How a former MSN.com editor built a sustainable local news startup from his living room
Mark Talkington launched The Palm Springs Post as a side hustle and grew it into a real business.
Editor’s note: This case study is based on an interview I conducted in 2023. I’m currently on vacation and will return to regular programming on the week of July 6th.
For more than two decades, Mark Talkington operated at a scale most journalists never experience.
He helped build ESPN.com during the earliest days of digital publishing, experimenting with web video, audio, advertising formats, and the kinds of interactive products that would eventually become standard across online media. Later, at Microsoft, he spent 20 years helping run MSN.com, a massive news portal that aggregated content from thousands of publishers and reached audiences at a scale that rivaled the largest media companies in the world.
But when Talkington launched his next media project, he went in the opposite direction.
Instead of trying to reach hundreds of millions of readers, he focused on a city of about 44,000 people.
The Palm Springs Post began in February 2021 as a side project with just three subscribers. Talkington was still working full time for Microsoft, but he noticed a gap emerging in his own community. The local newspaper had shrunk dramatically after years of industry decline, and basic civic coverage — city council meetings, neighborhood issues, public policy debates — was becoming harder to find.
So after finishing his day job editing one of the largest news websites on the internet, he would open his laptop again at night and cover local government meetings.
“I know how to cover City Hall. I know how to cover a beat,” he said. “My plan was just to cover these city council meetings.”
Within a little over a year, that experiment had grown into a newsletter with more than 13,000 subscribers, enough revenue to hire a journalist, and a roadmap for expanding across the broader Coachella Valley.
Talkington’s story reflects a broader shift happening across local media. As legacy newspapers contract, independent operators are discovering that smaller, more focused news products can succeed by building direct relationships with readers, keeping costs low, and measuring success through community impact rather than page views.
In our interview, Talkington talked about how he produced the newsletter during his free time, his business model, and what other local news entrepreneurs can learn from his approach.
Let’s jump into it…
From the earliest days of digital media to a local newsletter
Talkington’s career began in traditional newspapers, but he became fascinated with the internet earlier than many of his peers.
In the mid-1990s, while working at a newspaper, he pushed his employer to take the web seriously.
“I went to my paper at the time and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to put this thing on the internet,’” he recalled. “They laughed me out of the room. And I said, ‘It’s probably a good time to make a move toward the future.’”
That decision eventually took him to Seattle, where he joined Starwave, the internet company founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Starwave helped create ESPN.com, and Talkington became part of the team building one of the first major digital sports destinations.
At the time, the rules of internet publishing were still being invented.
Unlike newspapers, websites had unlimited space. Stories could be updated instantly. Publishers could experiment with multimedia. ESPN.com began developing early video and audio products, building league websites, and figuring out what online advertising could become.
Advertisers were eager to participate.
“We were sold out,” Talkington said. “We couldn’t produce enough inventory.”
The company quickly moved beyond basic banner advertising and began creating branded experiences, custom sections, contests, and other advertiser-driven products.
After Disney took full control of ESPN.com and moved operations to Connecticut, many Seattle-based employees looked for new opportunities. Talkington joined Microsoft in 2002 and spent the next two decades working on MSN.
There, he watched another era of digital media evolve.
MSN started as one of the dominant web portals, alongside companies like Yahoo and AOL. It aggregated content from publishers, curated major news stories, and sent enormous amounts of traffic around the web.
Over time, the operation became increasingly automated. By the end of Talkington’s tenure, Microsoft was preparing to eliminate the remaining human editorial roles overseeing the homepage.
“They are finally going to turn it all over to automation after all these years,” he said.
But even as his job at one of the world’s largest technology companies was disappearing, Talkington had already started building something new.
Finding an opening in local news
Talkington moved full time to Palm Springs in 2016. For several years, he admits, he did not pay close attention to the local media ecosystem.
That changed as he began noticing how much the local newspaper had declined.
In its heyday, the newsroom had about 75 employees. Years later, after ownership changes and industry-wide cutbacks, that number had fallen dramatically.
“They just started to really shockingly go downhill,” he said.
The problem was not that the remaining journalists lacked talent. There simply were not enough of them. Reporters were stretched across multiple cities and beats, meaning important civic stories often went uncovered.
Palm Springs was exactly the kind of community where that absence was noticeable. It had a highly engaged population, including many retirees who were accustomed to robust local media in larger cities.
“This town is very active, very involved,” Talkington said.
The pandemic created an unexpected opportunity. Government meetings moved online, which removed one of the biggest barriers to civic reporting. Talkington no longer had to physically attend meetings around town. He could finish his Microsoft workday, open another browser window, and start reporting.
“It leveled the playing field between me and any other reporter in town,” he said.
The Palm Springs Post launched on Substack with a simple strategy: provide the kind of useful local information that had disappeared.