Your guide to growing and monetizing creator-first businesses. Brought to you by beehiiv.
Long live local media.
Every time we interview a local newsletter operator, like Marissa Lovell, the guest on this week’s podcast, it’s a hit. Our team loves putting these stories together, and the metrics show that you, our subscribers, collectively love reading them.
Why? There’s something for everyone. Let me explain.
— Francis Zierer, Lead Editor
Local media is pro-social media
We’ve published half a dozen “local newsletter” stories over the last two years. I keep returning to them because they always work. They’re consistently among our most popular newsletter issues and podcast episodes. Our episode with Marissa Lovell this Tuesday hit 1,000 YouTube views faster than any previous episode.
One reason these stories are so appealing is that they present a clearly rules-based game.
They're catering to an extremely concentrated audience — the limitations are clear. The maximum possible audience is the metropolitan population.
They use tried-and-true formats (event aggregation is always at the core).
Replicable advertising business model working with local businesses.
So often, from so many readers, I’ve heard some version of this question: I want to write a newsletter (make a YouTube channel, create a short-form series), but I don’t know what it should be about. How do I choose?
Creativity wants limitations. From friction, life.
Creating anything for a massive audience on purpose is delusional. Doesn’t mean it’s not doable, just not for most people in most situations. It requires the creator to have the startup founder’s mix of delusion, drive, and relationship management. Creating a newsletter to serve a city with a population of around 235k, as is the case with Marissa’s From Boise, does not require that delusion.
What a local newsletter like Marissa’s requires of its creator is genuine care for the community. From that comes the drive to consistency necessary to maintain the product, and the internal demand for quality that attracts advertisers.
From, for, funded by community
Media needs funding. But funding for funding’s sake — media in thrall to capital rather than in service to community — never lasts. It is profoundly and actively antisocial; a healthy society rejects it from the body politic.
The local media operators I’ve interviewed for Creator Spotlight have this in common: they’re made for a community, by someone rooted in that community, and funded by businesses in that community. They foster a subculture within that community through their editorial choices, audience, and the creator’s cultural values.
This used to be all local newspapers, of course. Millions of words have been written about this week’s sweeping Washington Post layoffs, and I was particularly moved by a story in The New York Times about Martin Weil, laid off after 60 years covering local news for the paper:
“As Mr. Weil gathered bylines, the paper blanketed Washington and its suburbs with reporters, and reaped advertising dollars from the car dealerships, department stores and cultural venues across Greater Washington. Now the outlet is embracing more of the national news model that Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, has pushed since he bought The Post in 2013.”
Local businesses used to need local media to advertise; the advent of internet advertising is one of many straws upon the camel’s back. But! Local businesses still need specialized places to advertise beyond Google Maps and other now-commoditized channels.
Outputs and outcomes
Another reason the Spotlight audience consistently responds so well to local media operator stories is that they’re a mirror for every type of creator.
Over the last month, I’ve been looking at creators through an output vs. outcome lens:
Output-focused: The priority is the quality of the content. The majority of energy is invested in creating the best possible content units (whether essays, newsletters, videos, podcasts, etc.).
Outcome-focused: Priority is the business outcome. The majority of energy is invested in audience development, product conversion, and other business outcomes. It all comes down to the bottom line — how much money are our actions generating?
The extreme-output version of a local media operator is someone who is deeply invested in their community, who loves specific people in that community, and seeks to serve them through published work.
The extreme-outcome version of a local media operator is someone who understands the financial opportunity, without particular consideration for the community.
Every time we see these major media layoffs, there’s a conversation across social media about the folly of telling newly-laid-off journalists to “just go independent” or “write a newsletter.”
They’re right: there is no such thing as one person operating completely alone, tasked with reporting, writing, publishing, audience development, and business development.
Output people need outcome people. Reporters need ad salespeople.
Community is a valuable outcome, socially and financially
A product like From Boise or Catskill Crew is, in essence, a community service. There's typically only light reporting, if any, in these products, more like the classified and culture sections of a traditional newspaper. What these creators are doing is creating a pillar, a reference point, for a certain culture within a community.
When I talk about output versus outcome, I mean financial outcome. But community-building is as worthy an outcome as you could find.
The outcome of a local newsletter is the reproduction of a community, the entrenchment and growth of a culture.
This is true beyond “local newsletters,” to be clear — it is a defining feature of any personality-driven media product, thus of the creator economy.
A new study by Danny Hayes and Anusha Trivedi, both at George Washington University, found that “people who regularly consume a lot of local news reported being 32% less lonely than people who almost never read or watch local news.”
The duo suggest that other habits or demographic data might be at play here, but the precision of that number aside, I have little doubt about the sentiment.
Local newsletters work because they reproduce local cultures, and the resulting sense of community is valuable to advertisers. Audience and funding happily intersect.
Algorithmic social media fragments reality; we’re not all seeing the same feed. This is antisocial. A local media product achieves the opposite effect; the best local media is pro-social.
The future of pro-social local media
The first local newsletter operator I interviewed for this newsletter was Ryan Sneddon, creator of Annapolis, Maryland’s Naptown Scoop, nearly two years ago.
He was inspired to start his newsletter ($200k revenue in 2023) after discovering 6AM City’s Columbus, South Carolina newsletter.
6AM is a network of local newsletters. When I interviewed Ryan in April 2024, they were operating in at least 25 different cities. Today, according to their homepage, they’re in 410 cities across all 50 American states.
That exponential growth came from their acquisition of the AI newsletter startup Good Daily, as reported in Nieman Lab.
In the above graphic, taken from 6AM’s homepage, you’ll notice there are 31 large, lilac dots and many more small, golden dots. The lilac dots represent developed, staffed products. The golden dots are the more skeletal AI-driven products:
“We’re planting a seed in these cities that will allow us to establish great domain health, a positive reputation, and a list of subscribers that can then transition,” said Heafy. If any of those markets build up enough of an audience or revenue potential, he said, they’ll receive dedicated editorial staff.
Good Daily represents the extreme financial-outcome-oriented option for the new local media operator. Before the acquisition, just one guy, serving hundreds of cities; you can be sure he’d never stepped foot in most of them. The polar opposite of the independent creators we’ve profiled.
Deck’s initial piece on the work of Matthew Henderson, the founder of Good Daily, suggests that readers of the generated newsletters found the product useful, but advertisers and those publications being aggregated by the product did not.
A network like Good Daily is not the future of local media because that future must serve audiences, journalists, and advertisers alike.
After acquiring Good Daily, as Deck reported, the 6AM team set to work to bring the network of newsletters in line with their “editorial, ethical, and advertising standards.” The newsletters are now treated as market-testers, beachheads for potential, properly staffed products.
That is a step in the right direction.
The future of local media is From Boise. It is The Washington Post. It is 6AM City.
It may not be any of these three operations specifically, but it is these models: independent writers, storied institutions, and startups scaling their models nationally.
“The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village,” wrote media theorist Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962).
The world is not a global village; it is many villages, and the social fabric is damaged when the world’s myriad village media products are cannibalized, their resources and eyes turned to the globe, away from the village.
Long live local media, progeny and progenitor of the village.
Eleven Labs is hiring a Short-Form Content Creator (remote)
Have you ever seen a role with only one bullet under the “required” section? This one just says: “You’ve scaled at least one Instagram or TikTok account to 50k+ followers.”
No listed compensation.
Buzzfeed is hiring an Editorial Fellow (remote in select locations)
This is a three-month program (with hopes of extending to a full year) and a crash course on creating content that captures readers’ attention, pushes the cultural conversation, and reaches a massive audience.
Listed compensation: Starting at $20/hr.
Buffer is hiring a Senior Community Manager (remote)
This role will help shape how Buffer shows up for creators and small businesses — from leading conversations on Reddit and Discord to designing community programs and partnerships that scale.
Listed compensation: $116K–$144K
Project C (founded by former Spotlight guest Liz Kelly Nelson) is offering a free workshop for journalists interested in going solo, in light of this week’s layoffs at the Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Hechinger Report, and more.
Do you want to advertise an open role in Creator Spotlight? Reply to this email.
