— Colophon
How the paper gets made.
The Field Notes argue that a publisher’s site should be fast, durable, and legible to people and machines alike. This page is that argument, applied to the site you’re reading.
The type
Headlines and body are set in Newsreader, a face drawn for news text. The sans is Libre Franklin, a revival of the Franklin Gothic family that carried a century of American front pages. The small functional type, datelines, folios, and labels, is IBM Plex Mono. All three are served from this domain, so no type foundry watches you read.
The press
The site is built on Next.js and pressed as static pages. Every page you read was rendered ahead of time, which is why it loads like paper. A scheduled press run rebuilds the site each morning: it publishes any Field Note whose date has arrived, advances the issue number in the dateline, and stamps the press date in the footer. Essays live as plain text files under version control, and an editing desk commits changes the way a newsroom files copy.
The build is AI-assisted and operator-judged, the same standard the essays hold every tool to: it earns its place by moving the number, and the judgment stays human.
Legible to the machines
Note five of the series argues that being the cited source is the new being the paper of record. The practice here, all of it inspectable: structured article data on every essay, full schema for the organization behind it, a complete map of the site for answer engines at /llms.txt, a full-text feed at /field-notes/rss.xml that carries whole essays rather than teasers, durable URLs, honest dates, and a press card rendered for every note when a link is shared. Strict security headers ship on every response.
Paper, on purpose
There is no dark mode. This is a newspaper, and a newspaper is paper: warm newsprint, oxblood rules, ink. A reader who prints an essay gets a clean broadsheet clipping with the source cited at the bottom, because the audience this site serves still prints things worth keeping.
The shop
Written, built, and run by Brian Kennett from Houlton, Wisconsin. Corrections, arguments, and better ideas to brian@builtrevenue.com. The sharpest disagreements are where the real work starts.
Pressed July 6, 2026.