About
How The Quarry works
The Quarry started in Guernsey in 2025, an independent, reader-funded newsroom with no advertising, built by Nick Mann and Warren Mauger. Nick has spent more than two decades in local journalism and the last two years building the technology behind The Quarry's products. Warren worked in local news before running a video production company for over twenty years.
"Elmbridge Borough Council is being abolished in April 2027. Few organisations are watching that transition closely. We are."
The model splits into two parts. The Record is a public civic archive: planning applications, FOI disclosures, council papers and the political decisions behind them, collected automatically and made searchable, whether or not a journalist is available to write about them that day. Where a journalist is there, as in Guernsey, they use the same tools to go further: attending meetings, building sources, and writing the stories the archive points toward.
AI does the collecting, summarising and structuring. The judgement, the sourcing and the accountability reporting stay with a person. Read more about how we use AI →
Elmbridge was the first UK test of this model, chosen partly because it has no dedicated local news outlet of its own, one of more than 300 local and regional titles the UK has lost since 2005, according to Press Gazette and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The Elmbridge Record and The Quarry (Guernsey) are both live under this approach today, with further editions in development.
