Why should a local newsletter become a local media brand?

If you're trying to make this a real thing, have a true impact on your community and be around for the next 20 years, you've got to be more than a local newsletter. A side hustle can stay a newsletter. A business can't.

"You do not want to be a local newsletter and maybe a half-ass website, you need to be a real brand."

I believe this enough that I renamed my own show and newsletter. It used to be Local Newsletter Insider. I kept telling people a newsletter alone isn't enough to succeed, so having it as my brand name felt wrong. Now it's Local Media HQ. We build media companies powered by newsletters.

What is the octopus model?

I picture a local media brand as an octopus with eight arms: eight different things one brand does. Being the octopus is why we have so much more value than a single newsletter. It runs against the usual "focus on one channel" advice, and I'm fine with that.

The arms:

1. Newsletter. The foundation, the acquisition channel and the daily touchpoint.
2. Instagram first, then other social. It's the public number of your brand, and a reel is easier to share than a newsletter.
3. A full website. Full articles that can rank in search and pull in traffic.
4. A local podcast. Great for revenue, but also for branding, and branding is such a key point. I recorded about four episodes in my first six months.
5. Events, a business directory and a local job board. You become the infrastructure of where your community goes.

The mistake most people make in media is running silos: a great Instagram here, a cool website there, a newsletter somewhere else. Why not do all of it as one cohesive brand? Disney has movies, parks and stores, and it's all Disney. That's the goal locally: you're everywhere for the local businesses and the readers.

Why isn't a newsletter enough by itself?

Morning Brew and B2B newsletters can make a ton from the newsletter alone because each reader is so valuable. A local reader just isn't worth nearly as much, so you need more ways to earn from the same attention.

Newsletters are still where the value is. You own the audience, you show them exactly what you want, and there's no algorithm. It gets pushed to people. They don't have to search for it. But newsletters have no discoverability. The only way to get found is to pay for it, which is why we run Meta ads. Social video gets discovered for free: make cool videos, people find and share them, and it costs you nothing but time and effort.

Subscriber counts are also invisible. You could have 50,000 subscribers and nobody knows it. Instagram is public. Early on, my Instagram picked up about 1,400 followers with almost no effort, because people who saw our Facebook ad often went and followed the page directly. Operators I know were pushing 20,000 to 30,000 followers just from custom local content.

Why does the brand matter so much?

Because of AI. You have to think about one to two years from now: can AI just do what I'm doing? A newsletter that summarizes local news is easy to copy. A brand with a real person, a public following, events and relationships is not. The world is going more local with AI. People won't trust what's on the internet. They'll trust what they can see around them.

My model is half local media company, half influencer. Old local media owners had a known brand and business sense but zero social media skill. Local Instagram influencers know how to make videos and get an audience but have no brand and terrible business sense. Put them together and you get a known brand with many channels underneath it, where the influencer-style content is one leg of the stool instead of the whole stool.

People haven't stopped caring about local media. They just don't want newspapers. One photo post of a Texas Roadhouse got about 150,000 views in a weekend. It's not really a content change. It's a business model shift.

How do more arms help you sell?

Most competitors do one thing on one channel. Some print companies make a lot of money selling ads in a single magazine mailed to about 3,000 homeowners, and that's all they have to offer a business owner. When an inbound advertiser asks about the newsletter, I can also talk to them about Instagram, a cash drop, SEO or a package across all of it. That's far more to offer, and it becomes a no-brainer.

The arms feed each other. The newsletter gives a quick summary, and readers who want more go to the website for the full write-up, which builds web traffic you can quote to advertisers on top of your subscriber count. With the brand doing the influencer-style content as one leg of the stool, I think you get into six-figure territory on ads alone, before you sell anything of your own.

Small pieces stack, too. When I worked through the math on an ad going to 5,000 homeowners, small amounts from three sources added up to about $200. No single arm is big. Together they make the brand worth paying for. More in can a newsletter make money alone.

A brand also brings inbound. People putting on events come to you because you have the audience and the name. The difference between having an audience and not changes everything: you're the person with the audience, so people talk to you.

How do I add arms without burning out?

Use one test before adding any channel: does it consume content you already make? If yes, add it. If it needs net-new production, don't, until someone other than you is producing it.

• Instagram first. Aim for at least two local videos a week. Go to a restaurant, film 60 seconds of walking around without saying anything, snap a couple photos, and send it to an editor overseas. Now you have a professional video of a cool spot in town.
• Get more unique as you grow. Around 10,000 subscribers, put more effort into video nobody else has: a 10-second clip of an owner talking about starting the restaurant, or a local fair.
• Treat the podcast as relationships. A local podcast alone won't make you much money. It lets you meet the biggest business owners and officials in town, because they come on as guests.
• Grow frequency slowly. A newsletter doesn't have a ton of space. Start at once a week, move to twice, and I think three a week is probably the max.

When an operator asked me about adding more sends, my advice was to split up what he already had so each newsletter is shorter. You're not actually making more content. Operators I've interviewed show both sides. One refused to go from three sends a week to five because he already struggles for content at three. Another added SMS rather than treat the product as only a newsletter.

This is a lot of work, and I'm not even doing as good a job as I'd like because it takes so much time. If you have employees, have them do it. Once it's working, get other people to make the content and become the publisher. That's the gold. You also don't need polish on day one. I use Canva for all my designs.

Expect it to take a while. You probably won't make much money in the beginning, and the gold is at scale.