When the Merkurist was founded in Mainz in 2015, the idea of ‘citizen journalism’ was a much-discussed topic in the media industry. Many of the online media that wanted to involve their audience more closely in reporting at that time no longer exist today. The Merkurist has survived to this day – albeit not without difficulties.

Founder Manuel Conrad was not a journalist, but a management consultant and manager who wanted to develop a new model for local journalism. Instead of an editorial team deciding what is important for the reader, the online medium Merkurist allows readers to have a say in what they want to read. This is how the ‘Snips’ came about: registered readers can suggest topics in a short post on the Merkurist website and put them to the vote in the form of ‘Snips’. Other users can contribute facts, photos or questions and click to give an ‘O-ha’ – an indication of whether a topic is of interest. If enough ‘O-has’ are collected, an article is commissioned. Readers often even provide information or photos on a voluntary basis.

To this end, Conrad and his co-founder Maik Schwind developed their own content management system (CMS) with their newly founded company Mercurious GmbH (now Apicodo GmbH), which enables audience participation. (The name Mercurist is also derived from the English word Mercurious, which also refers to the Roman god Mercury, the patron saint of communication and trade). With a ‘mid-six-figure sum’ from two Angle investors, software was created about which Conrad said in an interview: ‘I can now safely say that we are several steps ahead of all major German publishers. We track reader behaviour very precisely and can use it to automatically determine and predict the quality of articles, the current relevance and the success of journalistic articles.’ 1 The most important elements of the programme include functions that identify weak points in texts based on reader behaviour and a tool that automatically determines the best combination of headlines and images for a text.

The industry magazine Medium named Conrad and Schwind Entrepreneurs of the Year 2017 for this Merkurist concept. German online journalist Konrad Lischka wrote in his blog that the product was ‘slick’ and ‘a good idea. “2 Even Jeff Jarvis, the American prophet of citizen journalism, described the German medium as ”interesting’ in a Facebook post. But there were also critical voices. The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote: ‘It all sounds very functional and service-oriented and like a farewell to journalistic ideals, like the end of the dream of the theatre critic, investigative reporter or New York correspondent. Will media organisations in future be made up primarily of IT specialists and poorly paid writers?’

At times, the company had 45 employees, including 14 journalists and seven developers. The reach in Mainz is said to have been 140,000 unique users per month at the time and the Merkurist had 32,000 Facebook fans. A lively community developed on its own website and on social media, which read, shared and commented on the Merkurist’s reports. The service was not financed by subscriptions, as with the Mainzer Allgemeine Zeitung, but by sponsored articles and banner advertising, much of it from local companies. 

The Mainz-based Merkurist, which was followed by an edition for Frankfurt/Main in July 2016 and an edition for Wiesbaden in August 2016, was actually just the ‘proof of concept’, i.e. proof that the concept of advertising-financed online local journalism with reader participation worked. The founders saw Merkurist first and foremost as a technology company that would earn money with its content management system. ‘We want to develop McDonald’s-style journalism,’ Conrad told the website Journalismuslab.de at the time – in other words, to look for franchisees in every city in Germany to launch their own local website using the company’s software.