Do you have to be the face of your local newsletter?

I did a call with a guy who said: I don't like to leave my house, I don't want to do anything on social media, I don't like meeting people, but I want to do a local newsletter. I told him that doesn't make any sense.

"Why do you want to be the face of the local community media if you don't want to put yourself out there? They're kind of at odds with each other."

Why does a local brand need a face?

Because that's how trust gets earned. People follow people, not brands. They don't want to follow Nike, they want to follow LeBron. Build the audience and the trust, and over time you find things you can do with it beyond selling ads. The creator angle, the human angle, is how you get there: be the real person in town that people know.

AI makes this more important every month. AI newsletters already exist and nobody cares about them. Faceless newsletters are going to multiply, and without boots on the ground and a real community feel, I don't think they'll work long-term. If there's no human face, people will assume you just used Claude to make it. Readers will gravitate toward curators they trust and can actually see and validate, and people can meet you at events and know you're not AI.

Local operators are creators in the same sense national B2B creators are. We just do it locally, which is rarely discussed. My model merges two things: traditional local media, which had a known brand but zero ability to be engaging, and local influencers, who are highly engaging but have no brand beyond their own name.

Should the brand be named after you?

No. Give it a real brand name with a person closely attached. The Free Press is the brand, everybody knows who runs it, and lots of other writers work under it. Bill Simmons is another example: his company is its own brand and could theoretically survive him leaving.

Naming it after yourself traps you, because everything is about you. A brand that isn't your name lets you add people, sell products more easily and sell the business someday. It also looks like a real brand, not just a guy. My main local brand is named for my town, not for me.

Then add creators as you grow: one, then two. The brand becomes more than the founder while staying a creator brand, and you can slowly do less and less. Even in a town of 70,000 where it might be you forever, you might as well prepare. If everything rides on one person and they quit, the whole business goes away.

Does it have to be the founder?

No. I don't want to be the face of my local consumer brands. The only brand I want to front is the business-facing one, where I talk to operators and media companies. Local readers want someone from their town. Business buyers are buying my judgment and track record.

I'll admit that's in tension with my own belief that a human face matters locally. The answer is to put a local person in front. A plumber I run Meta ads for hired a young woman who appears in the Instagram videos, writes the newsletter and even does some sales. The plumber just runs plumbing company ads in it, and the brand never lands on him.

Busy business owners almost never do the work themselves. In my done-for-you newsletters, professionals won't even write four sentences and send a photo. The fix is a dedicated person under the owner who becomes the face, the salesperson, the everything.

If you do own it, I like the transparency angle. If you're making 30-second videos about a new restaurant downtown, your face is already on the brand, so hiding your ownership in the newsletter makes no sense. People who figure it out later feel worse because you weren't honest. Either go all in, or hire someone and hide it completely.

Does the face have to be there on day one?

No. In September 2025, 10 of my 14 newsletters had no face on them, and two of my partners weren't putting their faces on theirs yet. A face is ideal, though, and I expected all of them to need one soon. Have a plan for it.

How much does the face actually have to do?

• Write the opener. I have partners write the first three paragraphs: a personal "here's what's going on in town this week, we went to the new bowling alley" note with a photo of them there. My team does the rest. No AI newsletter can ever do that.
• Make video. Minimum three Instagram videos a week, probably more. Green-screen videos at your desk work for a while, but eventually someone has to be out at new places and filming events.
• Show up. Join one or several chambers and go to all their events. That's where owners hang out, and this model runs on relationships.
• Be around enough. You don't have to live in the exact town. One partner of mine lives in a neighboring part of the metro but is there all the time, often enough to take photos and videos himself.

Keep the personal stuff light and never a sales pitch. "My family and I went to the park this weekend" with a photo works. "Hire me for your roof" doesn't. When readers see the writing, you want them picturing the person they see four times a week on Instagram.

When you do post, it's less scary than you think. A local Instagram page isn't YouTube. You're already niched down, and it still might reach 200,000 people.

Why not just hire a writer?

Because a writer won't go to the chamber meeting or host the event. Plenty of brands pay writers and make money, but I don't think it works that well. Pay a writer 50 grand a year and they're collecting a check until they find somewhere else to go. I once heard the head of a multi-city newsletter network say on a podcast that his writers work nine to five, so he can't ask them to go to community events after hours. That's my whole pitch: someone with a true stake in the brand.

That's why my vision is closer to a franchise. The local face owns the brand from a public perspective, and we run the back end. From my years as an insurance agent, I know how people react: say you're an insurance guy and they look for the exit. Say you own the local media brand and they want to be your friend, because you have the audience they want.

Is it worth it if I'm not a natural?

I wasn't. I didn't post until the last couple of years, and the payoff in opportunities has been large. Put yourself out there as a smart, interesting person doing interesting things, and things come to you.

The good news is the brand doesn't have to be about you. Nobody cares about me, and for a normal person without a special angle, an audience built on yourself is very hard. Make it about the community instead and you get the same value, if not more. That's literally why I got into this model. Katie Myers of Localish told me on my podcast that about 50 million of her 80 million views in 2025 came from content about local small businesses and town happenings, not herself.

Community leadership beats list size, too. I know an operator in the Midwest with very few subscribers who's crushing me, because he's doing a much better job in person, making videos and hosting events. In a big city you'll never be the person for Austin. You can become one of the people for Austin, and that can be incredibly valuable.