.8.1
Every page says which paper it is
Pages outside the New Carlisle edition had been claiming to be it in every browser tab and shared link, and the advertising rate card was selling three things that do not exist.
- ⚠️ Every page now carries its own title. The global edition, the search page, the account pages and the record pages had no title of their own, so they inherited the New Carlisle one — which meant a bookmark, a browser tab or a link shared to a group chat named a town those pages do not cover.
- ⚠️ The advertising rate card was offering a front-page banner, classifieds and section sponsorship. None of the three exists. Each row now says whether it is available now or not built yet — what to sell is the paper's call, whether the page is true is not.
- ⚠️ The same rate card promised to reach every household in the 45344. The paper measures no readership at all, so the claim is gone from both places it appeared.
- The section toolbar was cutting links off at every desktop width — eleven desks need more room than a laptop screen has, and the row was silently clipping them with no scrollbar to show it. The links that do not fit now move into a More menu, so no width shows half a word.
- A tip, an advertising enquiry or a job application now alerts the newsroom when it arrives, instead of waiting for somebody to open the inbox. The alert carries none of what you wrote — not your name, your contact details, or your message.
- Photographs are sent at the size they are displayed. A phone was downloading more than half a megabyte of pictures to fill slots a fraction of that size.
- Pressing Escape in the More menu returns you to the button you opened it with.
- Routine security maintenance.
0.8.0
Accounts, a masthead mark, and one footer for both editions
The Lantern got reader accounts, its own lantern mark in place of a placeholder, and a front page that can no longer print the same headline twice.
- Accounts: sign in, register, change your password or email address, sign out everywhere, and delete your account outright.
- The forgot-password form tells you the truth about what it can currently do. Where reset email is not switched on it says so and gives you an address to write to, rather than telling you to check an inbox nothing will arrive in.
- The lantern monogram replaces the placeholder circle in the masthead, on article pages, in the browser tab icon and on shared links.
- On a phone the whole toolbar now collapses into one menu, and several pages that scrolled sideways no longer do.
- About, Corrections, Privacy, Terms and Photo credits moved to the top of the site. They describe the publisher rather than a community, and both editions now link to one copy instead of drifting into two.
- The About page is rewritten in the founders' own words.
- ⚠️ The front page could print the same headline twice, with two different photographs, which reads as a publishing error. Across the archive, 265 records shared a headline with a sibling from the same source; that is now 2.
- ⚠️ A photograph of a flooded street in southern India — with dozens of identifiable people in it, including children — had been illustrating Clark County flood watches for three days. It is deleted, and weather photographs are now matched to the hazard in the headline rather than picked by number. Checking every weather record in the archive found four more wrong pairings that reading the rules had missed.
- Desk pages get the front page's rule against one source taking over. The Health & Safety desk had been 29 items out of 30 from a single stormy day.
- Drinking-water records are filed one per compliance period rather than one per contaminant, so the desk stops showing the same headline over and over.
- Feature stories put the photograph above the headline at every width.
0.7.0
A front page that reads like a newspaper
The front page stopped being a Dayton traffic bulletin, the paper got real photography for its recurring subjects, and the legal pages stopped promising things the software could not do.
- ⚠️ The front page was eight slots out of nine of road works, every one of them fourteen to nineteen miles away in the Dayton suburbs. Every item was true, current and correctly ordered, and the page still read as somebody else's traffic report. Selection is now capped per source and per subject, then re-sorted by date — so the page is still strictly newest-first, it just stops one filer taking it over.
- ⚠️ The legal pages were promising things that could not happen. The privacy page told readers they could have a submission deleted months before anything could delete one. A policy is a promise the software has to keep.
- Consumer product recalls are now covered. These are national rather than local, and every one of them says so on its face — they are here because the products reach households everywhere.
- Recall headlines stopped reading like database rows. A regulatory field carrying barcodes, case counts and raw label text was being printed as a headline.
- Recall photographs are chosen by what was actually recalled, so a medical device no longer illustrates itself with a fruit market.
- Real photography for schools, drinking water and nursing homes, replacing images that had nothing to do with the story. Nursing home citations were illustrating themselves with restaurant kitchens.
- The next Tecumseh varsity fixtures appear in the front-page rail. It is a schedule and says so: the school publishes no scores anywhere a machine can read them.
0.6.0
Schools, water, roads and public safety
Five new desks' worth of public records, including the first coverage of Tecumseh schools and of crime figures for the office that polices the town.
- Schools: Tecumseh Local and its five schools, year by year — enrolment, staffing, and what the district takes in and spends. Seven years of the district's numbers show six straight annual declines in enrolment.
- Drinking water: every public water system in the county with a compliance history, current to this year.
- Roads: construction and incidents within twenty-five miles. Most are not in town, so every headline says how far away it is.
- Campaign money raised in the 45344, aggregated by committee and month. Never by named donor — that is a rule the paper holds itself to, not a limit of the data.
- Public Safety opens with the monthly crime figures the county sheriff's office reports federally. It is a trend line and not a blotter: the federal record carries no incident locations, dates or names. New Carlisle has no police department of its own, so no local blotter exists to publish.
- ⚠️ The paper stopped quoting a percentage when the numbers are too small to carry one. A monthly count going from 2 to 8 is 'up 300%', which is arithmetically correct and tells a reader something false about the world.
- Several sources were widened from the town to the county after measurement showed the town alone produced nothing. Federal awards went from zero items a year to seventy-nine — and every summary names the place the money actually went.
0.5.0
Length earned by evidence
Nine new record sources, and an article is now as long as its evidence supports rather than as long as the software was allowed to make it.
- Nine new public-record sources for New Carlisle, across civic filings, business, health and the environment.
- Article length is graded by how much specific evidence backs the individual record — not by how much data exists in general. A single council announcement no longer licenses twelve hundred padded words.
- ⚠️ A broken key for the drafting software used to be indistinguishable from never having tried, so the paper could have published mechanically for weeks with nothing to show anything was wrong. The two states are now told apart and reported separately.
- Every request the paper makes to a government API now identifies itself the same way, with a contact address. If an agency wants to know who is reading its filings, it can tell.
0.4.0
A paper that survives its own cold start
The archive stopped being wiped by deployments, the whole back catalogue became searchable, and pages stopped making readers wait for a sleeping server.
- The archive persists between deployments. Until now a deploy could empty it.
- Search across every article the paper has ever published.
- The front page is never empty. If the servers are still waking, you get the last edition you saw while the current one loads.
- Articles load instantly from a cache and retry by themselves while the servers wake, instead of showing an error to somebody who arrived first that morning.
- Photographs are 77% smaller and cached for a year, so a second visit costs almost nothing.
- Pages say 'waking the server' when that is what is happening, rather than looking broken.
0.3.0
Articles that cite the filing
Articles began citing the records they are drawn from, every figure started being checked against the source data, and the paper went to press once a day.
- Every article cites the records it is written from, and every citation links to the filing it came from.
- Every figure in a drafted article is checked mechanically against the source data before it publishes. If a number is not in the record, the draft is withheld and the reader gets a mechanically assembled article instead, with a note saying why.
- The city's own channels are on the record: announcements, public notices, meetings, documents, and dated council packets from newcarlisleohio.gov.
- The paper goes to press once a day rather than writing on demand, which is what keeps it affordable to run.
0.2.0
Only real records
Every piece of invented content was deleted, and the New Carlisle edition began publishing nothing but real public records.
- ⚠️ All fictional demonstration articles are gone. The New Carlisle edition publishes only real records from official sources. Desks without a live source say so honestly instead of showing something made up.
- A photo-forward front page in place of a list of links.
- Live weather, and a market panel that says what it actually knows.
- Photographs are real, freely licensed pictures with their credits kept alongside them.
0.1.0
The first edition
The first working version of The Lantern: a local paper for New Carlisle, Ohio, and the watch platform it grew out of.
- A news platform built on public records, with two editions: New Carlisle, Ohio, and a global edition where you can set a standing watch over city open data.
- Front-page search, a real map of the town, and hand-drawn spot illustrations.
- A layout built for a phone rather than shrunk onto one.
Dates are the day the work reached the live site, not the day it was written. Every entry was read out of the project’s commit history rather than recalled — the gaps between dates are real gaps. Corrections to articles, rather than to the software, are on the corrections page.