Should a local newsletter cover one town or a whole county?

When I launched a newsletter where I grew up in the LA suburbs, my realtor told me people in Glendora don't care about people in Claremont. My answer: I don't care, they're 15 minutes apart. Each town there is about 35,000 people. We put them together and got to 120,000.

"I'm not doing a newsletter for 65,000 people in two cities. It's not going to pay off well enough for the workload."

Why does combining towns work better?

• Cheaper subscribers. Your acquisition cost should go down as you add towns, because you're giving Meta more people to show the ad to.
• 10,000 becomes reachable. It's much easier to get to 5,000 or 10,000 subscribers in a bigger area. 10K is the magic mental number for advertisers.
• One workload. One newsletter, one set of relationships, one ad system, instead of two brands that each get half your attention.

My working target has moved up over time. I used to say 100,000 to 200,000 people combined. More recently I've said a minimum of about 150,000. My Leander newsletter covers Leander (about 80,000), Cedar Park (about 80,000) and Liberty Hill (10,000 to 20,000), roughly 180,000 total. My Round Rock one covers Round Rock, Georgetown and Hutto, about 230,000.

I've told a podcast guest in a 45,000-person suburb the same thing: my instinct is to cover more ground, because you get more readership and more potential ad dollars.

What's the downside of a bigger area?

It's real, and I've gone back and forth on it. When I first launched in the north Austin suburbs, I chose one newsletter per town because the area felt too spread out. Parts of a neighboring city are farther from me than downtown Austin. The whole value prop is that everything in the newsletter is about 15 minutes from your house.

The tradeoffs of going big:

• People tune out. Someone on the north side of a county gets tired of things happening on the south side that they never go to. I'd lived here five years before I went to Hutto for the first time.
• You curate instead of cover. Across about 200,000 people and three cities, I'm curating maybe 5% of what happens or less. I can't cover high school sports with 10 to 15 high schools in the area. In a town of 30,000 with one high school, one police department and one city council, you can cover everything with beats, like an old-school local paper.
• Specifics disappear. Cover 400,000 people and you can't write about one school district, because too many readers aren't in it.

With a big enough team, hyper-local feels better to readers. For most of us, the work is the deciding factor. My honest take now: cheaper subscribers, bigger lists and more importance to advertisers matter more than an extra 5% engagement from a tiny area. And you can always launch a single-town edition later.

What if readers in one town only care about their own town? Great. Start one for them. If you launch combined and readers in one town tell you to stop covering the town next door, you already have eyeballs to launch the spin-off with. Until then, your competition usually doesn't exist. The alternative for that reader is getting nothing. People will be upset no matter which way you go, so decide what's best for the business.

Does the name matter?

More than I expected. One of my brands is named after Leander, but Cedar Park right next to it is a huge city getting crazy attention. It's not in the name, and a lot of people just write it off.

My naming rule:

1. If the area has a well-known nickname, use it, as long as it isn't long and clunky.
2. If not, pick the city in the middle that most people associate with the area, ideally the one with the concert venues and fun stuff. Shorter is better. "Leander slash Cedar Park slash Liberty Hill Insider" sounds stupid.
3. Add a subtitle listing the other towns. Mine says it covers Cedar Park, Leander and Liberty Hill, so readers in the other two know it's for them. Adding an area later is just a subtitle change.

Avoid names you don't control. One of my neighborhood brands used the name of a master-planned community, which turned out to be the HOA's trademark, and they asked us to stop. It wasn't a real city either, so events were hard to find. We're moving to a broader regional name covering another 300,000 to 500,000 people, which means more subscribers, more content and more events.

Should I launch the county brand first?

Yes. I did it backwards. I launched town newsletters first, and now I have four or five brands in Williamson County and I'm building the county brand on top of them. If I started over, I'd launch the county brand first, then add a town edition only where it made sense, as a sub-brand.

Early on I planned three newsletters for the three major north Austin areas and quickly realized that was a bad decision. I ended up with two in a similar area. At one point we had 14,000 subscribers, but really 7,000 on each. One county newsletter would have been 14,000 on one list with one ad system.

If I were launching from scratch today, I'd go even bigger for the website: a metro Austin brand covering anybody who can drive to downtown Austin in an hour, from Kyle to Georgetown to Lakeway, with town publications underneath that each show only their own stories, events and businesses.

What does a county-wide brand look like in practice?

I keep each newsletter hyper-local, because that's the value of a newsletter. The county brand, WilCo Guide, is the roll-up: one overarching brand, the town newsletters as sub-publications, and only one Instagram.

The reason is algorithms. Newsletters aren't algorithm-based. Websites (SEO and AI search) and social media are, so for those, the bigger the potential audience, the more valuable it is. A directory, calendar and jobs site for a 50,000-person area is never going to be that valuable no matter how good it is. For a county of about 750,000, people will actually pay to be on it and on the homepage. My listing offer is about $50 a month or $500 a year, fully automated.

On the website, everything is organized by location instead of by publication. A story in Hutto automatically goes under Round Rock Scoop. A story in Cedar Park goes under Leander, because those are the cities tied to those brands. Anything outside those cities defaults to the county brand.

To advertisers, you're one organization. Period. You can speak as any of your sub-brands, but the business owns the publications. I gave an operator in Southern California the same advice: build the regional umbrella brand, then add niche sub-publications under it (business being the big one, seniors another). Don't build a separate business brand for one small town. The business brand is the region.

How small is too small?

I rank geographies in three layers. A mid-size city that can stand on its own is best. Several cities combined, which is what my main newsletters do, is second. Neighborhoods and loosely defined areas are the worst, because they're harder in marketing and harder in content.

I learned that in West Austin, which is like the Beverly Hills of Austin, but it's a small area with fuzzy borders. We struggled there and it sat around 5,000 subscribers.

A tiny village alone is usually too narrow, so combine it with neighbors under one name. The upside of a small area is that there's often no competition, which makes it easier to win big sponsors. Where I live, a lot of people are doing what I'm doing. They do it poorly, but they're doing it.

A website can stretch further than a newsletter. One operator I work with has a newsletter covering four small cities, while his site covers 40 cities and about 4 million people. When he networks with business owners, he's selling an area of 4 million, not 100,000.

The mistake I'd skip

I spread six newsletters across unrelated cities instead of concentrating in one metro. 60,000 subscribers in one place would have been worth far more than 10,000 each across six, because advertisers buy reach in a market. More on that in why you should stack newsletters in one metro.

Launching a new brand is the easy part now. With a newsletter builder, a signup form system and Meta ads, a new market takes about a day to set up. Picking the right map is the part that decides whether it pays.