The growth hackers come to your town

Local news is a tough racket.

When I tried to buy a newspaper this year, my friends in the industry feared for my sanity. Even Perplexity cautioned me that it was a high-risk, low-reward investment.

Then why is there a gold rush of independent local newsletters flooding the market?

I talked to a few entrepreneurs in the space to find out why these newsletters seem to be taking off and are poised to join dailies, TV stations, alt-weeklies, and city magazines as de rigeur outlets in communities of all sizes.

Adam Grim launched The Lancaster Review in my Pennsylvania town about a month ago. Like many in the space, his day job is in marketing and building websites for local businesses. He already has just over 1,000 subscribers and says he’s getting strong open and click rates on local business profiles, guides to Christmas light displays, and local maker gifts. He’s seeing engagement from quizzes on local history and business logos.

Over a cocktail and cigar in downtown Lancaster, Grim told me he saw The Lancaster Review as a low-impact path to launching a complete digital magazine while he winds down involvement in a business he recently sold. “I don’t want this to be pay-to-play like some of our local magazines — I want real stories that show Lancaster’s culture,” he said. “We can take risks than traditional media with local utility features and community-minded incentives that aren’t a paid subscription.”

These sorts of newsletters aren’t new: Anyone who has seen an Axios Local or 6AM City newsletter will recognize the format. What is notable is how many are being launched as side hustles by marketing experts in their own town, entrepreneurs who may look at Meta ad-conversion rates before they think about a content calendar — and who have little intention of covering a school board meeting.

T.J. Larkin started a newsletter in his town of Round Rock, Texas, and then started branching out into other markets based on perceived market need and cost of acquisition of subscribers. (Pro tip: California ads are cheaper than most areas.) He’s launched in eight towns in five states and expanded into a business that provides tools and strategies for other like-minded entrepreneurs.

“The reason I got into it was just when you see it, this only takes a couple hours and I can monetize. It’s a cool side hustle,” Larkin told me on a video call. “But over time, I think there’s a huge play there.”

While there’s no clear count of local newsletters, there are indicators that the current number in the U.S. is more than 2,000. Newsletter platform provider Beehiiv claims local newsletters as a top category for its roughly 75,000 active newsletters. A database of newsletters has more than a thousand listed.

Talking to newsletter owners, the same reasons for the current trend come up each time. It’s a mix of a dearth of local content in their market, the newfound ease of gathering content with AI, the tools now available for managing the business, and the uncertain economy leading people to look for side hustles or low-capital business launches. Another factor is the opportunity to become a recognized voice in the community, a sort of social VIP, something that too few in the traditional media will admit is part of the attraction to the industry.

With Larkin and other businesses like Content Quant providing tools and instruction on how to build AI agents for news and monetize fast, it feels as if this space will attract a lot of growth hackers who learned the newsletter game from Business Insider and other giants in other content verticals.

What does this mean for the local media industry as a whole?

First, these newsletters provide content that traditionally would have come from a local daily, alt-weekly, or magazine. But as digital natives, they get the product piece right before the content. While your local newspaper might list local Christmas decorations, it would generally stop short of providing an embedded map that will let you plan your navigation around town. And service-piece journalism on local attractions and businesses that won’t make the newspaper story budget because of limited resources that are trained on hard news is the bread and butter of these newsletters.

Newsletter publishers don’t have to worry about how the article plays on the website, because even though there is a web presence for the content, it’s designed to be able to be consumed entirely in the email. As a former newspaper chief product officer, I know the limitations of worrying about how an interactive feature plays with your content management system.

The newsletter publisher tends to focus entirely on advertising revenue in lieu of subscriptions, which also creates the freedom to give away more in the newsletter or social media as opposed to driving to the website.

The elephant in the room is that these businesses are pulling eyeballs without doing the gritty work of covering town councils and other staples of local news. Quality and depth vary widely, and there’s a lot that are driven by AI slop. The ones that grow and succeed tend to be locally curated with a real human personality involved.

Success tends to look like annual revenue between $100,000 and $200,000 — not a king’s ransom, but more than enough to support a solo entrepreneur or a side hustle. Making between $0.70 and $1 per subscriber per month isn’t shabby for a part-time media empire, especially when subscriber acquisition via Meta ads runs between $.08 and $.20. This is a classic case of being able to drink the local paper’s milkshake, partly because your threshold for meaningful revenue is lower than that of a big business or even a full-blown staffed indie news site.

Unless the economy improves and layoffs slow down, there are going to be a lot of marketing-savvy entrepreneurs flooding the space, doing what many of us thought our newspapers should be doing digitally for years. If I had a local paper, I’d be building service-data journalism and newsletter products that are more than paid subscription ads.

Because growth hackers are coming for your market. Mostly only the good ones will survive, but they aren’t beholden to a civic duty to cover the news, yet. They’re thinking about the cost of acquiring a customer and how to create useful products while you’re spending a small fortune on hard news. They are a different product, but going after the same sorts of ad and sponsorship revenue and even disruptive ownership schemes.

“I think the people who should be running these models are current business owners,” says Larkin, who came from the insurance business. “Insurance companies, home services, can deliver a valuable product that drives their message every day.”

Is this another in the myriad chapters of missed opportunities from local news incumbents, or a wake-up call before the next digital evolution leaves us behind? We’ll find out over the next year.