Buy me a coffee

Last month, the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism — the nonprofit parent of the Baltimore Banner — announced it would buy the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Block Communications, preventing the 240-year-old paper’s scheduled closure on May 3. The deal gives the Venetoulis Institute a second market, a newsroom of 100 journalists, and 60,000 Post-Gazette subscribers to add to the Banner’s existing 80,000. What it gives the Post-Gazette is less clear. The Baltimore Banner, the model this deal is built on, has not broken even.

Block Communications, which had operated the Post-Gazette since 1927, acknowledged losses exceeding $350 million over 20 years. The Post-Gazette was built on print advertising, a revenue structure that stopped working. The nonprofit, subscription-driven model replacing it isn’t new either.

The Baltimore Banner, the Texas Tribune, the Salt Lake Tribune, and ProPublica are all running the same playbook. And the Post-Gazette acquisition is more proof of concept than breakthrough.

What remains to be seen is whether models like these and others the news industry is currently testing can scale and, more importantly, whether they can be replicated.

The industry got here through compounding failures. Craigslist cost local newspapers an estimated $5 billion in classified advertising revenue between 2000 and 2007. The 2008 recession accelerated cuts newsrooms never recovered from.

Then came a decade of hedge fund consolidation — Alden Global Capital, Tribune Publishing, MediaNews Group — in which the remaining assets were harvested rather than rebuilt. The pivot to digital produced banner ads that didn’t pay and a bet on Facebook video that evaporated when the algorithm changed in 2018, dropping referral traffic to publishers by nearly 40%.

Now Google’s AI Overviews are doing the same to search — organic Google search traffic to news publishers dropped 33% globally in the year ending November 2025, according to Reuters Institute data. Each round left fewer resources and less time to find something that works, which is why the testing ground is crowded now.

Scaling news is hard for reasons that don’t change with the business model. Journalism is labor-intensive. A story requires a reporter with relationships, institutional knowledge, and enough time to get it right. Local news compounds the problem because what works in Baltimore doesn’t transfer to Pittsburgh without rebuilding from scratch — staff, sources, community trust, subscriber base. There’s no franchise model for accountability reporting; the product can’t be templated.

Which brings me to this edition of this newsletter. The news organizations in this edition are running experiments with real financial consequences if they fail. Whether any of them can be copied is the question the industry doesn’t yet have an answer to.

Too many models, not enough proof

The news industry is running a simultaneous, largely uncoordinated experiment across every possible revenue structure: subscriptions, philanthropy, events, branded content, sports betting partnerships, AI licensing deals, creator-publisher hybrids, reader revenue gamification, paywalled podcasts. The majority of news organizations are now relying on three or four different revenue streams at once. The list keeps growing but the financials haven’t caught up yet.

Some models have documented outcomes worth taking seriously. (More on that below.) Others are working under specific organizational conditions that don’t transfer cleanly — and the journalism press tends to move from case study to case study without asking whether the conditions are replicable.

What’s new about these models is mostly the arrangement, not the ingredients. The revenue streams — subscriptions, advertising, philanthropy, grants — have been around for a number of years. What’s changed is which ones a newsroom bets on, and in what order.

In some instances, the problem amounts to a proliferation problem. A recent analysis of nonprofit newsrooms found that one of the biggest structural barriers to growth is the absence of staff focused on business development. Newsrooms need those operators to scale but can’t fund them. You can replicate the editorial model but you can’t replicate the sustainability without the people whose job it is to build it.

And I think that holds true even beyond nonprofit newsrooms. The gap between a working model and a replicable one runs through that exact shortage. Testing more models without solving the operator problem doesn’t compound progress, rather it multiplies the experiment count without producing any replicable results.

The wreckage of scale-first, platform-dependent media

The clearest model failure on record is the VC-backed digital media cluster — BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox, Huffington Post, etc. — that spent a decade raising millions on the promise that massive social reach would translate into advertising revenue. And, well, it didn’t.

Disney invested more than $400 million in Vice and later wrote the whole thing off. NBCUniversal put comparable sums into BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed went public via SPAC in December 2021 at $10 per share and was soon trading at around $1 — a precipitous 90% loss of value. Vice filed for bankruptcy. BuzzFeed is still standing, but just barely; it recently sold a controlling stake to media entrepreneur Byron Allen this month for $120 million.

BuzzFeed’s entire bet was built on Facebook referral traffic, not on readers who chose to come back on their own terms. When Facebook deprioritized news, the model collapsed.

And the platform dependency problem didn’t stop there.

Google search traffic to publishers fell by a third globally between November 2024 and November 2025. Facebook referrals to news properties are down 67% over the past two years. Twitter/X referrals are down 50%.

Publishers who built audience infrastructure around any of these platforms now face the same structural exposure that sank BuzzFeed. Whether they’ll admit it and change course is an entirely different question.

The nonprofit model works, but here’s what’s really holding it together

The nonprofit model is the most tested alternative, and the data backs it up. According to the 2025 INN Index, the nearly 400 digital-first nonprofit newsrooms in INN’s membership generated a combined $650–$700 million in revenue in 2024, a 14% increase from 2023. The median member outlet took in $532,000 — up from $477,000 the year before.

The Texas Tribune is still the most-cited case. Founded in 2009 with a single $1 million investment, it grew into a newsroom running on a roughly $13 million annual budget — built across more than 13,000 individual members, over 1,100 corporate sponsors, foundation grants, and an annual festival that drew 9,000 attendees and 1.1 million online session views in 2022 alone. The revenue diversification is real, and it holds up at scale.

What’s harder to replicate is how they got there. The Tribune was built around Austin’s political beat, founded by a well-connected venture capitalist, and run for 13 years by a CEO who had spent 18 years before that at Texas Monthly. Those conditions aren’t a model — they’re a specific set of circumstances that realistically could not replicate in every city in America.

For most nonprofit newsrooms, the revenue diversification the Tribune built over 13 years is still a goal, not a reality. The field runs on foundation grants, and INN’s own numbers show how dependent it remains on that single source.

Foundation funding still accounts for 49% of member revenue — down from 57% in 2017, but still the single largest source. Individual donations add another 32%, which then leaves 18% from earned revenue — events, sponsorships, advertising. The target in nonprofit news is roughly equal thirds across all three. Across INN’s membership, the field isn’t close.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette rescue is not a model. Within days of taking over, the Venetoulis Institute cut roughly half the newsroom including, according to the union, 80% of the journalists who had gone on strike. Stewart Bainum and his wife committed an additional $30 million over five years to fund the turnaround — on top of the $50 million already committed to the Banner, which still hasn’t broken even.

That’s one person’s philanthropic capacity deployed across two markets. The Venetoulis Institute’s move keeps a 240-year-old paper alive in a single city. It doesn’t tell us what happens in the next 100 cities without a Bainum equivalent willing to write the check.

The creator-led newsrooms come small by design

The most visible alternative to the institutional model is the journalist-owned outlet — small newsrooms built by reporters who left larger organizations, funded almost entirely by readers who chose to pay.

Defector Media reached $4.6 million in annual revenue in 2024 with roughly 40,000 paying subscribers and has been profitable since its first year. The site launched in September 2020, nearly a year after its staff resigned from Deadspin in protest when its private equity owner told them to stick to sports.

That resignation was public and dramatic, and it generated the kind of goodwill that converted directly into founding subscribers. Defector launched with 36,000 paying readers before publishing a single post, ended its first year with $3.2 million in revenue, and has operated without outside investors since. Worker ownership kept the editorial decisions with the journalists and the cost structure low. Subscriptions — not advertising — were the business from the start.

404 Media followed the same logic at a smaller scale. Four former Motherboard journalists launched the site in August 2023, three months after Vice filed for bankruptcy, each putting in $1,000 to cover startup costs.

The four had spent years building credibility covering tech and internet culture at Motherboard where the audience already existed, and the Vice bankruptcy gave readers a reason to follow them. The site was profitable within six months.

Overhead at 404 Media has been minimal. It started with a Stripe account and the Ghost web-hosting platform. When the founders discovered their stories were being scraped and republished by AI content mills, they put their content behind a registration wall — not just as a defensive move, but as a subscriber acquisition mechanism. Readers had to identify themselves to keep reading, and some of them converted.

Both newsrooms succeeded for the same underlying reason, which is that neither started from zero. They had audiences, reputations, and a defined subject matter before they launched. The model worked financially because the pre-conditions were already in place.

The subscriber numbers, though, don’t make an obvious case for replication.

Defector’s subscriber count has floated between 40,000 and 42,500 for two years, peaking each summer before retreating after the site’s September renewal cycle. By 2024, the pattern hadn’t changed, and new subscriber acquisition was underperforming projections most months.

404 Media hasn’t disclosed subscriber numbers publicly. Its founders have declined to share data in every interview on record.

These models work at the scale they’re built for. What they don’t answer is what happens when you try to run the same structure in a market that needs 50 journalists instead of four.

The B2B-premium model has the right audience, but the wrong math

A different bet is the B2B subscription model — high-priced, professionally targeted, designed to be expensed rather than paid out of pocket.

Axios Pro launched in January 2022 at $599 per newsletter per year and generated $2 million in its first year with more than 3,000 subscribers. Co-founder Roy Schwartz had said he wanted Pro to eventually represent 50% of Axios’s total revenue. In 2022, against total revenue of just under $100 million, it only contributed about 2%. Cox Enterprises acquired Axios later that year for $525 million.

The clearest existing proof of concept is Politico Pro, which launched in 2010 as a side project and grew into a 200-person operation accounting for roughly half of Politico’s total annual revenue — with a 90% renewal rate and 30% year-over-year growth over three years. A five-person subscription ran $8,000; the company’s VP later said they had underpriced themselves at launch. Axel Springer acquired Politico in 2021 for a reported $1 billion.

The Information runs on similar logic at a smaller scale — about 60 employees, no advertising, individual subscriptions at $399 per year, with a Pro tier at $999 that includes proprietary datasets and org charts. Founder Jessica Lessin built it for professionals willing to pay for reporting they couldn’t get anywhere else.

What those three have in common is that the content is priced as a professional necessity. The ceiling on that model is the ceiling on the audience willing to expense it.

Business professionals with expensed subscriptions churn less than individual readers — that’s the real appeal of the B2B model. But the audience is narrow by design, the price point has to compete against Bloomberg, and any corporate budget cuts can hit these products first.

A business professional’s expensed subscription is one of the easier line items to cut when a company tightens its budget — a risk flagged at Axios Pro’s launch by industry analysts. Another player in this field, Morning Brew, found out the hard way in 2022 because despite running a B2B subscription business, it lost enough of its ad revenue base to cut its staff twice that year.

B2B subscriptions improve retention. They don’t insulate a business from everything else.

What’s actually working and what to look out for

Events are the clearest documented revenue bright spot across multiple models. Semafor — the digital news outlet that launched in 2022 — reports that live journalism constitutes about 50% of its revenue. Its World Economy Summit, held in 2025, drew nearly 3,000 attendees including more than half of Fortune’s 500 Global CEOs.

Forbes, after transitioning to a hybrid event model, saw a 60% increase in event revenue with sponsorships accounting for 35% of its advertising revenue. And the Texas Tribune’s annual festival has been an anchor since the outlet’s earliest years. What these examples provide is proof that events create direct audience relationships, real-time brand value, and sponsor revenue that doesn’t depend on platform algorithms. And for that reason, other newsrooms have followed suit and experimented with live journalism events.

Looking beyond the live events model, the creator-publisher hybrid is the newest structural bet of the current cycle. The Washington Post’s Ripple project — which offers writers, including independent Substackers, a revenue-sharing arrangement to publish on the Post’s platform — has emerged as one of the more consequential institutional experiments underway. The arrangement is an admission that individual journalism brands have audience value the Post can’t build internally.

But the risk is there, and the Post learned this lesson when Dave Jorgenson — the Post’s “TikTok journalist” — spent eight years building his audience inside the Post’s brand, then left to launch Local News International independently. The Post’s YouTube channel views dropped sharply after he left. The institution had been renting an audience it hadn’t built, and the creator left with it.

Newsrooms investing in creator-style talent face the same problem — help journalists build their personal brand and risk losing them, or don’t, and lose relevance.

Great, but who fills the gaps elsewhere in America?

Every model in this edition starts with the same first step — finding people willing and able to pay for the news product. That’s not an argument against subscriptions. It’s a reminder that a working business model and a solved public interest problem are not the same thing.

Take into account that 213 U.S. counties now have zero local news sources, and another 1,524 have only one remaining outlet. Taken together, roughly 50 million Americans have limited or no access to local news. On top of that, less than 10% of digital-only news startups are located in rural counties, and new outlets are appearing in areas that are more affluent and better-educated — nearly the opposite demographic profile of the communities most affected by closures.

Defector works for 40,000 sports fans. 404 Media works for four journalists and a technology-literate readership. Axios Pro works for professionals with expense accounts. The Texas Tribune works for people who follow Texas politics closely enough to attend a festival. These are real businesses serving real audiences, yet none of them are substitutes for the paper that covered your county commission before the hedge fund arrived.

The models being tested right now are mostly legible to the people already paying attention — to journalism funders, media reporters, and readers of this newsletter. They are less visible to the communities that lost a paper in 2019 and haven’t had one since. The people most harmed by the collapse of local news are the least likely to be reached by any of the experiments currently generating the most enthusiasm.

In my view, that’s the question the industry keeps putting off. Not which model works, but which model works for whom — and at what point does a market get written off as unserved by design. The proof of concept era has produced some durable newsrooms. It hasn’t produced an answer to that question, and most of the models don’t try.

Buy me a coffee

When The Washington Post killed its flagship daily podcast and more than a third of its newsroom this February, it confirmed what publishers across the industry already know; that print still pays the reporters, but the audience that might fund journalism into the 2030s doesn’t necessarily want a printed paper.

The idea for this edition came from Mark Lyndersay, editor of the technology news publication TechNewsTT and a reader of this newsletter. He framed the question by asking how news publishers can make the leap to the new audience while holding onto the last remaining revenue streams of the old one.

So far, no major U.S. publisher has answered that question with full clarity yet. The cost of trying to be both products at once, of running the old model and the new one on the same budget, creates a financial strain that proves fatal for some news organizations.

This is what happens when a publisher can’t decide what it is, and which audience to serve. And the Post isn’t the only one.

The Pain Point

Running a print edition requires presses, distribution trucks, and a production workflow built for a daily deadline cycle. Building for under-35 audiences requires video teams, podcast producers, social-first editors, and newsletter operations that look nothing like a traditional news desk.

TV and radio newsrooms face their own version of the same bind, between linear broadcast and on-demand digital, but the revenue math hits legacy newspapers hardest and earliest.

A newsroom trying to fund both ends up under-resourcing each, and the compounding cost shows up in the newsroom budget, the subscriber base, and the product itself.

Print still pays the reporters. Roughly 58% of U.S. newspaper revenue still comes from print, and at many regional outlets the share runs higher. But the print subscriber base is shrinking. Combined daily print circulation at the 25 largest U.S. newspapers fell 12.5% in the year ending September 2025, with The Washington Post down 21.2% alone. That’s the revenue base funding the entire operation contracting by double digits, year over year.

Digital is where the next generation of readers actually lives. Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report found that 54% of U.S. 18–24-year-olds and 50% of 25–34-year-olds now name social or video networks as their main source for news, with the 18–24 figure up 13 percentage points year over year. Global social video news consumption rose from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025.

Meanwhile, Medill’s State of Local News 2025 found that web traffic to the top 100 U.S. newspapers has dropped more than 45% since 2019, as Google’s AI Overviews and platform-side changes hollow out the referral traffic publishers spent two decades building strategies around.

Most outlets can afford to do one of those things well. Committing to print means a disciplined, premium product for an aging subscriber base, but one that pays more per head. Committing to digital means underwriting the formats that actually reach under-35 audiences: vertical video, hosted podcasts, creator-style newsletters, and the staffing to produce them at a pace platforms reward. Either path is expensive, and each demands its own organizational calculus.

Trying to fund a newsroom with both audiences at once, in my opinion, is creating tension for an already fragile infrastructure.

And it is visible in the financials. The Washington Post reported $277 million in losses over three years. And then there’s Gannett’s simultaneous decline in both print and digital-only subscription revenue in Q3 2025. The Los Angeles Times subscriber base is bleeding out as billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong rearranges its editorial identity without a clear audience in mind; it is down roughly 25,000 subscribers since September 2024, on top of a $50 million loss for the year.

It’s also visible in the product — in daily podcasts canceled the same week a foreign desk gets gutted and in opinion sections retooled for audiences the newsroom isn’t actually reaching. The compounding cost is that each year of indecision raises the price of the decision still to come.

Pain Point Score: High

The pain is mostly felt at regional and metro dailies. These outlets carry the full cost of a print operation, presses, trucks, delivery routes, production staff, without the national subscriber base or diversified product suite to absorb the loss.

When the Los Angeles Times loses 25,000 subscribers, it’s a crisis. When Hudson County’s Jersey Journal ended its 157-year run in February 2025, its parent company shut down the printing plant, and the paper concluded a digital-only model couldn’t sustain its journalism. And that’s what the endgame looks like. Regional and metro outlets feel the cost first, and they feel it hardest.

Why It Matters

Print still accounts for roughly 58% of U.S. newspaper revenue, according to Grand View Research’s 2024 market analysis. But the Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report found that 44% of 18–24-year-olds globally — and a majority of the same age group in the United States — say social or video platforms are their main news source.

The shift isn’t limited to younger readers: across all U.S. adults, social and video platforms now reach more people for news (54%) than TV (50%) or news websites (48%).

The revenue and the audience aren’t in the same place. Spending to reach under-35s doesn’t generate the revenue print still produces, and spending on print doesn’t reach the audience the next decade depends on.

Medill’s State of Local News 2025 report puts the scale of the retreat in context: 136 newspaper closures in the past year, web traffic to the top 100 U.S. newspapers down more than 45% since 2021, and 50 million Americans now living in counties with limited or no access to local news.

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Who Should Care

» Newsroom leaders at regional and metro dailies who pay attention to their financial statements. If you’re losing print subscribers faster than digital subs can replace them, and you can’t name the one audience your product is built for, you are caught in this rift.

» Independent journalists and creators who reach audiences on YouTube, Substack, and podcast platforms. This is precisely the audience metro dailies can’t figure out how to serve. Your pitch to readers is also a pitch to newsroom partners.

» App developers and product leaders who see the tooling gap around audience migration, bundle management, and nonprofit conversion as an opportunity. More on this below.

The Structural Root Cause

Newsrooms face many headwinds in today’s digital landscape, and audience dilemmas are multifaceted that require their own treatment; because in reality there are several audience challenges that the industry as a whole hasn’t quite settled on.

Christian A. Hendricks, the publisher and founder of the Holly Springs Update in North Carolina, recently touched on one of these audience challenges for E&P Magazine.

In his piece, Hendricks argues that newsrooms trying to balance reach and depth face a structural failure mode. The faster, easier work expands over time while resource-intensive reporting loses ground — not because of discipline failures, but because systems that measure success broadly naturally reward what’s quickest to produce.

“If the objective is reach, then volume, speed and breadth are logical priorities. If the objective is to inform a community in a meaningful way, the model necessarily looks different. It emphasizes specificity over scale, depth over frequency and consistency over cadence,” Hendricks said.

Reach and depth aside, the audience problem sits on top of an old engine that powered the whole operation.

Print advertising paid for most of the 20th-century newsroom, and that revenue has collapsed. Total advertising revenue at publicly traded U.S. newspaper companies fell from roughly $23 billion in 2013 to about $9.8 billion in 2022, less than a fifth of its 2006 peak. The digital advertising that was supposed to replace it went to Google and Meta. Subscription revenue at most outlets hasn’t closed the gap.

That’s the survival pressure, and it lands on a demographic split. Only 4% of U.S. print newspaper readers are under 35; 46% are 55 or older. The audiences replacing them are watching news on social and video, without having to pay for it.

Newsrooms are now reorganizing their finances and staffing around an audience that hasn’t yet replaced the revenue the older audience generated. The cuts and rebrands at major U.S. outlets all follow that pattern.

The Washington Post lost an estimated $277 million over three years and laid off roughly 300 of 800 newsroom journalists in February 2026. It killed sports, books, and foreign bureaus along with “Post Reports,” its under-35 daily podcast. The Post’s average daily print circulation fell 21.2% to 87,576 in the year ending September 2025 — the steepest decline among the top 25 U.S. newspapers.

The Los Angeles Times is bundling the paper with creator, gaming, and studios operations under a new “L.A. Times Next Network” entity it plans to take public. The strategy depends on attracting new audiences. Meanwhile, owner Patrick Soon-Shiong has alienated the paper’s existing California readership by blocking its 2024 Kamala Harris endorsement, which prompted roughly 18,000 immediate subscription cancellations, and by reshaping the editorial board with conservative voices.

Gannett renamed itself USA TODAY Co. on November 18, 2025 even as its digital-only subscription revenue, the line supposed to replace print, fell 13% year-over-year in Q3.

All three news organizations are restructuring toward an audience that hasn’t paid for accountability journalism at the scale the old audience did, while cutting the operations that audience funds.

When Hendricks tries to answer the question whether newsrooms should serve what audiences want vs what they need, he reframes it by asking whether a single newsroom model can serve two fundamentally different objectives at once; and his answer is no.

The cost Hendricks names most directly is strategic, not financial. He says you have to be willing to define your purpose clearly enough to let it cut things out. Newsrooms that won’t make that call don’t avoid the cost — they just pay it slowly, in eroding relevance.

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Who’s Solving It (and How)

No one has solved the financial aspect of the audience dilemma just yet. What exists instead are bets — each one a different theory of which trade-off is worth making.

Three of them are worth examining. One metro daily went all-digital and shed print entirely. One national outlet built a bundle large enough to make the math work. One nonprofit moved a struggling paper out of private ownership and reset the equation. None of these is a template. Each carries its own costs.

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ended its print run on December 31, 2025, with roughly 115,000 paid subscribers at the time — 75,000 digital-only, 40,000 still on print — and a stated goal of 500,000 digital subscribers. The outlet is offering an ePaper replica for readers who want the newspaper layout, and launched an updated mobile app.

Publisher Andrew Morse said the shift would let the organization put all its resources into digital journalism. In practice, the AJC laid off 50 staffers — about half from the newsroom — within five weeks of going digital.

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The New York Times added 450,000 digital-only subscribers in Q4 2025, with digital advertising revenue up roughly 25% year-over-year. The Times bundles news with Games, Cooking, and other products — meaning those products help carry the cost of the newsroom rather than sit alongside it as separate bets. That model depends on a subscriber base in the tens of millions. Metro dailies don’t have it, which is why this isn’t transferable.

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This month, the Venetoulis Institute — the nonprofit parent of The Baltimore Banner — signed an agreement to acquire the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Block Communications had lost more than $350 million running the Post-Gazette over two decades before announcing its January 2026 closure.

The approach: move the paper out of private ownership, reduce costs, and open the door to philanthropy. Venetoulis chairman and founder Stewart Bainum has signaled the Post-Gazette’s newsroom of 100 will likely shrink. For metro dailies that can’t reach Times scale or go all-digital, this is the model getting the most serious attention right now.

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The Build Opportunity

These transitions are expensive, manual, and easy to get wrong. Most publishers are navigating them without dedicated tooling — making gut calls in boardrooms, rebuilding legal and operational infrastructure from scratch, or watching archives disappear when a paper closes. Four gaps worth building into:

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Opportunity 1: A Commitment-Decision Tool for Newsroom Leaders

Publishers deciding whether to drop print are mostly working from instinct. A tool that combines subscriber cohort data, print distribution costs, digital ARPU trends, and regional demographic projections — and outputs a clear, outlet-specific answer about when print stops paying for itself — would replace the boardroom gut call with something defensible. The inputs exist. Nobody has packaged them for this decision.

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Opportunity 2: Nonprofit-Conversion Infrastructure

The Venetoulis model works because Stewart Bainum had $50 million and a willingness to spend it. Most family-owned dailies don’t have that runway or those connections. A playbook-plus-tooling product covering legal templates, donor pipeline management, subscriber migration workflows, and board governance modules would let a regional paper execute a Banner-style conversion without rebuilding every system from zero.

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Opportunity 3: Bundle Management for Regional Outlets

The Times runs five products on one login because it has an engineering team to build and maintain that infrastructure. A hosted, lightweight version of that for regional outlets — covering newsletter bundles, podcast paywalls, event registration, and churn modeling — would let a mid-sized daily test product diversification without hiring a platform team to support it.

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Opportunity 4: Closure and Preservation Tooling

Of the 136 newspapers that closed last year, most were small family-owned weeklies with decades of archives that had no place to go. Archive preservation tools, subscriber-transfer workflows, and handoff templates would let a shuttering paper pass its readers and records to a nonprofit or regional outlet instead of disappearing. Right now there is no standard process for that handoff. And I believe there should be one.

Closing Provocation

“That is how information begins to move through a community. It builds understanding first and, over time, trust. Not the kind of trust that comes from a single story or a spike in attention, but the kind that develops when information is repeated, discussed and confirmed in real-world experience. When what people read aligns with what they see and hear, and when it proves useful repeatedly, confidence in the source grows.” — Christian A. Hendricks, publisher and founder of the Holly Springs Update in North Carolina

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Buy me a coffee

American radio is dying faster, reaching populations newspapers never did, and getting a fraction of the coverage. And I think we have about five weeks before the most underreported structural media story of 2026 lands in everyone’s lap all at once.

The collapse is concentrated in places that had no fallback to begin with, and that geography is mostly absent from the national coverage. A metro desk cut in Cleveland or Denver still leaves residents with TV affiliates and a crowded field of digital startups competing for their attention.

If we are to have a serious conversation about the state of local news and the structural flaws that create news deserts, we must truly consider the cost of losing an essential medium to millions of Americans.

A small rural AM signal going dark in South Dakota or rural Alaska often leaves nothing behind it. Broadband does not reliably stream out there, cell coverage drops in the canyons, and the last weekly paper folded a decade ago. The AM signal was what was left. Federal funding was the thin subsidy keeping it lit, and that subsidy is now gone.

Strip out the public money and the network feed in the same year, and what disappears in rural America is the apparatus that carries wildfire evacuation orders and tornado warnings to households who cannot get them any other way. Journalism was bundled into that infrastructure, and most rural listeners could not separate the two if you asked them.

(Click here to skip to the TL;DR summary of this newsletter.)

🩺 The Pain Point

Local radio is suffering a blow from multiple directions inside the same 12 months, and it affects rural listeners the most.

On May 22, CBS News Radio will go off the air after 99 years in service, pulling national news off roughly 700 affiliated stations. Radio World’s list of high-profile affiliates going dark includes WINS in New York, KNX in Los Angeles, WBBM in Chicago, KCBS in San Francisco and WTOP in Washington.

But the real exposure sits with the hundreds of smaller stations that licensed CBS hourly newscasts because they could not afford to staff a Washington bureau.

A small AM station in rural Iowa or the Nebraska sandhills does not have a White House correspondent. It paid CBS for a feed and got one, and beginning May 22 that option will be gone. The remaining alternatives (ABC News Radio, Fox News Radio and SRN News) are thinner on original reporting and more ideologically slotted than what CBS was delivering.

In January, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting dissolved itself after Congress rescinded $1.1 billion that would have funded public media through 2027. CPB averaged 8–10% of public radio budgets across the system, but that national average hides where the cut actually lands.

Rural and tribal stations often ran on 30–99% CPB funding. A Native Public Media survey found that a majority of tribal stations expect to close within six months to a year without new federal funding. Roughly a third of them relied on CPB for 80–100% of their operating budget.

iHeartMedia is $50 million into a second round of cuts on top of $50 million announced last quarter, with the reductions concentrated in its Multiplatform Group, which houses broadcast radio. The cuts started at regional leadership in early April and rolled into programming and on-air staff through mid-April.

Audacy — a similar operator to iHeartMedia — began its own round of cuts in late March, with further programming and leadership cuts confirmed in early April. Both companies are replacing local morning shows and news staff with nationally syndicated content. In small and medium markets where on-air staffs were already thin, losing one host can strip out a station’s entire local voice.

Newspapers lost roughly 40% of their footprint across two decades. But radio news is compressing a comparable restructuring into one calendar year, and the stations going first are the ones rural America cannot replace.

🔴 Pain Point Score: High

The pain point is high for the radio industry as a whole. It is most severe for rural, tribal, and small-market audiences where radio is often the only medium that reaches them.

📊 Why It Matters

Here’s some context on the scale of what’s being cut:

• Radio still reaches 93% of U.S. adults every month, per Nielsen’s Audio Today 2026 report, ahead of smartphones, connected TVs and tablets. This round of cuts is hitting the news and local programming that radio produces, not the medium itself.

• About 700 stations currently carry CBS News Radio, including all-news flagships like WINS, KNX, WBBM, KCBS and WTOP. On May 23, those stations will need a replacement national news feed. ABC News Audio is the largest remaining network by affiliate count, followed by Fox News Radio and Salem Radio Network’s SRN News. Fox carries a right-leaning editorial slant and Salem is conservative Christian, so none of the three is a like-for-like replacement for CBS’s original news-gathering service.

• CPB funded roughly 1,500 public media stations. A Native Public Media survey found that a majority of tribal stations expect to close within six months to a year, and roughly a third of them had been relying on CPB for 80–100% of their operating budget. NPR reaches 46 million people every week across its platforms, with 21.2 million of those listening on broadcast radio.

• Public broadcast signals reach further into news deserts than most people realize. The 2025 Medill State of Local News report found public broadcasting primary signals cover 46% of news desert counties, jumping to 82% once repeater signals are included. In nine counties — six in Alaska, one in Idaho, one in New Mexico and one in South Dakota — public broadcasting is the only source of local news coverage.

• On the commercial side, iHeartMedia operates roughly 860 stations and Audacy owns more than 220. Between those two companies, the commercial cuts are reshaping more than 1,000 stations.

• About 50 million Americans live in areas with limited or no access to reliable local news, per the same Medill report. In the places where broadband and cell coverage fall short, radio was reaching a meaningful share of those households before the current cuts began.

🤔 Who Should Care

» Public media leaders working through the CPB aftermath.

» Commercial broadcasters whose local ad base depends on listeners they are driving toward streaming.

» App developers or tool-builders who could assemble shared infrastructure small stations cannot afford on their own.

» Rural county emergency managers, tribal governments, and anyone treating AM radio as the last-mile alert system should also be paying attention.

🏗️ The Structural Root Cause

Network news infrastructure used to do the expensive work for small stations. CBS, ABC, Fox and a handful of others ran White House, Capitol Hill and international bureaus, then piped the reporting out to affiliates for a fee. Small stations never had to staff a Washington correspondent.

The choices shrinking now are both operational and editorial. Mike Haile, a radio personality and former general manager of WDWS in Champaign, Illinois, wrote in the News-Gazette that his station now faces only two realistic replacements for CBS News: ABC Radio or Fox News Radio, and the station is going with Fox. WDWS had been a CBS affiliate for most of its history since 1937, he wrote.

Multiply that editorial calculation across hundreds of newly unaffiliated stations and the center of gravity of American radio news moves. The Writers Guild of America East and West called the shutdown the product of “inept leadership” by CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and Paramount CEO David Ellison, warning the Ellison family should not be permitted to acquire CNN on top of CBS. Former CBS anchor Dan Rather told the Associated Press it was “another piece of America that is gone.”

Federal public funding was a significant source of support. Congress rescinded the CPB appropriations in July last year, and this January the CPB board voted to dissolve the organization after 58 years rather than continue in a defunded state.

The CPB Impact Report catalogs what the rescission has cost so far:

• WPSU at Penn State winding down and ceasing operations entirely by June 30;

• KQED in San Francisco reducing its workforce by 67 positions;

• GBH in Boston through its second of at least four 2025 rounds of layoffs, having cut 58 staff by July and another 15 in November per the Boston Globe, with American Experience paused;

• Kentucky Educational Television eliminating 36 positions, roughly 22% of its workforce;

• Wisconsin Public Radio laying off 15 employees and canceling four programs.

The bigger damage is further down the same list.

WQED in Pittsburgh is cutting 35% of its staff. Lakeshore Public Media in Northwest Indiana is reducing two-thirds of its employees to part-time. Basin PBS in West Texas is absorbing a 48% revenue loss. Alaska Public Media has shelved Alaska Insight, its weekly public affairs show. KRZA in Alamosa, Colorado is running programming cuts and layoffs with a real possibility the station shuts down. Those are the stations that cannot absorb this.

Commercial consolidation was another major leg of support, and the hardest to see coming. iHeart and Audacy bought up stations aggressively in the late 2010s and used scale to subsidize local morning shows, midday hosts, news directors and sales teams across their portfolios. That subsidy is ending.

iHeart’s April round hit programming directly, including the six-person Intern John morning show that aired across Washington D.C. and Baltimore. One commenter on Barrett Media’s coverage captured the reaction bluntly: “Ironic that iHeartRadio has lost the ‘heart’ in Radio with all their local and regional layoffs. Instead we’re getting nationally-syndicated Ryan Seacrest who knows (or cares) nothing about local culture.”

Each of these support systems were propping up the other.

A commercial station that loses CBS News has less reason to employ a local news director. A public station that loses CPB cannot afford to maintain the emergency alert equipment that makes its signal valuable to the county. A consolidated station that swaps out its local morning show cannot sell local advertising at the premium it used to command.

Take all those away inside one year and the result is what this edition is documenting: rural America losing the medium that was still reaching it, in real time.

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💡 Who’s Solving It (+ How)

The stations most exposed to the cuts are also running the most interesting experiments. None of them scale on their own, but together they sketch what a post-CPB rural radio layer might look like.

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KSUT Public Radio in Ignacio, Colorado has already proven the community-fundraising model can work in a tribal and rural market. The station serves the Southern Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, Jicarilla Apache and a large portion of the Navajo Nation, and lost roughly 20% of its $1.5 million annual budget when Congress zeroed out CPB.

Rather than cut, KSUT went to its listeners directly. Development director Chris Aaland told NPR in December that the station had raised more than $500,000 since the rescission vote. Executive Director Tami Graham is using the window that buys to rebuild the station’s longer-term revenue mix. KSUT also joined NPR, Aspen Public Radio and Colorado Public Radio in suing the Trump administration in May last year over an earlier executive order targeting CPB funding.

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High Plains Public Radio is the clearest example of a rural station treating the CPB cut as an excuse to rebuild bigger. HPPR serves the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, eastern Colorado, western Kansas and southwest Nebraska — roughly 90 counties across 332 communities.

The day after Congress enacted the rescission in June, HPPR learned it had been awarded a $750,000 three-year Press Forward grant to build the High Plains Civic Media Network, a regional coverage model coordinated by a lean central editorial team and powered by a contributors network of part-time and volunteer community members.

Founder and executive director Quentin Hope is pairing the grant with a local “Up to Us” campaign to raise $550,000 and cover the two-year CPB shortfall. What makes this worth watching is the sequencing. Most rural stations are responding to the cut with defensive moves — cutting programming, cutting staff, waiting for donations. Hope is reframing the same moment as a chance to build something that covers more of the region.

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New York Public Radio’s Station-to-Station Programming Project takes the subsidy question in the other direction — from big stations to small ones.

Effective October 1, 2025, NYPR began offering its full WNYC Distribution portfolio for a year — Radiolab, On the Media, The New Yorker Radio Hour, Terrestrials, plus independently produced shows like Science Friday, Freakonomics Radio, and Today, Explained — at no cost to any public radio station receiving 10% or more of its budget from CPB.

That threshold covers roughly 64% of the public radio system. NYPR CEO LaFontaine Oliver told Current the agreements carry a one-year term, so this is just a runway, not a permanent subsidy. It addresses program budgets but not the underlying local reporting gap.

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On the policy side, some congressional Republicans are now pushing to restore CPB funding for rural and tribal stations specifically. South Dakota GOP Sen. Mike Rounds brokered a $9.4 million handshake deal with the Trump administration last summer in exchange for his vote on the rescission, routing emergency funding through the Bureau of Indian Affairs to keep tribal and rural radio stations on the air.

Current reported in November that initial award notices have gone out to KILI in Porcupine, South Dakota, KOYA in St. Francis, which serves the Rosebud Reservation, and KDKO in Lake Andes, which serves the Yankton Sioux Reservation. The money covers 38 stations for FY 2026 only.

Rounds is now working with colleagues on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Interior and the Committee on Indian Affairs to secure FY 2027 funding. In addition, Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan and, on the House side, retiring Reps. Mark Amodei of Nevada and Don Bacon, are pushing to restore funding to the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program through the House Appropriations Committee.

Without that extension, most tribal stations could close within 6 to 12 months.

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A parallel fight is underway over the hardware itself. The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act has hit 218 House cosponsors (a simple majority) and 61 filibuster-proof Senate cosponsors, and it is backed by more than 125 organizations including AARP, the National Emergency Management Association, the American Farm Bureau Federation, Native Public Media and SAG-AFTRA. NAB President Curtis LeGeyt said this month the bill is close to floor time.

The AM preservation fight is not a journalism fix. It keeps receivers in vehicles so that whatever local signal survives still has a way to reach a driver in a wildfire evacuation or a tornado warning. Without it, the rural signals still on the air won’t have listeners to reach regardless of what stations rebuild behind them.

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🛠️ The Build Opportunity

The three supports being pulled out of American radio are also three pieces of infrastructure somebody now needs to rebuild, priced for stations that can’t carry it alone. Here are four distinct build opportunities worth flagging:

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Opportunity 1: A Cooperatively Owned National News Feed

Model it on the old AP Radio, not on a commercial network. Anchor it with public broadcasters, journalism schools, and philanthropic funders. Building the governance and dues structure is the actual work.

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Opportunity 2: Cloud-Native Operations for Small Stations

Broadcasting automation was priced for a world where CPB or a consolidator absorbed the overhead. Broadcast Radio’s Myriad Cloud won NAB Show Product of the Year 2024 by running a full professional station on Microsoft Azure with no on-premise engineering. Open-source extensions and shared back-office backends belong next on that stack.

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Opportunity 3: Standalone Emergency Alert Infrastructure

When a station goes dark, the local EAS node often goes with it, because the alert runs through the station’s transmitter and engineering staff. FEMA and the National Emergency Management Association have a direct interest in funding redundancy: cooperative alert nodes, satellite backup, or federally leased tower space. That work shouldn’t wait on the next wildfire.

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Opportunity 4: Digital Revenue Tools Priced for Small Teams

BIA projects 2026 radio digital revenue at $2.38 billion, up 5%. Small stations can’t capture that upside with tools built for national sales departments. A coop-owned digital sales stack with attribution, CRM, programmatic audio, and first-party data, priced for stations under $5 million in revenue, hasn’t been built yet.

💬 Closing Provocation

“I grew up on the Navajo Nation without running water or electricity, and some parts of the district still do not have broadband or cell service. So, we tribal members heavily rely on the radio to get information.” — Jonathan Nez, former president of the Navajo Nation

⚡️ tl;dr

• American radio is collapsing on three fronts inside the same twelve months — CBS News Radio shuts down May 22 after 99 years, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting dissolved itself in January, and iHeart and Audacy are stripping out local hosts and news staff across more than 1,000 stations.

• Newspapers took two decades to lose 40% of their footprint; radio is compressing a comparable restructuring into one calendar year, and it’s hitting exactly the rural, tribal, and low-broadband communities newspapers never reached well in the first place.

• Every layer of the collapse is also a build opportunity — a cooperatively owned national news feed, cloud-native station software, standalone emergency alert infrastructure, and digital sales tools priced for teams of three — and the stations most hurt by the current collapse are the ones who would opt into any of them on day one.

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Newsrooms keep producing journalism their audiences largely skip, then wonder why people tune out.

Forty percent of people worldwide now sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017, according to the Reuters Digital News Report 2025. They cite negative mood, information overload, too much conflict coverage, and a feeling that nothing they read helps them act.

Among 18-24s, the disconnect runs deeper. A Reuters Institute report published in 2026 found that many young adults consider traditional news irrelevant, hard to understand, or biased against their demographic.

And let’s not forget the most obvious form of content that nobody wants to read: commodified news. (Read this great piece on commodified news by Steven Wilson-Beales on Substack.)

And yet, none of this is new information.

In 2016, indie media advisor Dmitry Shishkin and his team at the BBC World Service found that 70% of one outlet’s editorial output was breaking news updates, and that content generated just 7% of its website visits. That finding went public in 2017.

Nearly a decade of audience research has since confirmed the pattern: people want more from news than updates, and the frameworks to deliver on that exist. In my view, few U.S. newsrooms have put any of it into practice though the reasons could vary from outlet to outlet.

But the bottom line is that the longer newsrooms continue to ignore where audiences place their purchasing interests, the longer they’ll continue to miss their revenue goals.

🩺 The Pain Point

The industry’s default mode has historically been top-down: editors decide what matters, reporters write it, and the audience is expected to show up. Newsrooms produce content based on editorial instinct, not audience need, and the mismatch is measurable.

A CJR/Tow Center study on how journalists imagine their readers found that while most newsroom decisions are made with a reader in mind, consciously soliciting and incorporating audience preferences is usually resisted. Journalists recognize obligations to reach an audience but are wary of allowing readers to shape what gets covered.

When the news industry has talked about “empathy” in recent years, the conversation has centered on three things: 1) how reporters relate to sources during interviews, 2) how newsroom leaders support staff through trauma and mental health challenges, and 3) how coverage represents marginalized communities.

The American Press Institute’s 2018 study on the empathetic newsroom focused on reporting techniques for covering neglected communities.

That work has value. But what remains largely unaddressed is the person consuming the product and whether the newsroom is measuring what that person actually needs. In my view, that’s the true empathy gap the industry has been slowest to confront.

When FT Strategies tested the user needs framework with three U.K. publishers, all three over-indexed toward breaking news updates. One found that 40% of its articles were “update me” pieces driving only 13% of page views, while “divert me” content made up 19% of articles but pulled 43% of traffic.

These were small, U.K.-based experiments — take it or leave it, American colleagues — but the pattern is consistent with what audience surveys keep surfacing globally. And that is newsrooms spending resources on content their audiences skip past, while underinvesting in explainers, service guides, perspective pieces, and stories that help people act.

🔴 Pain Point Score: HIGH

This affects every part of the operation: editorial strategy, resource allocation, revenue, and retention. With AI now commoditizing “update me” content at scale, newsrooms that haven’t rebalanced their output face an existential squeeze.

If the future of news is truly to be built and made by humans, then it should be done with humans in mind, not algorithms or bots.

📊 Why It Matters

Here’s what makes this pain point so frustrating: the audience isn’t being quiet about what it wants.

The Reuters Digital News Report 2025 found that 12% of under-35s in the U.K. avoid news because they don’t understand it. That’s four times the rate among over-35s. The same report found that people want journalists investigating powerful people and providing depth, not chasing algorithms for clicks.

A 2026 Reuters Institute report on young audiences later went even further by pointing out real alienation among 18-24s who find traditional news irrelevant, hard to follow, or slanted against their demographic.

A recent Knight Lab/FT Strategies NGN2 study picked up the same signal from the production side. Yes, young news consumers are engaged. Yes, they care about the news. But they’re drowning in the volume and complexity of what’s out there.

Lisa MacLeod, director of news at FT Strategies, said the most effective producers are rethinking how news is made and delivered, building distribution into editorial decisions from the start rather than bolting it on after publication.

None of this is abstract.

Only 18% of people across 20 wealthier countries pay for online news, and that number has barely moved. An INMA analysis of subscription stagnation identified “not addressing core reader needs” and a “perceived lack of value” as two of the seven reasons growth has slowed.

In a 2020 INMA poll cited in that analysis, 38% of news managers said they made product decisions based on gut feeling over research or data. Meanwhile, online reach for the median news brand fell 12% year-over-year in 2025, according to INMA benchmarking of 289 publishers.

As I’ve written before, traffic from search and social media keeps declining. Audiences who feel alienated from the product don’t subscribe, don’t return, and don’t engage with the civic reporting that newsrooms say justifies their existence.

Take the The Washington Post, for example, which lost more than 300,000 digital subscribers in a matter of days after its October 2024 endorsement decision. That was a trust failure, not a content-mix failure. But it showed how fast an audience leaves when it decides a news organization doesn’t represent its interests.

The slower version of the same exit is happening across the industry, and the content-audience mismatch is accelerating it.

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🤔 Who Should Care

» Newsroom leaders making editorial strategy decisions.

» Engagement and audience editors who sit downstream of those decisions and are often asked to optimize distribution for content that was never designed around user needs.

» Developers building editorial analytics and CMS tools.

» Independent publishers trying to compete with AI-generated news updates.

🏗️ The Structural Root Cause

The editorial judgment model that drives most newsrooms was built for a supply-constrained environment.

When people had one newspaper and three TV stations, editors could reasonably decide what mattered. That gatekeeping role carried real authority. But it also embedded assumptions that newsrooms never revisited as the information environment changed.

Engagement teams, where they exist, sit downstream of editorial decisions. They optimize distribution for content that was never designed around audience needs. Dmitry Shishkin has argued that this arrangement has persisted for far too long, with audience engagement treated as a side initiative rather than a central purpose of journalism.

The Reuters 2026 trends report found that publishers are now deliberately deprioritizing commodity content and general news, where AI poses the greatest competitive threat, and shifting investment toward original investigations and contextual analysis.

That pivot makes sense as a competitive strategy against AI-generated updates. But if “distinctive journalism” is still defined by what editors believe is distinctive rather than what audiences find useful, the result is the same mismatch at a higher production cost.

Lilly Workneh of PushBlack wrote in Nieman Lab’s 2026 predictions that legacy outlets cut diversity teams, eliminated community beats, and gutted cultural coverage, treating that work as expendable when it was the connective tissue between journalism and community.

This one line from Workneh’s Nieman Lab prediction stuck with me the most because it neatly encapsulates the essence of having a diversity of thought inside a newsroom: “people will always choose the storytellers who choose them back.”

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💡 Who’s Solving It (+ How)

The outlets making progress on this problem share one thing in common: they stopped guessing what their audiences want and started asking. Some are using structured frameworks to audit their editorial output against actual engagement data. Others are going straight to their communities through SMS, WhatsApp, and direct questions.

The tools and methods vary, but the shift is the same. They’re going from producing news for an imagined audience to building it with a real one.

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So what does it look like when a newsroom actually tries to fix this? The user needs framework, developed by Shishkin and Smartocto, is the most concrete tool available out there. It organizes news consumption around four drivers — know, understand, feel, do — with eight editorial categories underneath them.

The point isn’t to memorize the taxonomy. The point is that it gives editors a way to audit their output against what audiences actually engage with, and the results are consistent: too much breaking news, not enough of everything else.

Some newsrooms have already put it to work. Omroep West, a Dutch regional outlet, went through Smartocto’s User Needs Labs 2.0 and reported more returning visitors, better engagement, and higher attention time after shifting its content mix.

BauernZeitung, a Swiss agricultural publication, found that 90% of its output was fact-driven or context-driven. When it added more emotion-driven stories, the top performer in that category pulled 15% higher page views, and emotion-driven content brought in 45% new visitors. Smartocto and FT Strategies have since launched User Needs Labs 3.0, a year-long program now enrolling 10 to 15 news brands.

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In the U.S., the examples are smaller but instructive. KPCC/LAist asked audiences during COVID what they wanted to know. They got more than 4,000 questions and found sources and stories they wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Nuestro Estado in South Carolina moved to WhatsApp and SMS after realizing its assumptions about community needs were coming from the newsroom, not the community. El Tímpano in Oakland and Outlier Media in Detroit deliver critical information by text message, reaching people where they actually are.

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FT Strategies and WAN-IFRA recently launched a global Future Newsrooms Study, surveying editors-in-chief and newsroom strategists on how their organizations are adapting. The findings are expected this summer.

I’ll be watching for how many of those surveyed have actually built audience feedback into their editorial process versus how many are still running on instinct.

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🔧 The Build Opportunity

The research, the frameworks, and the case studies all exist. What’s missing is the connective tissue between them and the newsrooms that need them most.

The tools that make user needs actionable are either expensive, Europe-based, or designed for publishers with dedicated data teams. Small U.S. newsrooms and independent publishers — the ones getting squeezed hardest by the content-audience mismatch — are locked out of the very infrastructure that could help them fix it. That’s where the build opportunities are.

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Opportunity 1: User-Needs Dashboard

Smartocto is the primary tool doing this work right now, but it’s Europe-based, geared toward mid-to-large publishers, and priced accordingly. No lightweight, U.S.-focused equivalent exists.

The opportunity is a simple editorial analytics layer that sits on top of a newsroom’s existing CMS and does three things: tags output against user needs categories (automated with AI), measures performance against those tags, and generates weekly rebalancing recommendations. The reporting doesn’t need to be complex.

A dashboard that tells an editor “you published 65% ‘update me’ content this week and it drove 11% of your engaged traffic, while your three ‘help me’ pieces drove 28%” would give a 10-person newsroom the same strategic visibility the BBC and FT have had for years. Nothing like this exists in the U.S. market at an accessible price point.

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Opportunity 2: Editorial Audit Tool for Newsletters

Most solo operators and small outlets running newsletters make content mix decisions by gut — the same instinct-over-data approach that INMA found among 38% of news managers industrywide.

A tool built on user needs categories that lets an independent publisher tag their newsletter output, benchmark category performance over time, and see where their mix is off would fill a gap no one is currently addressing. The bones of this could be built on top of existing platforms like Substack or beehiiv, using AI-assisted tagging and a lightweight reporting layer.

The market for it is large and growing: Substack alone hosts over 50,000 publications earning money, and most of them are flying blind on editorial strategy.

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💬 Closing Provocation

“I believe that journalism as an industry has lost its way because the economics are so dire, and they have been for so long. We urgently need to acknowledge this and reset course. We need to move back our focus to the quality of the products and the experiences that we create for the people we aim to serve.” — Mattia Peretti, co-founder of the News Alchemists and a former leader of JournalismAI, at an ICFJ forum.

⚡️ tl;dr

• Newsrooms overwhelmingly produce breaking news updates that their audiences skip, while underinvesting in the explainers, service journalism, and perspective pieces people actually want.

• The data proving this has existed since 2016, and frameworks like the user needs model offer a tested fix.

• But most U.S. newsrooms haven’t adopted any of it — and the cost shows up in stagnant subscriptions, declining reach, and growing audience alienation, especially among younger readers.

• Two build opportunities could help close the gap: a lightweight editorial analytics dashboard for small newsrooms, and a content-mix audit tool for independent newsletter publishers.

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Table of Contents

1. The Government Accountability Gap: Digital Democracy/CalMatters

2. The Public Meeting Coverage Gap: Civic Sunlight

3. The Investigative Tooling Gap: Buried Signals

4. The Institutional Memory Gap: Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program

🧩 Other Notable Builders: Henk van Ess, Michael VanZetta, Jack Brewster, Nick Hagar

Coverage gaps in American journalism are well-documented by now. Statehouse press corps have been cut in half. Local court reporting is sporadic at best. Two local newspapers still close every week, according to the State of Local News Project.

Thousands of communities have no original reporting on how federal policy affects them, no one tracking their school board, and no one sitting in on their county commission meetings.

Previous editions of this newsletter have traced these gaps in detail: the journalist pipeline collapse, the local school sports coverage gap, the web traffic metric that lied to newsrooms, the paywall problem that locks civic journalism behind subscription walls.

What I’ve been paying attention to lately is a small group of journalists and technologists who have started building AI-powered tools designed to fill specific coverage gaps. These aren’t corporate demos or automation plays designed to cut staff. They’re working tools, shipping now, built by people who have spent time inside newsrooms and can point to the exact place where coverage broke down.

In my view, the coverage gaps these tools address have two components that tend to get blurred together in most discussions about AI and journalism. One is structural: money, headcount, distribution. The other is informational: useful data sits in government databases, public records, legislative transcripts, and historical archives, but nobody has the time or tools to process it into journalism. AI can help with the informational half.

The structural half still requires funding, policy, and organizational will. Those are different problems with different solutions, and I think conflating them has slowed progress on both.

This edition profiles four projects working on the informational half, organized by the specific gap each one addresses. Below those are additional projects worth following.

1. The Government Accountability Gap

Full-time newspaper statehouse reporters fell from 374 to 245 between 2014 and 2022, a 34% decline, per Pew Research, and the number has kept dropping. Committee hearings produce hours of testimony. Campaign donations flow to legislators whose voting records go unexamined. Tracing lobbying influence means days of cross-referencing public records that most reporters don’t have.

David Lesher, a CalMatters co-founder and senior editor with nearly 30 years covering California state government, and Foaad Khosmood, a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo computer science professor, built Digital Democracy with funding from the Knight Foundation, Arnold Ventures, and the Lodestar Foundation.

The system tracks every word spoken in California public hearings and floor sessions (transcribed within 48 hours), every bill with full text and amendments, every vote, and every campaign donation, expenditure, gift, and travel disclosure. It scans all of that and generates tip sheets for reporters, flagging anomalies worth investigating.

CalMatters reporter Ryan Sabalow has used it to uncover stories, including a pattern where California Democrats almost always abstain from votes rather than voting against legislation, and which lobbying groups get their way most often.

This isn’t AI tool that does work unmonitored by humans. CalMatters CEO Neil Chase says he has drawn a clear line: the AI produces tip-sheet-level leads, not publishable conclusions. Reporters make the editorial calls. In the future, CalMatters plans to adapt the tool for other states and for city and county government.

In my view, if that expansion works, it would bring this kind of monitoring to thousands of local jurisdictions that currently have zero accountability coverage.

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2. The Public Meeting Coverage Gap

Thousands of local government meetings happen every week with zero press coverage. The meetings are public, often recorded and posted online, but very few are watching.

Tom Cochran, co-founder of Civic Sunlight, told the Concord Monitor that when he asked a Belfast, Maine town council whether reporters still covered their meetings, the answer was: 25 years ago they had four, 15 years ago two or three, then it went to one, then zero.

Cochran, the former CTO of The Atlantic, and David Mortlock co-founded Civic Sunlight after realizing their own town’s meetings were impossible to follow without hours of video watching. Their tool uses AI to process meeting livestreams and transcripts into summaries delivered as free newsletters with time-stamped links to source video. It currently covers about 20 towns across Maine and neighboring states.

Their first newsroom customer, the Midcoast Villager, covers 43 towns with limited staff. Deputy manager Alex Seitz-Wald told Nieman Lab the tool is probably not as good as a junior reporter, but “I would much rather have anything than nothing.” Reporters verify everything before publication.

The tool has real accuracy problems. CJR reported that a Civic Sunlight newsletter stated Concord, New Hampshire’s city council had approved funding for two projects; as the Concord Monitor later noted, neither claim was true. Cochran told CJR accuracy runs about 90 to 95 percent, and the mistakes pushed them toward human review, which led to the Villager partnership.

Other projects are working in this space, including Chalkbeat’s in-house meeting monitor for school boards in New York City, and citymeetings.nyc, a free public proceedings newsletter.

In my opinion, the honest reporting of this tool’s flaws is part of what makes it worth watching. The gap is real, the tool works but makes mistakes, and the editorial safeguard of requiring journalists to verify AI output before publication is the right model.

3. The Investigative Tooling Gap

Investigative reporting depends more and more on digital tools for open-source intelligence (OSINT), but most independent reporters and small newsrooms can’t access the technical infrastructure that major outlets use. Investigative teams have gotten smaller alongside everything else in the industry.

The reporters still doing accountability work often operate alone or in pairs, without tech support, and without the budget for commercial OSINT platforms.

Tom Vaillant is a Swiss-based visual journalist, a fellow of the CUNY Newmark AI Journalism Lab’s Builders cohort, and founder of Buried Signals, a data-driven investigative publication and tool-building studio.

He’s built several tools aimed at working journalists. OSINT Navigator, built with Indicator, lets reporters describe an investigation task in plain language (“How do I track a crypto transaction?” or “What tools can I use to archive a webpage?”) and, according to Vaillant, returns curated results from nearly 7,500 tools across nine open-source OSINT toolkits.

As described on the Buried Signals site, his investigation pipeline uses AI sub-agents to research, verify, and report on leads, storing findings in a structured knowledge base built on Claude Code, Telegram, Obsidian, and Quarto Markdown.

He’s also built a government database monitor that alerts journalists when new data matching their investigation appears in public APIs, and released a skill file with 150 curated OSINT tools and operational security checklists that can be attached to any AI model.

None of these tools have been independently reviewed or tested by a third party as of this writing, but they are publicly available and Vaillant is building them within the CUNY Builders cohort community.

These tools are designed for the reporter working a story on a laptop in a coffee shop, not the reporter with a data engineering department down the hall.

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4. The Institutional Memory Gap

When reporters leave a newsroom, the institutional memory they carried leaves with them. Major metro papers have decades of published work sitting in fragmented archive systems with different logins, inconsistent metadata, and weak search.

Reporters under deadline spend hours digging through old clips manually. At smaller outlets, the archive often isn’t digitized at all. And when external traffic dries up, the archive becomes even more important as internal infrastructure: it’s the institutional knowledge that gives new reporting its historical grounding.

Jim Friedlich, CEO of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, led the creation of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, a $10 million partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft. The program placed dedicated AI engineers in 10 American newsrooms across two rounds of grants, each on two-year terms, each working on problems the newsroom itself identified.

At The Philadelphia Inquirer, CTO Matt Boggie oversaw the development of Dewey, an archive research assistant that searches everything the paper has published since 1978 (roughly 127,000 web articles and 200,000 digitized print articles) and returns summarized results with citations and links to originals. Reporters query it in natural language instead of guessing date ranges and retrying keyword searches.

The Inquirer expected the project to take 24 months. During a Microsoft hackathon, they had working code in two weeks. The team is open-sourcing the core architecture so other newsrooms can build their own versions.

Other results from the Collaborative: at Chicago Public Media (WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times), the fellow enabled same-day Spanish translation of articles that previously took days and is making 40 years of WBEZ audio searchable for the first time. The Minnesota Star Tribune built an AI-powered restaurant guide. The Seattle Times is using its fellow to build an ad sales prospecting tool.

In my opinion, the Lenfest model deserves attention from funders because it’s designed to be copied. The fellow structure and the open-sourcing are built to produce tools that spread beyond the original participating outlets.

🧩 Other Notable Builders

If you know a journalist or technologist building AI tools that fill specific coverage gaps, I want to hear about it. Send names and links to me on LinkedIn.

ImageWhisperer — Built by Dutch journalist and verification specialist Henk van Ess, ImageWhisperer is an image authentication tool used by newsrooms at AFP, AP, and others.

Upload a suspicious photo and it runs 41 independent checks in parallel, including a daily-updated database of known debunked fakes, 14 specialized detection models, forensic noise-pattern analysis, and AI visual inspection that catches things the math misses (melted faces, impossible architecture, mismatched lighting). It returns a color-coded verdict with a plain-language explanation of why.

The tool gained attention after BBC Verify cited its analysis of viral AI-generated videos of a snowstorm in Kamchatka, Russia, which newsrooms in Panama, Mexico, and Poland had aired as real footage.

Van Ess has been public about the tool’s failures too: after two experts exposed cases where it missed hybrid fakes and threshold errors, he rebuilt the detection system to compare foreground and background noise patterns separately and to require agreement across multiple models before issuing a verdict. PetaPixel covered the v1.0 launch in February 2026.

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PiZetta News Tracker, MyNewscast, MyNeighborhood — Michael VanZetta spent more than 20 years producing and directing content for news programs at stations in Washington, DC and Virginia, including WJLA, WUSA, and Sinclair Broadcast Group. He's now CEO of PiZetta Media and has built three AI tools aimed at local news distribution.

PiZetta News Tracker monitors YouTube uploads from local TV stations in real time and categorizes stories by topic (breaking news, crime, weather, politics, community coverage), giving newsroom teams a quick view of what's developing across markets.

MyNewscast lets viewers build their own lineup of local news stories from local station YouTube channels, generating a personalized rundown that works like a traditional broadcast newscast.

MyNeighborhood organizes local news content by ZIP code or region, aimed at helping people find stories relevant to their community, with potential applications in areas affected by news deserts. Note: these tools have not been independently reviewed as of this writing.

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Newsreel and Ragebait Tracker — Jack Brewster is a journalist who has written for The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Time, and Vice. In 2024, he broke the story uncovering the source of the viral claim about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio. He's a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and former Fulbright research fellow.

After a stint at NewsGuard rating news website credibility, he built Newsreel, a short-form news app aimed at younger readers who have largely abandoned traditional news products. The app delivers journalist-written stories in a swipeable format with quizzes, polls, and streaks, and has partnered with schools and libraries across the U.S. and Europe.

Newsreel recently received investment from the Glen Nelson Center at American Public Media Group, per NewscastStudio. AI is used on the product and engineering side, not for writing stories. Separately, Newsreel launched @ragetrack on X, an AI bot that anyone can tag on any post. It rates the post 1-10 on a ragebait scale, identifies the specific manipulation tactic being used, and is politically neutral.

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Investigative Tipsheet Generator — Nick Hagar is a postdoctoral scholar at Northwestern University's Generative AI in the Newsroom (GAIN) Initiative and incoming assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. He's previously worked at The New York Times, Meta, and Patreon.

His recent work focuses on whether AI coding agents can do the preliminary grunt work of investigative journalism: scanning large, messy datasets for evidence-based leads before a reporter commits weeks to a full investigation. He built a set of reusable skills for Claude Code that direct the agent to process raw data and compile findings into a tipsheet, with no web searches and no steering beyond a high-level topic prompt.

He tested it against seven real investigative datasets, including 178 million opioid transaction records, 10.7 million FEMA disaster aid applications, and 5.6 million Virginia court records, then measured how many of the leads that human journalists had published the agent could independently recover.

The results: of 30 established leads across the seven cases, the agent found versions of most of them, though 20% were missed entirely and about 30% of the recovered leads were thin or only directionally aligned with the published findings.

Hagar has also published related work on using agents to wrangle messy document sets and on replicating a MuckRock/WHRO investigation into Virginia police decertifications using Claude Code, where he independently reproduced the top-line findings in under an hour. His work is honest about the limitations, which makes it a useful reference point for what these tools can and can't do right now.

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Genna / Stringr — Built by the team behind Stringr, a suite of AI tools founded by a former broadcast news producer, Genna's VidGen tool converts published text articles into short-form vertical videos for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Paste in a story URL and VidGen pulls from the article's copy and multimedia, adds background music and an AI voiceover, and produces a draft video that a human editor can then adjust (text, visuals, length, voiceover pronunciations) before publishing.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nevada's largest daily newspaper, has been using VidGen for two years to scale video output across its social channels. Director of social media Caitlin Lilly told the News Media Help Desk that the tool functions like an additional staff member for a video team that doesn't have dedicated social media editors.

One VidGen-produced video on a road-rage shooting broke 1 million views on TikTok. The team applies AI labels to all VidGen videos and says editors must watch and listen to every video before publishing to catch voiceover mispronunciations, particularly for local names. Genna charges $3 per video (plus $1 for optional Getty licensing), with a $1,000 monthly minimum.

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Let me begin by saying that this newsletter is a passion project.

Like the many other past passion projects of mine — the CA//MEDIA//JOBS Newsletter, a weekly listing of journalism jobs in California; or the Missed Pitches newsletter, a weekly collection of freelance writing pitches that once got rejected — News Pain Points started the same way: I saw something that bugged me, and I couldn’t stop picking at it until I’d figure out how to say what I meant.

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The U.S. journalism industry is cannibalizing its own workforce.

In the first three months of 2026, one of the country’s most storied newsrooms lost close to half its journalists in a single round of cuts. A 240-year-old daily announced it would stop publishing altogether. A broadcast network shut down a division that had been on the air since the 1930s. And across digital and local TV, outlets from Axios to Nexstar continued trimming staff with no sign of slowing down.

The pace of destruction is outrunning any effort to rebuild — and the pipeline that’s supposed to feed new talent into the profession is collapsing right alongside it.

🩺 The Pain Point

The talent pipeline is collapsing at every stage: experienced reporters are getting pushed out, entry-level pay is driving graduates away, and the midcareer layer that holds newsrooms together is thinning fast.

At the top, experienced journalists are being pushed out by rolling layoffs that have intensified sharply since 2018. Press Gazette’s 2026 tracker has already logged cuts at The Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Politico, Nexstar, Vox Media, Axios, CNBC, CBS News, and The Wall Street Journal — all by early spring.

Full-year journalism cuts reached at least 3,434 in the U.S. and U.K. in 2025. This year’s pace could very well eclipse those figures by this summer, according to The Media Copilot.

The Washington Post alone eliminated roughly 350-375 newsroom positions in February — about half of its staff, according to the labor union that represents its journalists — shuttering its sports section, books desk, and large parts of its foreign and metro coverage.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in continuous operation since 1786, will publish its final edition on May 3, wiping out roughly 170 jobs. On March 20, CBS News killed its nearly century-old radio division and cut about 60 staffers.

A dark year for storied journalism indeed.

However, all of these layoffs track with trends those of us in the industry have been witnessing for some time now. A Columbia Journalism Review analysis found that more than 8,200 U.S. journalists have been laid off since 2022 — about 9% of the entire workforce. This year’s bloodletting may put that at a higher figure.

Pew Research found in a 2020 analysis that the decade-long decline between 2008-2018 hit midcareer workers ages 35–54 the hardest, something I’d liken to stripping out the institutional knowledge that holds newsrooms together.

At the bottom, the entry-level wage math is brutal. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the lowest 10% of reporters earned under $34,590 in May 2024.

Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that journalism graduates earn a median of just $39,700 net of student loan debt three years out — ranking 14th out of 34 major groups — and only about 15% of journalism majors end up working in the field early in their careers. The profession is asking people to take a pay cut for the privilege of entering it.

And the pool of people willing to make that bet is shrinking.

Undergraduate enrollment in journalism and mass communication programs dropped 16.3% between 2013 and 2015, and the trajectory hasn’t reversed. Bachelor’s degrees awarded in journalism have declined 25% since their early-2010s peak, according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce. The occasional ‘Trump bump’ in j-school interest has never been matched by an improvement in the economic logic of actually taking a journalism job.

Meanwhile, the number of U.S. high school graduates is expected to peak around 2025–2026 and then fall roughly 13% by 2041, meaning journalism programs will be fighting for students from a shrinking pool — students who can see the layoff headlines as clearly as anyone.

🔴 Pain Point Score: HIGH

This is a crisis-level structural failure.

Unlike a single round of layoffs or a single paper’s closure, the pipeline collapse threatens the industry’s ability to staff any beat, anywhere, for the foreseeable future. Every other problem I’ve covered on this newsletter — the sports gap, the paywall paradox — is downstream of this one.

📊 Why It Matters

Every outlet in the pain point section above had one thing in common: the journalists who left were replaced by nothing — no new hires, no alternative coverage plan, just gaps where reporting used to be.

What fills the gap is worse than the gap itself: press releases published as news, partisan operatives with Substacks and production budgets, AI-generated content farms optimized for engagement, and public officials who now operate in communities where no one is paid to check what they say.

The pipeline collapse is beyond just a labor market story. It is a transfer of narrative power from trained, accountable reporters to actors with no obligation to accuracy and no professional consequences for getting it wrong.

And the public can feel it.

Gallup’s annual trust survey shows confidence in mass media at just 28% as of 2025 — a record low. A separate Pew Research Center survey found that trust in national news organizations has fallen 20 percentage points since 2016, with less than half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents expressing any trust at all. These numbers track closely with the acceleration of newsroom cuts.

Fewer journalists means thinner coverage, which means less public value and fewer subscribers, and ultimately more cuts.

Meanwhile, the information vacuum left behind becomes a growth market for misinformation, political propaganda, and algorithmic content that looks like journalism but operates without any of its constraints. Every closed newsroom is a new unmonitored zone.

The democratic cost is concrete and measurable. A landmark study found that newspaper closures lead to higher municipal borrowing costs — 5 to 11 basis points per bond issue — higher government wages and deficits, costing taxpayers an estimated $650,000 per bond issue (Read the full study here).

That means that when no one is watching, officials spend more, disclose less, and face fewer consequences. The communities losing coverage the fastest are the ones that can least afford it.

To put it succinctly, the pipeline problem documented above is a structural failure in the country’s information infrastructure — and the people who will pay the highest price are the ones who never subscribed to a newspaper in the first place.

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🤔 Who Should Care

» Newsroom leaders facing hiring gaps on critical beats.

» J-school administrators watching enrollment erode.

» Funders and philanthropy officers deciding where to direct local news investment.

» Developers and civic technologists looking for infrastructure gaps to fill.

» Policymakers weighing whether the government has a role in sustaining local journalism employment.

🏗️ The Structural Root Cause

This is a compounding structural failure at every stage of the talent pipeline.

The midcareer hollowing-out has a specific consequence that gets less attention: the editor pipeline is breaking. A survey of 116 editors conducted by Bettina Chang during her JSK Fellowship at Stanford found that the vast majority cited a lack of formal training, barriers to advancement, and unclear success metrics.

The reporter-to-editor pathway that newsrooms have relied on for decades has almost no institutional training behind it — only a few large organizations (Dow Jones News Fund, The New York Times, NPR, ProPublica) invest in formal editor development. When experienced editors get laid off, the mentorship and quality control they provided leaves with them — and there’s no program replacing it at scale.

AI is also having an impact on the pipeline by accelerating displacement. Axios publisher Nicholas Johnston said the company was “starting to see how AI can help us automate some tasks to focus humans on our most consequential work.”

The Washington Post’s executive editor cited the collapse of organic search traffic — down nearly half in three years — and the rise of AI-generated content as key factors in the restructuring.

Meanwhile, media workers are pushing harder for guaranteed severance packages as layoffs feel inevitable amid consolidation.

The result is a field that is simultaneously losing experienced professionals to layoffs, losing entry-level talent to better-paying industries, and facing a shrinking pool of students willing to enter the profession at all.

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💡 Who’s Solving It (+ How)

The people working on the pipeline problem are scattered across universities, nonprofits, state legislatures, and newsrooms that are themselves under threat. What connects them is a shared read: the market alone won’t fix this, and neither will journalism schools or philanthropy acting in isolation. The efforts worth watching have moved past diagnosis and into implementation.

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Report for America is scaling the most proven pipeline intervention in the country. The national service program announced its 2026 newsroom partners in January, with plans to place more than 200 corps members in local newsrooms by July 2026. By that point, RFA will have placed more than 850 journalists in 465 newsrooms since its first placements in 2018, and the organization reports that 81% of its alumni remain in journalism after completing the program.

In 2026, RFA introduced a sports corps (five positions covering community sports) and expanded its investigative reporting program, funded by Arnold Ventures, to support 48 local investigations over three years. RFA also launched a pilot in Central Kentucky with Press Forward Blue Grass to train non-traditional community journalists — a model for stackable-credential entry.

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The Illinois Local Journalism Tax Credit is the first state-level policy designed to directly subsidize journalism jobs. In its debut year (2025), the program awarded more than $4 million in tax credits to support more than 260 journalist positions at 55 news entities across more than 120 local outlets.

Two-thirds of recipients were newsrooms of six or fewer journalists. Rebuild Local News, which helped design the legislation, reports that the program reached a cross-section of commercial and nonprofit outlets statewide, and that its formula design raised no known allegations of officials picking winners or making content-based distinctions between outlets. The 2026 application window opened February 1.

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The nonprofit news sector is absorbing some displaced talent and growing — but unevenly. The 2025 INN Index found that 83% of local nonprofit news organizations increased revenue by at least 10% over three years, outpacing state, regional, and national outlets. Traffic to nonprofit news sites surged in Q4 of 2025, especially those covering immigrant communities amid heightened ICE enforcement.

But a field-level analysis of 559 Press Forward infrastructure funding proposals warns that nonprofit outlets have clustered in major metro areas, and that the communities most in need of subsidy are often the least likely to have philanthropic access.

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🔧 The Build Opportunity

The pipeline crisis documented above has a structural quality that makes it resistant to traditional fixes. You can’t recruit your way out of a pay gap, train your way past a demographic cliff, or fundraise your way into communities that lack philanthropic infrastructure.

But each of those failures points to a specific gap where a well-designed tool, policy model, or funding mechanism could change the math. The following build opportunities offer some solutions.

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Opportunity 1: A Shared Industry Talent Platform

No centralized tool exists to match laid-off journalists, career-switchers, and j-school graduates with newsrooms that have open beats — including the part-time, freelance, and contract roles that traditional job boards miss.

The Institute for Independent Journalists tracks layoffs and surveying displaced journalists, but there’s no CRM-style platform that reconnects that talent with the outlets that need it. There’s an opportunity for a two-sided marketplace for journalism labor, built around beats and geographies, not just job titles.

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Opportunity 2: Scalable Apprenticeship Infrastructure

Report for America proves the model works at scale, but its corps will reach around 200 members by July 2026 — a fraction of the 3,400+ jobs cut in the U.S. and the U.K. in 2025 alone.

What’s needed is federated apprenticeship infrastructure: a framework that lets regional press associations, community foundations, and nonprofit newsrooms stand up their own salary-subsidy programs using a shared playbook, shared recruitment tools, and shared outcomes tracking. The Kentucky pilot with Press Forward Blue Grass points in this direction.

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Opportunity 3: State-level Payroll Policy at Scale

Illinois proved that a journalism payroll tax credit can work without government content interference. Other states need replicable legislative templates and implementation guidance.

Rebuild Local News is already pushing bills in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Hawai’i, Maryland, and Washington. But the speed of adoption matters: every year without policy intervention is another year of compounding talent loss.

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Opportunity 4: Salary Benchmarking and Transparency Tools

Small publishers can’t compete for talent if they don’t know what the market pays. The Georgetown CEW report ranks 850 journalism and communication programs by graduate earnings — similar data is needed at the employer level.

An open, anonymous salary database for journalism — broken down by market size, beat, and experience level — would give newsroom leaders the benchmarks they need to write competitive offers and give job seekers the transparency they deserve.

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💬 Closing Provocation

“All the strategies that we can throw at funding journalism are meaningless if the people are broken, if they cannot do the job.” — Meredith D. Clark, associate professor, UNC Hussman School of Journalism

⚡️ tl;dr

• The U.S. journalism talent pipeline is breaking at every level. At the top, more than 8,200 journalists have been laid off since 2022. The Washington Post cut half of its newsroom in February. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is shutting down in May. CBS killed its radio division after 99 years.

• At the bottom, entry-level pay starts below $35,000, only 15% of journalism majors end up working in the field, and the number of high school graduates feeding into college programs is about to drop for the next decade.

• In the middle, the midcareer editors who hold newsrooms together are being cut fastest and replaced by nothing.

• Gallup trust in media hit 28% in 2025. A growing body of research ties newspaper closures directly to higher costs for local taxpayers.

• The nonprofit sector is growing but concentrated in metro areas with existing philanthropic networks, leaving the communities that need coverage most with the least access to funding. Illinois launched the first state-level journalism tax credit and got $4 million out the door in year one.

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The news industry spent a years convincing itself that subscriptions would save journalism. For a handful of national brands, they did. (More on that below.) For everyone else, paywalls are determining which stories get told and who gets to read them.

And more recent research confirms what local publishers have feared: the business model built to sustain newsrooms is actively hollowing out the civic coverage those newsrooms exist to provide.

(Click here to jump to the tl;dr summary of this edition.)

🩺 The Pain Point

Paywalls are working financially for large publishers but actively shrinking civic coverage in the communities least able to absorb the loss.

A University of Michigan study tracked 17 regional U.S. newspapers over the course of 17 years and found that after implementing paywalls, newspapers cut local news by 5.1% on average.

But the damage is not evenly distributed.

In smaller markets — cities under 500,000 — local coverage dropped by 12.8%. In regions experiencing an influx of younger residents (age < 40), it fell by 19.1%.

At the same time, soft news like entertainment and lifestyle content ticked up by 3.5% in those younger-skewing markets. Editorial choices are following the money, not the need, in my opinion.

The coverage losses aren’t abstract. According to the study, city council meetings and local government decisions saw the sharpest post-paywall declines, particularly in smaller markets, followed closely by local education coverage — school board meetings, classroom initiatives, the decisions that shape daily life in a community.

Lead author Paramveer Dhillon put the stakes plainly: without intervention, newspapers risk creating “information deserts in communities that most need robust local news coverage.”

🔴 Pain Point Score: HIGH

This is an accelerating structural problem with civic consequences. The gap between who pays for news and who needs local accountability journalism is widening, and no market force is correcting it.

📊 Why It Matters

The numbers tell a story of compounding exclusion.

A Pew Research Center survey of 9,482 U.S. adults, conducted in March 2025 and published that June, found that 83% of Americans did not pay for news in the past year. Among those who hit a paywall, just 1% chose to pay while 53% went looking for the same information somewhere else and 32% gave up entirely.

The gap falls along predictable lines.

Only 9% of adults with a high school diploma or less paid for news, compared to 27% of college graduates. Just 10% of Hispanic Americans and 11% of Black Americans paid, compared to 20% of White Americans. And only 8% of adults in the lowest income bracket paid, versus 30% in the highest.

To me, the data shows that people most likely to pay for news are older, wealthier, more educated, and whiter than the general population — meaning paywalled local coverage is least accessible to the communities that need it most.

A follow-up Pew survey confirms the pattern: 83% of respondents again reported they had not paid for any news source in the prior 12 months.

Globally, the picture is no more different, according to the 2025 Reuters Institute Digital News Report. The report, covering 48 markets, found that only 18% of respondents across a basket of 20 wealthier countries had paid for any online news — a figure that plateaued after a decade of growth.

As the report notes, traditional news media face a troubling mix of declining engagement and growing resistance to paying for news.

🤔 Who Should Care

» Newsroom leaders making editorial decisions under subscription pressure need to understand that the paywall reshapes what stories get told.

» Developers and product teams have a direct opportunity to build tools that distinguish civic content from premium content at the paywall layer.

» Independent journalists and nonprofit publishers face the sharpest version of this tradeoff: every dollar of subscription revenue carries an implicit editorial nudge away from accountability work.

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🏗️ The Structural Root Cause

The subscription model rewards content that retains paying subscribers, not content that serves a civic need. That incentive structure pushes newsrooms — especially smaller ones without a financial cushion — to trade city council coverage for lifestyle content.

In the U.S. alone, paywall adoption among newspapers increased from 60% to 76% between 2017 and 2019.

But the paying-for-news ceiling has flatlined at 17–18% in the U.S. and globally, and most of those subscriptions flow to a handful of national brands. With most households only willing to pay for one or two news subscriptions, that dynamic overwhelmingly favors established national brands. That leaves local news providers fighting for scraps.

To illustrate the point, a consumer subscribing to every major local news outlet in Chicago would now pay roughly $200 a month — with individual subscription prices like the Chicago Tribune’s climbing from $8 per month in 2015 to $20 in 2026, far outpacing inflation.

The result is a two-tier information system, one in which wealthier, older, more educated audiences get the journalism. Everyone else gets whatever is free — increasingly algorithm-sorted social media content and partisan commentary that foments division and distrust.

Paywalls do not just lock out readers from stories; they reshape which stories get told in the first place. And without intervention, this can create deeper news deserts and potentially widen the information inequality gap.

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💡 Who’s Solving It (+ How)

Not every publisher is standing still, however. Across the industry, a handful of experiments are testing whether there’s a way out of the paywall trap. None of these are silver bullets. But together, they suggest the paywall is a choice.

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The Salt Lake Tribune is making the most aggressive move in the U.S.

The nonprofit newspaper, which described its paywall as a "necessary evil," raised approximately $2.5 million — anchored by a $1 million pledge from Chris and Summer Gibson that the community matched at 1.5x — and said it would drop its paywall in Q1 2026, shifting to a voluntary membership model with three tiers at $5, $10, and $26 per month. See the image above.

The newspaper budgeted nearly zero subscription income for 2026, betting that donors and members would more than replace the $2.6 million in digital subscription revenue it earned in 2025. A poll of its own subscribers found that most had signed up not to bypass the paywall but to support independent news in Utah.

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Dynamic paywalls are gaining traction as a middle path. An INMA survey found that 38% of publishers are now using or planning to adopt dynamic paywalls, quadrupling from near-zero adoption in 2020 to 22% of news brands by late 2024.

These AI-driven systems decide in real time whether a visitor sees a paywall, a registration wall, or open access based on their likelihood to convert.

The Post and Courier in South Carolina used this paywall strategy and saw a 57% increase in paywall revenue and up to 54% in ad revenue after switching to a dynamic model through Piano. In this case, subscription and advertising revenue didn't cannibalize each other.

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Paywall messaging also matters, according to a study by Volha Kananovich which found that local newspapers across the U.S. are asking readers for money through subscription pitches and donation appeals — but they’re making a weak case.

More than 20% of newspaper subscription and donation appeals cited informing the public as a function of their journalism. If publishers want readers to pay, they need to articulate the civic value of what they produce beyond a subscribe button

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🔧 The Build Opportunity

The paywall problem is a product gap, not a policy debate. The tools to fix it either don’t exist yet or haven’t been assembled into something a mid-size newsroom can actually use. Here are three distinct build opportunities.

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Opportunity 1: The Civic-Access Paywall Layer

Dynamic paywalls are booming at large publishers, and a few newsrooms manually exempt emergency and civic content during hurricanes or elections. But nobody has built a turnkey product that bakes civic access rules into paywall logic by default — one that automatically keeps government, school board, public safety, and election coverage free while gating premium analysis, entertainment, and lifestyle content behind the paywall.

The product would need to integrate with existing CMS platforms (especially WordPress, where tools like Leaky Paywall already operate) and leverage the browser-side AI paywall intelligence that companies like Mather Economics are pioneering — systems that optimize paywall decisions in real time without requiring cookies.

The market timing is ripe for this. Dynamic paywall adoption has quadrupled since 2020, but is still at just 22% of news brands. The other 78% not yet using dynamic paywalls represent an enormous addressable market of publishers who know their current approach isn’t working but don’t have the engineering resources to build something better.

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Opportunity 2: Income-Sensitive Pricing and Micro-Payment Infrastructure

The data is clear: the people least likely to pay for news are younger, lower-income, and less educated. The standard $15–20/month subscription is priced for an audience that already pays.

Torstar tested this concept in 2024, launching a 75-cent-per-article micropayment option powered by the platform Axate, with a $1.50 daily cap for full access. The model was designed not to replace subscriptions but to capture incremental revenue from readers who would never commit to a recurring payment.

Pair micro-payments with income-sensitive pricing tiers — sliding-scale subscriptions, student rates, community-sponsored access — and you have a framework that protects revenue without abandoning the civic mission. The infrastructure for this exists in pieces (Axate for micropayments, Piano for dynamic pricing) but hasn’t been assembled into a single, publisher-ready product.

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Opportunity 3: Paywall Messaging That Actually Makes the Case

The study by Volha Kananovich at Appalachian State University found that local newspapers across the U.S. are asking readers for money through subscription pitches and donation appeals.

Only about 1 in 5 newspaper paywall appeals cited informing the public as a function of their journalism. Even fewer emphasized community building, investigative accountability, or democratic service.

There’s a product opportunity in building a paywall messaging toolkit — A/B-tested, research-backed templates and frameworks that help local publishers make a concrete case for why their journalism matters to the reader's daily life.

Pair it with the dynamic paywall layer from Opportunity 1, and the messaging can be personalized to the visitor: a first-time reader sees a civic appeal, a returning reader sees a value proposition, a high-propensity subscriber sees a direct conversion offer.

💬 Closing Provocation

“The Tribune cannot afford to continue to limit who has access to independent and trusted news. Making the news is only the first step — we must also ensure people can find it.” — Lauren Gustus, CEO and Executive Editor, The Salt Lake Tribune

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⚡️ tl;dr

• The pain point: Paywalls are gutting the civic coverage they were supposed to protect — local news dropped nearly 13% in smaller markets after paywalls went up, replaced by lifestyle fluff that keeps subscribers happy.

• The twist: 83% of Americans don’t pay for news, and the people locked out skew younger, lower-income, and non-white — exactly the communities that need local accountability journalism the most.

• The takeaway: The subscription model isn’t broken by accident; it’s structurally misaligned with journalism’s civic mission — but fixable through tools like dynamic paywalls, micropayments, and smarter messaging that no one has assembled into a turnkey product yet.

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Across America, more kids are playing organized sports than ever before. Almost no one is covering them.

Local newsrooms have hollowed out their sports desks, leaving millions of families, athletes, and communities with no one telling their stories. It’s not a small gap — it’s enormous. And it represents the biggest unclaimed business opportunity in American media.

A new report analyzing 559 funding proposals for local journalism confirms the underlying cause: the threats to local news aren’t individual newsroom failures; they’re ecosystem-level infrastructure breakdowns.

But while funders and policymakers debate the diagnosis, some of the sharpest business minds in media are already placing their bets — not on city hall coverage or investigative units, but on Friday night football.

(Click to skip to the tl;dr summary of this newsletter.)

🩺 The Pain Point

The U.S. just recorded its highest-ever high school sports participation, and yet the journalism ecosystem that once covered those games has all but collapsed.

The NFHS 2024–25 High School Athletics Participation Survey confirms that participation has surged by more than 645,000 athletes in just three years, with breakout growth in girls’ flag football (up 60%), and girls’ wrestling (up 15%).

More than 3,200 newspapers have closed since 2005. News desert counties have hit a record 213, and roughly 50 million Americans now live with limited or no access to local news.

The reporters who once filed Friday night game recaps, profiled breakout athletes, and held athletic departments accountable are largely gone. What remains is a structural mismatch: demand for school sports content is surging while the professional supply has cratered.

High school sports coverage once served as community connective tissue that bound neighborhoods through shared stories the way obituaries and school board reports did. When that coverage disappears, something civic disappears with it.

🟡 Pain Point Score: RISING

The collapse of local school sports coverage is a structural market failure with proven revenue implications. In the meantime, competitors (social creators, school-produced content) are filling the vacuum with no editorial standards.

The social media replacements are not communal in the same way. They are siloed experiences — you learn about your friends’ feeds, not a stranger’s story.

There is a difference between a highlight clip going viral and a beat reporter writing about the sophomore who broke the school’s 800-meter record in front of 200 people on a Tuesday afternoon. The first entertains. The second witnesses.

The coverage gap is a market failure with civic consequences, one that is deepening as participation rises and newsrooms continue to shrink.

📊 Why It Matters

The numbers make the business case impossible to ignore.

In August 2025, the Minnesota Star Tribune launched Strib Varsity, a dedicated high school sports product. Within months, it accounted for 10% of new subscriptions, with its paywall converting readers at roughly 3x the rate of the paper’s main site.

MassLive, a digital outlet under Advance Local, reported that about a third of its new subscriptions came through high school sports content. And the Boston Globe launched in 2025 a dedicated high school sports team and initiative citing growing interest from families and athletes.

These aren’t anomalies — they’re proof points. The Local News Initiative’s profile of these efforts documented how high school sports is emerging as one of the most reliable subscription engines in local media.

While web traffic to the 100 largest newspaper sites has plummeted more than 45% in four years, local school sports coverage is making the search for differentiated, high-engagement content existential.

MassLive’s VP of Content Ronnie Ramos called it content readers can’t get anywhere else and noted that people will pay for it.

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🤔 Who Should Care

» Newsroom leaders and publishers: You’re leaving the most proven subscription driver on the table. The Star Tribune and MassLive have demonstrated the model. The question is: why haven’t you replicated it?

» Developers and product builders: The tooling for local sports coverage — stats engines, live-streaming infrastructure, community engagement platforms — is woefully underdeveloped. This is greenfield territory.

» Independent journalists and creators: Social-native creators are already filling this vacuum with mic’d-up footage and highlight reels. But they lack the editorial standards and investigative capacity that professional journalism brings. There’s a hybrid model waiting to be built.

» Philanthropic funders and investors: A new report by Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, analyzing 559 Press Forward infrastructure proposals, argues that the era of individual newsroom experimentation is over. The field needs system-level investments that lower the cost of producing local journalism. Sports-driven local models are exactly the kind of scalable infrastructure play the report calls for.

🏗️ The Structural Root Cause

The diagnosis here runs deeper than “newspapers are closing.” I can identify at least three compounding forces have created this gap:

First, the economic collapse of local news hit sports desks early and hard. Sports coverage was often the first casualty of shrinking newsrooms because it was seen as discretionary, the proverbial “toy department,” despite growing evidence it’s among the most effective content for driving subscriptions.

Let’s not forget that The Washington Post eliminated its entire sports section in February this year. This move alone signaled the latest and most dramatic blow to sports journalism, which has seen reporters cut or reassigned across the industry.

Second, national platforms cannot fill the local gap. When The New York Times purchased The Athletic for $550 million, it put the Times in “direct competition with every local news site” for subscribers.

But The Athletic covers roughly 270 professional and major college teams. It does not, and structurally cannot, cover 20,000 high schools producing 8.2 million athletes. No national platform has the incentive or capacity to do this.

Third, the funding ecosystem rewards experimentation over scale. Hansen Shapiro’s new report is blunt on this point: philanthropy tends to be time-bound and project-based, which produces fragmented, newsroom-by-newsroom solutions that never reach the scale needed to address a systemic problem.

As she told ProPublica founding general manager Richard Tofel in a Nieman Lab interview: the era of innovation is over. What’s needed now are scaling solutions, and funders willing to pick winners and let failing experiments die.

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💡 Who’s Solving It (+ How)

From the Star Tribune’s paywall-busting prep sports product to Chuck Todd’s proposed $2 billion franchise network, a growing number of publishers are treating high school sports not as a soft feature, but rather as a business model.

The through line: content readers can’t get anywhere else, serving communities willing to pay for it. Here are four compelling models worth watching.

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Star Tribune / Strib Varsity (Minneapolis). The most ambitious model currently operating. Strib Varsity combines dedicated sports journalism with a stats-and-scores engine and live-streaming for hundreds of Minnesota high schools.

The product has its own paywall tier and is converting readers to paid subscribers at three times the rate of the main site. This is a high-investment play, but it’s proving the model at scale.

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MassLive (Massachusetts) offers a leaner approach under Advance Local. MassLive currently covers 95 teams statewide and is expanding into the Boston and Worcester areas. VP of Content Ronnie Ramos said he has plans for live-streaming and a high school version of NFL RedZone — weekly video highlights across games.

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Chuck Todd’s proposed micro-outlet network. The former Meet the Press moderator has made local youth sports the centerpiece of a proposed $2 billion media venture. His model: a franchise-style network of up to 1,000 community-owned sites where sports-driven advertising revenue subsidizes broader local journalism.

Todd told LNI that the first three hires at any new local news organization should be a lead high school sports reporter, a micro weather forecaster, and a consumer/food reporter. He frames sports as the most sustainable revenue stream for local news — not a soft feature.

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Report for America launches its first sports corps. The national service program launched in 2017 by The GroundTruth Project places emerging journalists in local newsrooms to cover under-reported communities and beats. To date, RFA has partnered with more than 400 newsrooms across all 50 states, and by mid-2026 will have more than 200 active corps members in the field.

For its first eight years, the program focused almost entirely on civic accountability beats like government, criminal justice, health, immigration, education. It wasn’t until this year that RFA launched its first-ever sports corps — with just five positions nationwide, including one dedicated to high school and youth sports in Arizona.

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🔧 The Build Opportunity

The tooling layer for local school sports coverage barely exists. This is where developers and product builders should be paying attention. What’s needed isn’t another one-off experiment. It’s shared infrastructure that any newsroom can plug into and go live in weeks, not years.

The Strib Varsity model proves there’s demand. The Hansen Shapiro report proves the field needs a platform layer, not more pilots. Think of it as Substack meets ESPN+ meets a local stats engine, purpose-built for high school markets.

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Opportunity 1: A sports-local-news operating system

No single product currently combines real-time stats ingestion, low-cost live-streaming, community engagement tools, subscription infrastructure, and AI-assisted content generation for high school sports at scale.

Most stats are still tracked on paper or in disconnected coaching apps. Most live-streaming still assumes a broadcast truck. The opportunity is an integrated platform layer that legacy papers, digital startups, and micro-outlets alike can deploy without building from scratch.

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Opportunity 2: AI-augmented coverage that scales without replacing journalists

Patch’s AI-driven newsletter system has already demonstrated that AI can extend hyperlocal reach to 14,000 communities and nearly a million subscribers.

Imagine that same scaling logic applied specifically to school sports — automated game recaps, statistical analysis, and event scheduling that augment human reporting rather than replace it, with editorial standards and community trust baked in from the start.

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Opportunity 3: Community engagement infrastructure for hyperlocal audiences

The missing piece isn’t just content — it’s connection. Parents, coaches, and athletes currently have no unified way to interact around local sports coverage.

The build opportunity includes subscription and paywall tooling optimized for hyperlocal audiences, notification systems tied to specific teams and athletes, and feedback loops that make the audience part of the coverage.

This is what turns a reader into a subscriber and a subscriber into a recurring revenue source.

💬 Closing Provocation

“The first three hires I would make starting a local news organization would be a lead high school sports reporter, a micro weather forecaster, and a consumer/food reporter. Too many local news startups start with trying to get the news junkies to pay for subscriptions. I think you’re a closed audience there. Start with the widest possible pool.” — Chuck Todd, in conversation with Medill’s Local News Initiative

⚡️ tl;dr

• High school sports participation just hit a record high, but the local journalists who used to cover those games are mostly gone. More than 3,200 newspapers have closed since 2005, and sports desks were often cut first. The result: a massive gap between surging demand and vanishing coverage.

• But a few players are proving this gap is also a business opportunity. The Star Tribune’s prep sports product converts subscribers at 3x its normal rate. MassLive is seeing a third of new subscriptions come through high school sports. Chuck Todd wants to build a $2 billion franchise network with sports as the revenue engine. And Report for America just launched its first-ever sports corps after eight years of ignoring the beat.

• The newsletter argues this isn’t just a content play — it’s an infrastructure problem. What’s missing is shared tooling (stats engines, live-streaming, community engagement platforms) that any newsroom could plug into, rather than each outlet building from scratch. The closing message: stop treating school sports as a soft feature — it may be the most sustainable path to local news revenue.

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The number that newsrooms have worshipped for two decades — web traffic — is now lying to them.

The industry spent years optimizing for a metric controlled entirely by Google and Facebook, and now that those platforms have changed the rules, publishers are discovering they never actually knew their audiences at all.

The collapse isn’t coming. It already happened. But here’s what most coverage of this crisis misses: the publishers who stopped worshipping traffic years ago aren’t just surviving. They’re growing.

(Click to skip to the tl;dr summary of this newsletter.)

🩺 The Pain Point

For years, web traffic was the universal metric of digital news. It’s what publishers showed advertisers, what funders used to justify grants, and what boards cited to measure impact. The entire business infrastructure of online journalism was built on the assumption that Google and Facebook would keep sending people to news websites.

That assumption has been shattered. A March 2026 analysis by Growtika found that 10 major tech publications — CNET, Wired, The Verge, TechRadar, and others — lost a combined 65 million monthly organic visits from Google since their 2024 peaks. That’s a 58% decline!

Some individual sites fared far worse: Digital Trends fell 97%, ZDNet dropped 90%, and The Verge lost 85% of its search traffic. Meanwhile, the Reuters Institute’s 2026 Trends report found that Facebook referrals to news sites have dropped 43% in the last two and a half years, with X (formerly Twitter) referrals falling 46%.

But the pain has not been evenly distributed. Chartbeat data drawn from over 2,500 publisher websites, cited in the Reuters Institute report, shows that publishers specializing in lifestyle or utility content — weather, TV guides, horoscopes — were more likely to have been affected by the decline.

The traffic isn’t shifting to another platform that publishers can chase. It’s disappearing into AI-generated answers, walled-garden social feeds, and direct conversations with chatbots. The scoreboard that newsrooms have been reading is broken, and most still don’t have a replacement.

🔴 Pain Point Score: HIGH

This is a high urgency problem, but not for the reason most people assume. The crisis is not that traffic decline automatically means revenue decline, but the publishers proving that are a specific kind of publisher.

Digiday’s analysis of subscription trends, drawing on its 2025 Subscription Index and other public earnings data, found that The New York Times accelerated digital subscription growth by 6.5 percentage points between 2023 and 2025, with average revenue per user rising year-over-year to $9.72. The Guardian posted an 8.2-point jump in subscription growth acceleration. Bloomberg raised its annual subscription price 33% year-over-year.

But these are elite, well-resourced publishers with strong brands and large audiences. The majority of newsrooms have not made the same transition, and many lack the capital or reach to try.

A Local Media Consortium survey of executives across 170 local media companies found a dramatic increase in the number of publishers identifying subscriber retention as a top challenge. Most of the closures aren’t happening at outlets that failed to diversify — they’re happening at small, independent publishers that never had the resources to begin.

And even for publishers who have built subscription models, the traffic collapse isn’t neutral. Digiday reports that audiences arriving through search convert to paid subscriptions at roughly 3x the rate of those arriving through Google Discover. Losing search traffic doesn’t just hurt ad revenue; it also shrinks the subscription funnel.

The gap between publishers who built direct audience relationships and those still renting them from platforms is widening fast. Traffic’s collapse is making the divide impossible to ignore, and for the publishers on the wrong side of it, every month spent measuring success by a collapsing metric is a month closer to joining the growing list of closures.

📊 Why It Matters

The numbers tell two stories at once: one of collapse, and one of adaptation.

On the collapse side, the data is stark. The Growtika analysis found that 4 of the 10 publications studied now generate less combined traffic (2.1 million visits) than the r/ChatGPT subreddit alone (4.68 million). TechRadar’s traffic loss of 11.5 million visits exceeds the current total traffic of Wired, The Verge, ZDNet, HowToGeek, and Digital Trends combined. And it’s not just tech media. Healthline lost 55 million monthly visits. NerdWallet, a publicly traded company, saw a 73% decline.

However, Piano.io’s 2026 publisher data shows that even as median traffic fell 2%, revenue climbed 10% — and 70% of publishers who saw traffic decline still grew revenue. Highly engaged users generate 110 times more revenue than one-off visitors — $25.52 versus $0.23 per thousand visitors. One could reach the conclusion that traffic volume has decoupled from both audience value and revenue potential.

The publishers who recognized this early are now pulling ahead.

The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Trends report found that 76% of publishers now rank subscriptions and memberships as their top revenue focus for 2026, ahead of display advertising (68%) and native advertising (64%).

On Substack, more than 5 million paid subscriptions are now active across 35 million total subscriptions. The top 10 publications collectively earn more than $40 million per year, and 52 individual publications earn at least $500,000 each.

Beehiiv’s 2026 State of Newsletters report found that paid subscriptions on its platform generated $19 million in 2025 versus $8 million in 2024 — a 138% jump! New newsletter creators reached their first dollar in a median of just 66 days.

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🤔 Who Should Care

» Newsroom leaders and editors-in-chief who still use traffic dashboards to evaluate editorial success and make staffing decisions. If your strategy meeting starts with a pageview report, you’re optimizing for a broken scoreboard.

» Revenue and advertising teams who pitch traffic numbers to advertisers and are watching CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) erode alongside visits. The pitch needs to shift from volume to attention and engagement — and the data to support that shift now exists.

» Audience development and growth teams who need new KPIs to justify their strategies and budgets. The most useful growth metrics in 2026 are registration rates, return frequency, newsletter subscriber depth, and cross-platform engagement; not unique visitors.

» News technology developers and product teams building the next generation of analytics and distribution tools. The infrastructure opportunity here is enormous.

» Funders, donors, and board members who have used traffic as a proxy for impact without questioning what it actually measured. The Knight Foundation and the American Journalism Project are already investing in audience development and revenue diversification as the new markers of newsroom health. Other funders should follow.

» Independent journalists and creator-journalists who are building media businesses on platforms like Substack, YouTube, and Patreon. The traffic collapse is your competitive advantage — your direct audience relationship is the asset legacy newsrooms are scrambling to build.

🏗️ The Structural Root Cause

The diagnosis here is dependency masquerading as strategy, and it runs deeper than measurement.

For two decades, news publishers treated Google and Facebook as permanent infrastructure. They optimized headlines for search algorithms, designed stories around trending queries, and structured entire beats around what would perform in the feed. Newsrooms didn’t build audience relationships. They rented them from platforms.

When those platforms pulled back from news, Facebook pageview referrals in the U.S. dropped 35% while those from X fell 46% from 2023 to 2025, and thus the dependency was exposed.

This created a dangerous blind spot. Publishers could tell you how many people clicked on a story, but not why those people came, whether they valued what they read, or whether they’d come back. Traffic measured distribution efficiency, not audience connection.

Piano.io’s publisher data illustrates the cost of that blind spot: one-off visitors make up 60% of traffic but generate almost no revenue, while highly engaged users convert at 44 times the rate. And yet most publishers optimized for the former, not the latter.

When Google introduced AI Overviews that answer queries directly in search results, the publications most dependent on “how-to” and “best of” queries — exactly the kind of commodity content that platforms can now generate themselves — saw the steepest declines, Growtika’s analysis found.

But the structural failure goes beyond choosing the wrong metric. Publishers also outsourced their entire distribution infrastructure to search engines and social media platforms. The measurement problem and the distribution problem are entangled but distinct. Fixing how you measure success won’t help if you still have no independent way to reach your audience.

As if things weren’t unstable enough, an even deeper structural shift is emerging. According to the 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report, automated traffic surpassed human-generated web traffic for the first time in a decade, accounting for 51% of all web activity in 2024. The surge is largely driven by AI and large language models, which have made it easier than ever to create and scale bots that crawl, summarize, and transact on behalf of humans.

And the trend is accelerating. AI bot visits to publisher sites grew by roughly 400% over the course of 2025 alone, according to TollBit’s quarterly tracking data. The web is quickly becoming a place built for machines first and people second. And now publishers must contend not just with fewer human visitors but with a fundamental change in what a “visit” even means.

As the Newzdash 2026 News SEO report put it: winning in 2026 is about owning topics, not just ranking URLs. The report’s panel of 20 global experts highlighted the need to move beyond pageviews toward engagement, return rate, and value-based metrics.

That shift is underway at some publishers. But for most newsrooms, the tools, frameworks, and internal culture to measure what “owning a topic” actually looks like remain a work in progress — to say nothing of the distribution channels needed to reach people directly when they do.

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💡 Who’s Solving It (+ How)

The response to the traffic collapse is emerging on mainly two fronts: direct-to-audience distribution and measurement innovation. No single solution has become the new standard, but the pieces of a post-traffic ecosystem are taking shape.

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Direct-to-Audience Distribution

Newsletters can be thought of as owned infrastructure. Email has emerged as one of the most resilient distribution channels in journalism. Unlike social feeds or search results, newsletters are permission-based, algorithm-resistant, and owned by the publisher.

Substack now hosts more than 50,000 publications earning money, with open rates that often exceed 40% — dwarfing typical web engagement metrics. On beehiiv, paid subscriptions grew 138% year-over-year and the platform powered 28 billion emails in 2025. Paved’s network now reaches 253 million newsletter subscribers across 3,000+ publishers, demonstrating that newsletter advertising has matured into a standalone revenue channel.

Another example of owned distribution is YouTube — the new front page. YouTube became the highest-priority platform for news publishers in 2026, scoring +74 net in the Reuters survey, up from +52 last year.

In his 2026 priorities letter, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan noted in January that the platform has paid more than $100 billion to creators, artists, and media companies over the past four years.

Adweek reported that journalist-creators like Tara Palmeri, Taylor Lorenz, and Dave Jorgenson are now treating YouTube as their primary distribution point, using its discovery engine to attract viewers and funneling their most engaged fans toward Substack and Patreon for conversion.

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Measurement Innovation

Piano.io provides a publisher engagement platform that moves newsrooms away from raw traffic metrics toward what they call the “engagement ladder.” Its system tracks how readers progress from anonymous visitors to registered users to paying subscribers.

Among the publishers using Piano.io include Rolling Stone, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times. The platform’s 2026 data showing the 110x revenue difference between engaged and casual users is becoming a rallying point for the industry’s shift.

The American Press Institute’s Metrics for News (MFN) tool helps newsrooms measure engagement depth across beats and content types. Newsrooms like the Winnipeg Free Press and Crain’s City Brands use MFN to identify what content their audiences genuinely value — and, critically, what they can stop producing.

🛠️ The Build Opportunities

The gap in the market is wide open — and it’s bigger than a single product. In my opinion, there are at least three distinct build opportunities emerging from the traffic collapse.

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Opportunity 1: The Post-Traffic Analytics Platform

What publishers need — and what doesn’t yet exist as a single, integrated product — is a post-traffic analytics platform built specifically for news organizations.

This tool could unify several data streams that are currently siloed: on-site engagement depth (time spent, scroll depth, return frequency), off-platform presence (citations in AI answers, social sharing, newsletter opens), audience identity and loyalty signals (registration, habit formation, community participation), and downstream impact metrics (did coverage drive civic action, policy change, or informed decision-making).

Think of it as Chartbeat meets CRM meets attention scoring. It’s designed for the reality that most of a publisher’s audience may never visit their website directly. The platform could help newsrooms answer the question that traffic never could: Are we actually reaching and serving the people we exist to inform?

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Opportunity 2: AI Citation and Distribution Tracking

ChatGPT referrals to publisher websites have risen rapidly since mid-2024. But according to Chartbeat data cited in the Reuters Institute’s 2026 report, ChatGPT still represent just 0.02% of total referral traffic.

As AI platforms grow, publishers need tools that track when and how their content appears in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Comet, and others. ProRata.ai’s attribution technology is an early example — identifying when publisher content is used, attributing it to its source, and compensating publishers accordingly through a 50/50 revenue share.

To help on that front, IAB Europe released a technical framework in September 2025, titled “Crawling for Compensation,” establishing content access controls, discovery protocols, and monetization APIs. Additionally, IAB Tech Lab’s Content Monetization Protocols (CoMP) working group has developed the standardized APIs to implement these mechanisms at scale.

There’s a clear build opportunity for an independent monitoring layer that gives publishers visibility into their AI footprint — a kind of “Chartbeat for chatbots.”

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Opportunity 3: Creator-Newsroom Partnership Infrastructure

The Reuters survey found that 76% of publishers plan to encourage journalists to behave more like creators, 50% plan to partner with external creators for content distribution, and 39% fear losing top editorial talent to the creator ecosystem.

The Washington Post’s Ripple project, CNN Creators, and Vox Media’s creator deals are early experiments. But there’s a gap for tools that help newsrooms manage creator partnerships: revenue-share tracking, brand-safety frameworks, cross-platform analytics for journalist-creators, and talent retention structures that let journalists build personal brands without leaving the organization.

Think of it as a creator management platform built for newsrooms. (See my previous newsletter edition.) As Morning Brew CEO Robert Dippell told Adweek: “Human connection becomes a premium channel” in an AI-saturated environment. The publishers and entrepreneurs who build the infrastructure for that connection will define the next era of news.

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For developers and entrepreneurs in the news technology space, this is a rare moment where an entire industry’s measurement and distribution infrastructure needs to be rebuilt simultaneously. The publishers who adopt new metrics and own their distribution first will have the clearest picture of their actual audience — and the strongest pitch to advertisers, funders, and subscribers.

💬 Closing Provocation

The question for every newsroom isn’t how do we get our traffic back? It’s what were we actually measuring — and what should we measure now?

“No discussion of tech media can get past this basic traffic fact: in the AI world, Google and social no longer refer traffic, which means that the vast majority of readers just never find you in the first place.” — Danny Crichton, Partner at Lux Capital and former Managing Editor of TechCrunch

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⚡️ tl;dr

• Web traffic — the metric news publishers have relied on for 20 years — has collapsed, with some major sites losing 85–97% of their search traffic as Google and Facebook pulled back from sending visitors to news sites. That traffic is now being absorbed by AI answers and walled-garden feeds.

• The twist: traffic volume was never a great measure of success anyway. Publishers who shifted early to direct audience relationships (newsletters, subscriptions, YouTube) are actually growing. Data shows highly engaged users generate 110x more revenue than one-off visitors.

• The big takeaways: stop measuring pageviews, start measuring engagement and loyalty, and build distribution channels you actually own (like email newsletters) instead of renting audiences from platforms. There are also major opportunities to build new analytics tools, AI citation tracking, and creator-newsroom partnership infrastructure to replace the old, broken system.

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The news industry spent the last year deciding it needs creators. Good. But it picked the wrong ones.

While newsrooms scramble to partner with people who “look like journalists” on TikTok and Instagram, they’re walking right past the scientists, professors, doctors, and researchers who already hold the trust that legacy mastheads have been hemorrhaging for a decade.

The creator strategy isn’t broken because it’s new — it’s broken because it’s narrow.

🩺 The Pain Point

Most publishers treat their creator strategy as a distribution hack: find someone with followers, hand them a link, hope for clicks. But that approach mirrors the same transactional thinking that eroded audience trust in the first place.

According to the Reuters Institute’s 2026 trends survey of 280 senior news executives across 51 countries, roughly 76% of publishers plan to encourage journalists to develop creator-like personas, and half intend to partner with influencers for distribution.

The problem? Nearly all of that energy flows toward “news influencers” — people who already operate in the media orbit. Meanwhile, high-trust subject-matter experts (the climate scientist with 200K YouTube subscribers, the economist with a loyal Substack following, the public-health researcher whose threads go viral) sit outside the newsroom’s field of vision entirely.

These aren’t just potential amplifiers. They’re trust brokers. And newsrooms are ignoring them because they don’t fit the legacy definition of a “media partner.”

🔴 Pain Point Score: HIGH

This is a compounding problem. Every month newsrooms spend partnering exclusively with personality-driven news influencers, they reinforce the perception that news is entertainment, not expertise.

The trust gap widens, and the subject-matter creators build direct audience relationships that make future partnerships harder to negotiate.

📊 Why It Matters

The trust numbers are brutal and it’s getting worse. Gallup’s latest survey found that just 28% of Americans express confidence in mass media to report news fully, accurately, and fairly. Yikes! That’s a record low, and the first time the measure has fallen below 30%. Five years ago, that figure was 40%.

Pew Research Center data from a September 2025 survey shows trust in national news organizations fell 11 percentage points from a brief uptick earlier that year, landing at 56% — and down 20 points since Pew first asked the question in 2016. The decline cuts across both parties and all age groups.

At the same time, audiences are gravitating toward individual voices they perceive as credible. Pew data shows that 38% of adults under 30 regularly get news from influencers on social media; and the behavior is bipartisan, with virtually no difference between Republicans and Democrats.

But here’s the catch: Reuters Institute research across 24 countries found that much creator content skews toward opinion and partisan commentary rather than reported news, and that most popular news influencers have no obligation to report fairly or accurately, even if many try.

That means newsrooms partnering only with opinion-forward creators risk reinforcing the very dynamic that’s eroding their authority. Subject-matter experts offer a different proposition — credibility rooted in domain knowledge, not personality.

Ryan Kellett, a Nieman-Berkman fellow at Harvard and formerly the audience lead at Axios, raised this point at the World News Media Congress in Krakow. He acknowledged that newsrooms have legitimate brand-safety concerns about partnering with non-journalists.

Kellett suggested that those uncomfortable with such partnerships should consider working with academic and expert creators who have real, verified expertise.

🤔 Who Should Care

Newsroom leaders and audience strategists — you’re the ones setting partnership criteria that may be too narrow.

Independent and local publishers — you have the most to gain from expert-creator partnerships because your audiences crave local authority.

News product developers and app builders — there’s a discovery and matchmaking gap here that technology can solve.

Journalism funders — your grants support creator programs, but are they broad enough to include non-journalist experts?

🏗️ The Structural Root Cause

The diagnosis: newsrooms are applying influencer-marketing playbooks to a trust-building problem, which requires a completely different logic.

Journalism innovator Liz Kelly Nelson has warned that the real risk isn’t just how newsrooms partner with creators — it’s who builds the infrastructure that governs creator journalism.

Writing in Nieman Lab, Nelson described two divergent paths: one where platforms build creator programs optimized for their own needs, using engagement metrics and ad inventory rather than journalistic integrity, causing the most sensational voices to rise while careful, community-embedded reporters remain invisible.

The other path involves creator-governed systems for discovery, standards, and partnerships where journalists and creators can be found based on beat expertise, geographic coverage, and demonstrated trust-building, not just follower counts. Nelson, along with Justin Bank and Ryan Kellett, is launching an infrastructure project to help close that gap before platforms define the terms alone. (More on that later.)

The root issue is that newsrooms still define “authority” through a legacy lens. A credible partner looks like a journalist, talks like a journalist, or used to be a journalist. But audiences have already moved on from that framework.

Audiences trust the epidemiologist who explained COVID variants better than the evening news did. They trust the local urban planner whose YouTube videos make zoning laws digestible. These people command deep loyalty in niche communities — exactly the audiences newsrooms can’t reach through traditional channels.

The American Press Institute, which has been running newsroom-creator collaboration experiments, references a taxonomy from consultant Adriana Lacy that categorizes potential partners into four types: niche content creators, community leaders, micro-influencers, and macro-influencers.

For local news organizations, API argues, what matters most is that a trusted messenger’s community overlaps with your market area and has a need for your journalism. That category of “trusted messenger” includes activists, nonprofit leaders, and small business owners whose influence comes from community embeddedness, not audience size — and it’s the one most newsrooms underinvest in.

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💡 Who’s Solving It (+ How)

Influencer Journalism, founded by Adriana Lacy — an award-winning journalist, educator, consultant, and entrepreneur whose background spans the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Axios — is one of the most direct attempts to bridge this gap.

The platform helps newsrooms and media organizations combine journalistic excellence with influencer partnerships and modern storytelling techniques. Through strategic partnerships, video production training, and engagement workshops, Influencer Journalism empowers media organizations to reach today’s audiences on social platforms without compromising editorial standards.

In addition to partnership facilitation, the company provides short-form video consulting and training programs that help journalists adopt proven creator engagement practices. The approach treats creator partnerships as a strategic function — not a one-off campaign.

The American Press Institute has been running structured experiments across two cohorts of newsrooms, providing grants and hands-on support for creator collaborations.

A 2024 pilot through the Knight Election Hub supported six newsrooms experimenting with influencer partnerships around nonpartisan election coverage. In 2025, API expanded the program to 16 local and community news organizations, each receiving $3,000 grants to test creator collaborations that went beyond content marketing.

These weren’t transactional distribution deals but true collaborations built around listening, sharing control, and reaching audiences in ways newsrooms can’t do alone. The Houston Chronicle worked with food influencers to bring new energy to dining coverage. CivicLex in Kentucky tapped local creators to inspire small but meaningful acts of civic engagement, from litter cleanup to shadowing public officials.

Across both cohorts, API described its role as not just a funder but a guide and partner, helping newsrooms step outside their comfort zones and reflect on what real impact looks like.

Project C, led by Liz Kelly Nelson — who developed the concept during a 2024 Sulzberger Fellowship at Columbia — has built a Slack community of 60-plus 200-plus independent journalists who connect daily to support each other, share strategies, and collaborate.

The initiative also runs “Going Solo,” an accelerator co-created with Ryan Kellett, Blair Hickman, and Caitlin Dewey that provides practical training for journalists transitioning into the creator space.

The News Creators project from FT Strategies has proposed Information Credibility Guidelines for creators who feel a strong personal responsibility for accuracy but lack the formal frameworks of a traditional newsroom.

🛠️ The Build Opportunities

Opportunity 1: A creator-expert discovery platform purpose-built for newsrooms, not a recycled influencer-marketing tool. Think of it as a matchmaking engine that surfaces subject-matter creators (scientists, academics, policy experts, community leaders) by beat, geography, audience trust signals, and editorial alignment.

Current tools like CrowdTangle are gone, and nothing has adequately replaced them for this specific use case. A product that indexes expert creators across YouTube, Substack, LinkedIn, and podcasts — scored by domain credibility rather than follower count — would fill a painful gap.

Opportunity 2: Beyond discovery, there’s an opportunity to build partnership infrastructure: standardized contract templates for expert-newsroom collaborations, shared editorial guidelines that protect both brand safety and creator independence, and measurement dashboards that go beyond clicks to track trust indicators like audience retention, community sentiment, and subscriber conversion from creator-sourced traffic.

💬 Closing Provocation

“Publishers will finally learn the value of news creators” isn’t the real prediction for 2026. The real question is whether they’ll learn the value of the right creators — the ones who don’t look like journalists but hold more trust than most mastheads.

The newsroom that figures this out first won’t just grow its audience. It’ll deserve that audience.

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⚡️ tl;dr

• Newsrooms are rushing to partner with social media creators, but they’re picking the wrong ones. Instead of teaming up with “news influencers” who mostly offer opinion and commentary, they should be partnering with trusted subject-matter experts — scientists, doctors, professors, local community leaders — who already have the credibility that traditional media keeps losing.

• Public trust in news is at record lows, and these expert creators offer something personality-driven influencers can’t: authority rooted in real knowledge.

• A few organizations (like the American Press Institute and Influencer Journalism) are starting to figure this out, but most newsrooms are still stuck thinking a credible partner has to look and sound like a journalist.

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