JTN Local went from a brief to live in 66 hours.

JTN Local is the local-news site from Just the News. One person directed Symphony from the brief on September 20 to the first live release on September 23, 2026.

October 1, 2026 · Serras

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September 202666 hours

Sep 20The brief

Sep 20Discovery, brand, analysis

Sep 21Scope and design approved

Sep 22Design complete, delivery plan

Sep 22Checks planned, build begins

Sep 23First release live

Build: 13 hours to the first release

Design: 30 hours, the longest stage

A person answered 14 gates along the way.

What it is

JTN Local is a local-news site from Just the News. A reader picks a state and gets that state’s edition: state news, election and candidate facts, what the state’s leaders are posting, and the weather.

Staff run it from a signed-in admin area. There they publish stories, manage places and feeds, and run ad campaigns.

It works in a browser on a desktop, a tablet and a phone. No account is needed to read it.

Where to find it

JTN Local is public. Pick a state, or let it suggest one from your location.

local.justthenews.com

The build at a glance

	JTN Local
What was built	A public news site with 50 state editions, and a signed-in admin area
Brief to first live release	66 hours, September 20 to September 23, 2026
Brief to the start of the build	53 hours
Start of the build to first live release	13 hours
Team	One person directing Symphony, in Codex and Claude Code
Shaped before the build	Setup, discovery, brand, analysis, scope, design, delivery plan and verification
Brand	An existing brand package, applied: 284 rules classified
Approved before the build	32 requirements and 32 acceptance criteria
Designed before the build	44 screens and 83 states, in 10,728 approved design details
Planned	947 tasks in six waves
Decisions made by a person	14, each recorded with who answered
Releases since	22 more by September 30, 2026

How it ran

The same phases as every Serras delivery.

Shape: 53 hours.The brief was written on September 20. Discovery, the brand, analysis and scope were approved by early the next morning. Design took the longest, 30 hours. The delivery plan and the checks followed on September 22.
Build: 13 hours to the first release.The build began on the evening of September 22. The person directing it chose to release early, while the build was still running.
Release: September 23.The first release went live 66 hours after the brief. Its address, local.justthenews.com, was added the same day.
Improve: the week after.Work did not stop at the first release. By September 30, 22 more releases had added election data for all 50 states, candidate profiles, paging and search-engine files.

This was not the first attempt at JTN Local. This build started over from a new brief, and all of its code is new. It reused the brand work from an earlier attempt.

A line from the product

Location is used once to suggest an edition. You can always choose manually. Precise location is not kept.

The JTN Local home page

Not every run was smooth.

Design took 30 hours, and several of its passes were done again.

A sync to the work tracker went wrong. The tracker was switched off, and six finished stages had to be sealed again. That took 3 hours and 27 minutes.

The first deployment failed. The second one worked, 92 seconds later.

The first release went live before the build’s own checks had finished. Independent audits then found faults to fix, and that work is still going on.

Each of these is on the record, with the fix that came from it. Nothing is quietly patched.