How a local newsletter company is leveraging AI to cover hundreds of counties across the US
6AM City co-founder Ryan Heafy insists he's not trying to replace human journalists.
When Ryan Heafy talks about scaling local media, he doesn’t sound like a typical publisher. He instead sounds more like the head of product at a tech firm — which makes sense given he spent years in project management at aerospace companies.
In fact, his process-driven mindset has shaped 6AM City from the beginning. Founded in 2016 in Greenville, South Carolina, the company set out to answer a deceptively simple question: What if you took Morning Brew’s breezy, five-minute newsletter format and applied it to local news?
Nearly a decade later, 6AM City operates newsletters in more than 400 U.S. markets and reaches over two million subscribers. But its most consequential shift has happened only recently — a move toward AI-powered “seed markets” that allow the company to launch daily local newsletters in towns as small as 20,000 people, for pennies a day, without immediately hiring editors.
The goal, Heafy insists, isn’t to replace journalists. It’s to build a nation-wide local news infrastructure that could eventually support a large network of community editors.
From Legacy Print to Newsletter Scale
6AM City began not as a startup, but as an experiment inside a traditional newspaper company. Heafy’s business partner Ryan Johnston came from Community Journals, a family-owned print publisher with deep roots in Greenville — and almost no digital presence.
“At the time, that was when you had Morning Brew getting off the ground, The Hustle, the Charlotte Agenda,” Heafy recalled. “There was a real opportunity to take this local media company that’s all print and hop into the newsletter space and maybe scale.”
The initial product borrowed heavily from the Charlotte Agenda playbook: a conversational tone, a short daily read, and a strict avoidance of divisive topics like crime and partisan politics. That editorial stance wasn’t accidental.
“That really gave us a larger total addressable market,” Heafy said. “It was a safe place for advertisers.”
The first Greenville newsletter launched with an unusual advantage: a built-in advertiser base. The company pre-sold roughly $500,000 in advertising to local businesses that had already been buying print ads. With revenue secured, expansion followed — first to nearby cities in the Southeast, then outward.
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