What we write about here
Most writing about local media is either an obituary for newspapers or a pitch deck. We're trying to do a third thing: write down what actually happens when you build a hometown site and try to make it pay.
That means the unglamorous parts. What a business owner says when you ask for three hundred dollars a month. Which sections of a local portal people actually read (the answer surprised us in Douglas County). How long it takes a new town to show up in search, and what you do during the months it doesn't. Why the events calendar is the hardest module to get right and the one that brings people back weekly.
We'll get some of it wrong in public. That's fine. The alternative is another round of confident advice from people who've never sold an ad in a town of nine thousand.
Who this is for
Three groups, mostly.
Facebook group admins and newsletter writers come first, because they've already done the hard part and usually can't monetize it. If you moderate a community group, or you send a local email that people actually open, you've built the thing that's genuinely scarce. The rest is machinery, and machinery is learnable.
Then local business owners, who keep getting sold advertising that leaks out of their trade area. If you run a shop in Castle Rock and your ads reach Denver, you're paying to talk to people who will never drive to you. We write about what local reach actually costs and how to tell whether you're getting it.
And chambers, civic groups and the people who just love their town too much. You know the ones. Every community has somebody who shows up to every meeting and remembers what the corner used to be. That person usually knows more about local information gaps than any consultant we could hire.
The bias we're writing from
We build local portals for a living, so read accordingly.
We think the national platforms took something from towns and gave back a worse version of it. We think a local site that covers restaurants, events, jobs, homes and businesses under one roof beats seven apps that each do a slice badly. And we think the person running it should live there, because you can't fake knowing which road floods.
You'll notice we don't publish traffic screenshots or revenue claims. Partly that's because our network is young and the honest answer is that it's early. Partly it's because that genre of content is mostly theater. When we have numbers worth showing, we'll show them, and we'll say how they were measured.
New posts land when we have something worth saying, which works out to a couple a month rather than a weekly quota. We'd rather publish six pieces a year that a publisher forwards to another publisher than fifty that nobody finishes. If that pace suits you, the contact form is also how you tell us what you want covered.
If you want to argue with any of this, the contact form goes to a real person.