One of the most dispiriting media stories in recent years has been the continuing decline of local news, while one of the most encouraging has been the email newsletter boom. It’s little surprise, then, that one of the solutions touted has been delivering local news via email.
Perhaps the most high profile push into this area has come from Axios, in the US. Founded in 2016 by former leaders of Politico, Axios’ USP was always mobile-first “smart brevity”, something that has fitted very nicely into its approach to a range of subject-specific newsletters. The focus on local spinoffs only started in 2021, but it has already launched free email newsletters targeting more than 20 locations, racking up more than 1m subscribers.
Another US player is 6am City, which has also launched more than 20 hyper-local newsletters, attracting a similar number of subscribers since it was set up in 2016. It reportedly had $5m turnover in 2021, and is aiming to double that this year.
There are loud concerns about how the Axios mostly top-down approach pans out in many markets: “The word I would use to describe Axios’s approach to local news so far is minimalist… and that’s being generous,” says Aron Pilhofer, Professor of journalism at Temple University, in Philadelphia, and co-founder of The Tiny News Collective.
“I don’t want to be too critical here. Local news is hard. But no news organization has gotten more credit for doing less in this space than Axios. Remember, when Axios bought the Charlotte Agenda (in North Carolina) a few years ago, there was a lot of bluster about how they had cracked the code of local news, how it would be expanding this model to other cities, etc. The Agenda is the real deal. It’s an example of an all-digital success story in local news, and many of us hoped the Axios acquisition would lead to more startups like it. So far, that hasn’t happened.
“Instead, Axios has launched a series of local newsletters that are mostly low-value, low-effort aggregation and fluff. Here in Philadelphia, its impact locally is too small to measure. I’ve nothing against the young reporters working their tails off for Axios here, but you can’t plausibly claim hiring two junior journalists in a city of 1.5m people demonstrates any sort of commitment to local news. That’s what Axios Local is.
“That may change in the future. Cox Enterprises, publisher of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, bought Axios for $525m this year, and may have some plans to actually make good on all those promises. We shall see.”
One quite different example – with a bottom-up approach to local news via email – comes in the form of the The Mill in Manchester, in the UK. Launched by Joshi Herrmann, the Manchester Mill recently announced it had achieved break-even two years after launch, making enough from its 1,600 subscribers to employ four reporters for in-depth original reporting, as well as support staff:
“We work really hard to produce the kind of journalism our readers couldn’t get anywhere else,” says Herrmann. “We don’t do standard news write-ups and we never, ever produce stories that are effectively re-written press releases or are just based on a social media post by some celebrity or politician. Those kinds of tactics have massively devalued journalism in a lot of people’s minds. Our value proposition is really in-depth, well-written journalism about the cities we cover – the kind of reporting that gives people context and helps them to understand their world better.”
Herrman has also launched two smaller titles in the cities Liverpool and Sheffield built on similar lines – currently with one reporter each. The Millers Publishing Company, which received $100k in June 2021 as part of Substack’s investment in local news projects, boasts around 3,200 subscribers paying either £7 a month or £70 a year, generating revenue of around £250,000 a year.
So far, says Herrmann, many of those subscribers have bought into his organisation’s mission.
“We know people join for different reasons – some become paying subs because they want to read particular stories we have published and some come on board because they want to support our growth, and lots of people are probably somewhere in the middle,” he says.
“At this early stage, I like that we have a lot of members who truly buy-in and see their sub as an investment in our growth – it means we have an unusually strong community and lots of members who effectively help with our marketing. When we did a one-off print edition last year as a marketing push, 35 members offered to give up their own time to distribute copies in their local area. One guy took 600 copies.”
Of course, while the Millers titles may be at one end of the spectrum, a local news newsletter doesn’t have to focus on only in-depth original reporting. What is important, says US-based audience strategy consultant Cory Brown, is an understanding of the community being served, and that can play well for existing local media organisations: “Local newsrooms know their communities better than outsiders, so they can leverage unique insights and perspectives that outsiders won’t have. This leads local newsrooms to curate, rather than aggregate. Social media has prioritized algorithmic recommendations, which leaves people wanting. Because of that, I’ve found that curation has far more upside, both in audience growth and reader revenue, than recycling content across all distribution channels.”
Whether it’s a spin-off from an existing operation or a standalone product, it’s having a defined point of view and value proposition that is important, says Brown, who founded the 99 Newsletter Project, which curates trends and shares audience advice for local and niche publishers: “The key is really nailing the positioning and value proposition of the newsletter. It’s wiser to focus on one niche, have a well-defined point-of-view and own it completely. Readers who pay for news see a part of themselves in the publication. There’s an element of belonging and self-expression that makes people open their wallets. I think the general interest, voice from nowhere publications that would find a foothold 20 years ago will have a tough, tough time these days.”
Can newsletters fill the void left by the shrinking local newspaper market? Brown is more optimistic than most: In small or mid-size markets, newsletters can fill the void left by local newspapers that have contracted or even shuttered. More importantly, I don’t think it’s necessary for one newspaper to be replaced by one newsletter. I’m lucky that I live in Chicago, where there’s an exciting mix of newsrooms that have launched in the last five years or so.
“Individually, they aren’t a replacement for a 20th century Chicago Tribune. But together, they are building an entirely new local news ecosystem. And they are all growing. Each has a specific point-of-view that it puts front and center, and each has a clear value proposition. We’ve come a long way from newspapers selling themselves as the source for “news, weather, and sports”.
A key question of course, is whether the high-value, email-focused approach of newsletters like Herrmann’s can scale. One of the big tests will be whether those new UK titles in Sheffield and Liverpool can replicate the success of their Manchester parent, invest in more journalists and provide a platform for further growth in other cities.
Is there some ‘promised land’ where the value offered by locally-grown email newsletters can be matched with the kind of scale that the likes of Axios and 6am can offer from their loftier (and better funded) positions? It’s a question central to whether email newsletters will play a significant role in making local news a more viable proposition (again). Early days.
