Brought to you by beehiiv
Local media isn’t dead — it’s being restructured and reimagined by creators deeply rooted in their communities.
Our guest this week is Landon Huslig, founder of Wichita Life — a local media company grown from an Instagram account he started eight years ago. Today, its newsletter reaches 31,000 subscribers across a metro area of 650,000 people, generating 6-figures in annual revenue.
In this episode:
📈 Steps to building thriving hyperlocal media
🤝 How to turn community relationships into recurring revenue
🎯 A DM strategy that converted 90% of replies into subscribers
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
00:00:00 Introducing Landon
00:01:16 The art of “hand-to-hand” combat
00:10:54 Starting a local media business
00:18:43 The growth to $120K
00:25:06 How big can a local newsletter be?
00:34:27 The value of a like-minded community
00:40:39 The creator to entrepreneur spectrum
00:46:06 The difficult relationship with traditional local media
00:57:22 Building local businesses on top of newsletters
01:01:48 The responsibility to your audience
01:04:03 Side hustle vs full-time business
01:09:24 Starting a local newsletter in 2025
🎧 If you prefer a podcast platform other than YouTube, we’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune in to your podcasts.
Hometown advantage
Landon Huslig launched Wichita Life as an Instagram account eight years ago as a love letter to his city — documenting what made it worth rooting for, partially as a message for hometown friends who'd moved away.
A few years later, inspired by the podcasts he’d tune into while at his engineering job — like The Tim Ferriss Show and How I Built This — he started the Wichita Life podcast as a creative outlet, interviewing interesting people around town. In June 2020, he launched a newsletter as a way to promote the podcast.
Around this time he fell into the rabbit hole of newsletter Twitter, fascinated by success stories like Morning Brew and The Hustle. He connected with Ryan Sneddon, former Spotlight guest and creator of Naptown Scoop, a local newsletter serving Annapolis, Maryland, and they traded notes on the fundamentals of newsletter growth and Facebook advertising.
The newsletter quickly became more than podcast promotion, adding sections like local event roundups. He spent the first months of growing the newsletter doing what he calls “hand-to-hand combat:” personally DMing people across Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, to ask if they'd sign up. About 70% would reply, and 90% of those replies would turn into subscribers (read more on this under Steal this Tactic).
More recently, Landon joined The Newsletter Club, a private Discord-based community for local newsletter operators started last summer by former Spotlight guest and Catskills-based local newsletterist Michael Kauffman. He joined after a recommendation from Jas Singh of Winnipeg Digest, whom he met through Twitter. Exposure to like-minded entrepreneurs accelerated his growth and exposed him to new ideas.
"It’s been super cool — the best $200 I've spent […] There’s a lot of people going through the same thing. Some, like Michael, are crushing it, some are sending daily newsletters, and some are still trying to get off the ground and nervous to get started. It’s good to hear feedback from people that have been through it.”
Landon began monetizing the newsletter early on — to identify sponsors, he wrote down every billboard advertiser he saw in town. Readers have shaped the list of sponsors by their reactions. They don’t always reply to issues at high rates (he now sends four per week), but tend to leave comments through beehiiv’s poll feature (he started the newsletter on Kit before switching platforms this year).
Now, Wichita Life reaches nearly 60,000 people on Instagram and 31,000 via newsletter — engaging a total of 120,000 across all platforms. In 2024, Landon hit his biggest milestone yet: $119,814 in top-line revenue.
“That was the first year I out-earned my day job. That felt big.”
In a recent Axios story, Sara Fischer reported that the U.S. now has just 8.2 “local journalist equivalents” per 100,000 people — a staggering 75% drop from 2002. The result, as she puts it, is “the stunning collapse in local reporting” across everything from school board meetings to hospital oversight. In many places, the only reliable source of local news comes from civic-minded independents, not legacy institutions.
Landon is part of the counter-trend, reaching almost 8% of the city's population with his newsletter, and just over 30% of its population on social platforms. It doesn’t come without its tensions, especially with the city’s long-standing, traditional local media, who once painted his work as propaganda.
"The biggest event venue in town — the record attendance there was around 16,500. That’s how many people read each of my emails. That's how I always try to reframe it."
As part of the Wichita Life operation, Landon also manages a local job board, collaborates with local businesses on sponsorship packages, and sends newsletters four times a week. "You either have money or you have time," he said. "I had no money then."
That once-casual, hometown Instagram page is now a profitable media company and has turned Landon into an increasingly popular community figure, but he’s not interested in scale for scale’s sake. While other operators expand into new cities or chase exits, he's all-in on Wichita.
"I could start one in like every little town that's like 60 minutes away. But there's so much juice to squeeze here in Wichita."
Nat’s notes ✍️
A few things that stuck with me as I listened through this week’s conversation:
Landon’s success represents a massive opportunity for anyone passionate about their city, local news, or local media. With 88% of newspapers declining and local TV audiences shrinking, there's a vacuum in almost every mid-sized market. Landon proved that 31,000 engaged subscribers in a specific geography can generate six figures — a model that could work in hundreds of similar cities across America. You don’t need a journalistic background, just a connection to your community and its happenings, a solid communication strategy, and entrepreneurial acumen.
This mirrors what we're seeing across hyper-niche media — from vertical-specific newsletters to neighborhood-focused content — where depth of engagement trumps breadth of reach. As attention becomes more fragmented and expensive to capture, creators who can dominate small, defined communities will consistently outperform those fighting for a share of global attention.
Connect with Landon on LinkedIn.
Subscribe to and learn more about Wichita Life.
Landon’s guide for converting followers into subscribers
Landon's “hand-to-hand combat” strategy provides a replicable framework for converting audiences from one platform to another.
When Landon says “hand-to-hand combat,” he means, essentially, manual labor. It’s a mindset, a willingness to roll up your sleeves and do work that doesn’t scale. This would include cold calling — or, in this case, warm direct messaging.
Start with your most engaged followers first
Your outreach should always be intentional. Landon started at the top of his Instagram followers list, people who consistently engaged with his content.
Filter your followers by "earliest" or look for people who consistently like and comment on your posts. These engaged followers convert at much higher rates because they already know your value proposition.
Perfect your message before scaling
Landon's DM template was simple:
"Hey [Name], you like [Account Name]. Would you be interested in a local newsletter covering [specific value proposition], kind of what I do on [Platform] but more in-depth?"
The key elements that made this work:
Personal greeting using their actual name
Acknowledgment of their existing engagement
Clear value proposition tied to their demonstrated interests
Connection to familiar content they already consume
Specific benefit ("more in-depth")
Landon simultaneously worked his Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter followers, recognizing that people engage differently across platforms. LinkedIn followers were particularly responsive because of professional networking norms, while Instagram provided the largest volume of potential subscribers.
Treat outreach as an essential business function
Landon justified his outreach like a sales funnel, tracking metrics at each stage:
~50 DMs sent per day across Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter
Over a 15-20 minute period each day
Out of the 50, he received ~35 replies
From those ~35 replies, 31 became new subscribers, at a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) of $1.20 — cheaper than typical paid advertising acquisition
It’s worth breaking down every acquisition method in this way. Whether you're doing organic outreach, content marketing, or community building, calculate the true cost of your time investment to help shape your strategy.
Know when to transition to paid growth
Landon’s “hand-to-hand combat” strategy is most effective in the early stages, when you need proof of concept and are building initial momentum. Landon practiced this approach for about six months before switching to Facebook ads, by which point he had established enough social proof and audience size to justify investing cash into the business.
It’s a strategy that requires consistency, personal attention, and the patience to do work that doesn't feel scalable. But for creators building niche communities, this personal touch often converts better than any automated funnel.
There is an automated alternative to direct messaging using a tool like ManyChat. A guest from earlier this year, Thomas Yeum, told us how he used it to grow a newsletter. Another previous guest, Rachel Karten, recently spoke to a political strategist who used the same tool in New York City’s recent mayoral primary to great success.
Anyone can use Landon’s manual direct messaging strategy; the automated strategy requires an audience engaged enough to comment on your posts.
Where do you land on the spectrum of influence? (Creator Spotlight)
A 7-step guide to creating a signature content series (Instagram)
This former Vice staffer built a PR business catering to the internet’s most notorious figures (Vanity Fair)
