About

Since 2005, more than two thousand American communities have lost their local newspaper. New Carlisle was one of them.

What goes with a local paper is not the front page. It is the boring, load-bearing stuff: what the council actually voted on, which nursing home got cited, where the federal money went, whose water failed a test. Nobody stops filing those records when the paper closes. They just pile up, unread, in places no ordinary person would think to look.

We are Adam Sahli and Joseph Abboud, and we got stuck on that. Not journalists — we came at it from the software side, and the thing that kept nagging at us was that most of this work is not a reporting problem at all. It is a reading problem. The facts are already public. They sit in government databases that are free to anyone with the patience to query them, and nobody has that patience, because it used to be somebody's job and now it isn't anybody's.

So we built The Lantern. Software reads the public record for this town every day and writes up what changed. Every figure it prints is checked back against the filing it came from — and if a number cannot be found in the source, the story is thrown out rather than published. The record itself is printed at the bottom of every article, so you never have to take our word for anything. That is the whole design: make it hard for us to lie to you, then show you the receipts.

It is free, and we intend to keep it that way. Not free for now, not free until we find a way to charge — free, because a town knowing what its own government is doing should not depend on whether you can afford it. Running this costs us very little, which is exactly what makes the promise keepable.

Now the part most papers would leave out. No person edits these stories before they publish. There is no newsroom — there is the two of us and a fact-check that runs on every draft. Every article is labelled with how it was made, so you always know whether you are reading something a machine assembled or something it drafted and had checked. We would rather tell you that plainly than have you find it out. If something here is wrong, it is our fault and our names are on it.

There are also things we simply cannot cover yet, and we would rather name them than quietly leave them out. New Carlisle has no police department of its own and the county publishes no incident log a computer can read, so there is no blotter here — only county-wide crime totals. Property transfers sit behind a county website with no way in. Obituaries, opinion and the life of the town need people, and those pages say so instead of inventing something to fill the space. We are working on all of it.

New Carlisle is where this starts, not where it ends. If it works here it should work in every town that lost its paper and never got another one. If you spot something wrong — and you will — please tell us. We publish corrections on the story itself, and we would much rather hear it from you than not hear it at all.