A city of two hundred thousand people once shared one object every morning. The newspaper told a mechanic and a bank president the same forty facts before either of them got to work. It printed the school board agenda and the high school box scores and the obituaries and the zoning notices, and gave a quarter million strangers a common set of building blocks for constructing their days.

An advertiser buying a half page in 1985 was buying one thing: the fact that most of the city would read the same object on the same morning. The paper spent money producing something a town would gather around, then sold access to the gathering. When the business moved online, publishers behaved as though the journalism had been the product. They put it behind paywalls and cut the calendar, the classifieds, the club notices and the obituaries, which were among the strongest gravity the paper had.

Gravity is a city’s attention, assembled in one place, in a form that local parties can act on. A resident who spends ninety minutes a day inside a national feed is engaged and unreachable at the same time.

That gathered attention is the asset. It costs money to build, and there are known ways to turn it into revenue. The three papers take it in order: how it is built, why people keep coming back to it, and what it is worth.

From Engineering the Commons, chapters one and two.

The demand a newspaper served never went away. People still want to know what is happening in the place they live, and they still want the people around them to know it too. What the newspaper lost was the contest for attention. The national platforms arrived with a better experience, faster, free and endless, and their gravity pulled a city’s attention out of the city. A resident now spends the evening hour inside a feed that knows nothing about where they live, and the platforms have no reason to change that. They gather attention at national scale and sell it at national scale, and a city is only a location field to them.

That is the opening. The tools that built the platforms are now available to anyone, so a city’s gravity can be rebuilt with them, and rebuilt out of many small pieces instead of one printed edition: a team’s schedule, a museum’s calendar, a neighborhood’s classifieds, a council vote reported the same night. Each piece is local by construction, which is the one thing a national platform cannot supply, and each can be adjusted on its own. Cityverse competes for the same evening hour with the same machinery, and wins it back by binding it to the place a person actually lives.

Every piece is a value chain, and the paper uses a high school’s sports teams to show one running end to end. Cityverse gives the school free software for running its teams: schedules, statistics, plays. The school cannot sell any of that, so it would never build the software itself. The scores the coaches enter in real time become reporting, the reporting goes out through Cityverse as content, and the parents who follow it are an audience that local businesses will pay to reach. The school produces something it cannot sell, Cityverse changes its form, and the advertiser at the end pays for the whole chain. The software earns nothing on its own line; it is paid for by attention that pays out on lines it never touches. This is why the papers insist that no single feature be judged on its own ledger. The cost lands on the feature and the revenue lands on the network.

A few rules follow from this. Only the first link in a chain is bought: the school’s software costs Cityverse money, and everything downstream of it comes free. A link can live inside someone else’s institution, a school, a museum, a league, as long as the arrangement is written so that it survives the people who made it. And because the point is the gathering, nothing is charged at the door. Reading is open to anyone in the world, taking part requires living in the city, and ordinary pricing applies once someone is inside.

Two more rules govern how the commons is run. Moderation applies to how people treat each other, and a person’s position is left alone. And each city’s record, the data and the history its residents create, stays in that city’s hands, with the city deciding what, if anything, leaves.

From Engineering the Commons, chapters three to thirteen.

A shared layer for a city is only worth building if people come back to it every day, so the second paper is about what brings them back. It asks the question a reader is entitled to ask of any design that admits it is engineering a habit: what separates a version that serves the person from one that consumes them?

The machinery is the same in both cases. The cue that makes a person pick up the phone, the small reward when they open it, the story that keeps them there: these run the national platforms a city lost its attention to, and no platform holds attention without them. What differs is what the machinery is aimed at, and who keeps what it produces.

Aimed at what a person watches, it extracts. Aimed at what a person does, it serves.

Watching is what the national feed sells: an argument between strangers, a stranger’s kitchen renovation, ninety seconds of anger at a man you will never meet. Doing is what a city has and a national platform cannot supply. It has two halves, and the paper gives them equal weight: what a person does in the city, at the school board meeting or in the stands, and what a person does on Cityverse, in the rooms and tools built around the things they already care about. The feed’s cues open drama, because drama is the only story a platform with no newsroom can produce on schedule. Cityverse produces the news, the tools and the rooms, so its cues open things that actually happened, close to home. The rewards that hold up over years are autonomy, competence and belonging, and a city is one of the few places that can supply all three.

From Engineering Attention.

The third paper puts numbers on the first two. Gravity is an asset in the ordinary sense: it costs money to build, and it turns into cash in known ways. Whether a company can run a civic commons at a profit comes down to whether the second figure clears the first.

The cost has two parts, and they behave differently over time. The software is built once and then deployed to each new city for almost nothing. The local organization, the newsroom and the small team that runs the city, has to be built again in every city, and its cost never spreads to the others. The first year of that organization is the expensive part, before the city earns much back. Cityverse covers it by selling a minority stake in each city’s LLC to people who live there. That keeps expansion off the parent company’s balance sheet, and it means every city opens with local backers who have a reason to see it take root.

The revenue comes from the things people use: the classifieds, the galleries, the fan bars, the advertising a business buys. None of these is worth much empty. A classifieds section nobody reads sells nothing, and a fan bar with no fans is a dead page. What makes each of them valuable is the attention already gathered around it, which is why the paper prices the attention around each utility and treats the utility as its container. The revenue lines switch on in order as the city grows, each becoming worth running once enough people are there, while the cost of the organization holds roughly flat. A city breaks even on a small share of its population, and the network turns profitable as cities are added.

A few rules protect the asset while it is being sold. Advertising is sold openly, and paid placement never buys its way into the organic Flow. Cash buys everything on the platform; the currency layered on top is one-way and closed, so that it never becomes a regulated exchange. Data is traded with partners and never sold. And nothing a resident can buy is the standing a resident has to earn.

From Engineering Value. The paper works its arithmetic on a stylized city of a quarter million people. The rules above hold for any city; the figures stay in the paper.