How Keith Pepper turned an Atlanta newspaper chain into a digital-first media company

He started by consolidating the publications into a single web brand.

When Keith Pepper bought a chain of print newspapers back in 2020, he received an email from a columnist at the Atlanta Journal Constitution that basically asked if he was crazy. But Keith had a plan for taking a company that generated 98% of its revenue from print advertising and converting it into a digital-first media company.

And he’s done just that. Today, Rough Draft Atlanta generates 27% of its revenue from digital ads, and it managed this feat without seeing a significant decline in print advertising. This has allowed Keith to reinvest in the business by hiring more journalists, and it’s now stronger than ever.

In a recent interview, Keith explained how he consolidated all the newspapers under a single brand, his strategy for attracting online ads, and why he’s avoided placing his content behind a paywall:

So I bought the company in December of 2020. In March of 2021, we launched a morning newsletter called Rough Draft Atlanta. And it was a new endeavor. It was a new brand. We started from zero. It was a new model for Atlanta. So Axios wasn't here yet. They hadn't launched Axios local. I had been following what Ted had done with the Charlotte agenda. So that was the vision – something between the Morning Brew, the Skim, the Hustle, and what they were doing in Charlotte. I took all of those inputs and, and knew that we needed something like Rough Draft in Atlanta.

There just wasn't something like that. And it was for an audience of one, because I had moved back here after being away for a long time. And I wanted to know what was happening around town where – what did I need to know about food concerts, et cetera. So that was what we had in mind when we built Rough Draft. So that was the name that has led to the entire digital presence and the company being rebranded as Rough Draft Atlanta.

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Transcript

Hey, Keith. Thanks for joining us. 

Hey, Simon. It's good to see you. 

So you own and operate this company called Rough Draft Atlanta, which is a local news company in Georgia. We'll get to talking about everything there. But briefly, just to kind of talk about your background that led up to you basically becoming a local news entrepreneur. It seems like throughout your entire life that you were jumping around in the media space, both in traditional journalism, but then also on the outside with marketing and advertising tech and stuff like that. What was your initial interest and entry into media?

Yeah, well, the part that's probably not in my LinkedIn is that when I was a kid, we got three newspapers every morning at my house. So I grew up in a very news obsessive household, so much so that when I was a teenager, I personally used my allowance money to subscribe to the afternoon paper.

So I grew up in a time when Atlanta had in the morning, the Atlanta Constitution, and then in the evenings, the Atlanta Journal. So that was how cool I was in high school. I was rushing home to get the afternoon paper. I started working at WSB Radio, which is the flagship news radio station in the Southeast and one of the top radio stations in the country, part of Cox at the time. And I started working there when I was in high school. I just talked my way into an internship and I would sit and just learned how to how to run the board, how to produce, how to edit, and ended up working really all through my senior year of high school and then through college producing Georgia games, the Braves, the Hawks, the Falcons, and then eventually was the morning show producer after college and totally burnt myself out.

I wanted to get into sales. I was tired of waking up at three o'clock in the morning and being done with work at 11, just not really an ideal lifestyle for someone that's 23 or 24 years old. So it was impossible for me to break into sales there because they sort of saw me as this producer kid. So I ended up getting my way to New York in 1999. And it was at the time when the first dotcom boom was happening and all my friends were working at startups and there were parties every night and they were making lots of money. And so I was able to, I think for the only time in my life, applied for a job without knowing anybody, just blindly applied on the internet at a company called Jupiter Communications, which was a research company where, young people were writing research reports about how the internet was going to disrupt business, in particular media. And so I was on the sales side. So I was around a bunch of really smart people that were thinking about the future of media and digital media and what the internet would bring. And my role was to do sales and emerging markets.

And so I got an amazing experience where I was able to travel around the world. My first trip I took in that role was to India and then Singapore and Australia on that same trip. So I think for the first two years I worked at Jupiter, I never took one domestic business trip. It was only flying around the world.

And you're just pitching people on why your research on media companies is essential for them to be able to do their jobs or whatever?

Yeah. I mean, this was the early days for the internet when everyone was just terrified of what the internet was going to do to their business. And so they would spend... tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on market research and to speak to our analysts, to read the research reports, to get the data, to make decisions. So that company no longer exists in that name, but pieces of it are at Gartner, pieces of it are at Forrester. So that was my first sales job, selling that research.

And a recurring theme when in your careers was that even when you were outside of the media, you always kind of had one toe still dipped into it. So you were keeping educated and probably forming your own opinions about what was going on in the media world.

Yeah, I was always studying media,  and when I went to the University of Georgia, I studied the business of media, and my emphasis was on telecommunications management. So I've always had that interest in what's happening. And then I joined Outbrain, and I worked there on the client services team.

Client side as in the buyers or the publishing partners?

I worked with both. There were two separate sides of the business, two different teams, one that would work with advertisers to help them maximize their reach and their ad spend. And then one that would work with publishers to help them maximize their revenue. So I got to sit over both of those.

Which is a great perch, I think, to really see what's going on between those two sides and what the advertising side needs and also the troubles and the tribulations and the anxieties on the publishing side. It probably was a pretty good educational experience for someone who would later own a media company.

Yeah, for sure. And it gave me insight into both. I was not, I mean, and I'm still... probably not an expert on ad tech. I came into that role with a lot of client service experience and I think a lot of business experience and maturity that was good for the time, but I was not an ad tech expert. So I learned a lot about ad tech and also learned a lot about the challenges that publishers face, which would later on serve  me well in my role of now owning a media company in Atlanta.

So you were living in New York. You decided to move back to Atlanta in what, 2019? 

Yeah. So I bought a place here in 2018. And then I commuted for about a year and a half. I was traveling every week between New York and Atlanta. Outbrain knew I wanted to be back in Atlanta just for some family reasons. And so they were super supportive. So I left Outbrain at the end of Q3 in 2019. I had been traveling internationally and needed to just hit pause for a second. So for the last three months of 2019, I was kind of doing nothing. I was consulting for a friend's company, just getting back in shape. I bought a dog. I was enjoying the cost of living differences between New York and Atlanta.

And then I started looking around for something to do and wanted to be engaged locally. There's a lot of really interesting things that are happening in Atlanta politically, culturally, just really felt like Atlanta was getting a lot more interesting. And so I was looking around at small businesses and I met a guy who had a group of community newspapers and he was turning 70. He wanted to retire and didn't have a really clear succession plan. So when I met him, we hit it off personally. We had a lot of things in common, knew a lot of the same people and we started talking and I got really interested, and I thought this sounds kind of cool. And I saw a bunch of things that I could do to make some changes. And then the pandemic happened and I was like, whew, I dodged a bullet. And so we put the talks on hold, but we stayed in touch through the summer, through the first phase of the pandemic. And then he kind of weathered the storm. There was one month when they didn't print and it was not a great revenue year for the company in 2020. And so we started talking again at the end of the summer. By then, I think I got some advantages on probably the cost because the business took a little bit of a turn. But I was still really interested and I still thought my plan made a lot of sense.

Let's talk about what this company was. So this guy was like 70 years old. Over a span of years, he had either purchased or launched several print newspapers in and surrounding the Atlanta area in the suburbs. And these were monthly free newspapers that were mailed to people's mailboxes, correct?

Correct.

And they were a little bit more than 98% print revenue, and because they were completely free, they were monetized almost 100% through advertising, mainly through local mom and pop businesses and stuff like that at that point.

Yeah, 100% advertising. So there was no reader revenue model at the time. All the content was free. And right, and mostly mom and pop businesses local businesses.

And it had like some websites with it, but they were kind of publishing to the websites almost as an afterthought, after the print newspaper would get mailed out.

That's right. It was very much of a print first mentality. They had three different websites for representing the three different newspaper groups that have been put together into this one company. So three different logins, three different ad servers, really kind of people operating in three different silos for the most part.

So you had people that were in editorial on one of the papers and they wouldn't collaborate with the editorial on the other paper. There were some sales fiefdoms where people didn't really communicate with each other and were operating in a very siloed manner.

Yeah.

How was it staffed?

So there were three full-time journalists and then about three or four full-time salespeople, an office manager, and a graphic designer who also acted as a tech guy.

Yeah. And to kind of explain how little they were focused on digital, like they had a long dormant Instagram account that would have been started by some intern. Like when you were kicking the tires of this place, it was clear that they just didn't have a very strong web strategy or anything like that.

Yeah, over five years of not posting on Instagram. And I asked them, surely there must be a strategy. And like you said, it turned out an intern had set up the password and they had lost it when the intern left. So in about, I don't know, less than 12 hours, I reached out to someone that used to work for me at Outbrain who is now at Facebook and they got me back into the account. And so we went from around 600 Instagram followers at that time, and just last week we passed 21,000. We've completely tried to reinvigorate the digital DNA of the company and move to being digital first. 

So you pointed out before it was very much focused on, let's get the print paper out the door and then we'll worry about digital. Now, everything we do is digital first, and really newsletter first. So what we think about every day is how do we fill our morning newsletter so that that is the new morning paper. So, the visual I gave you of me getting three newspapers at our house every morning, like obviously that doesn't really exist much anymore. It's pretty hard pressed to find someone that's getting three print papers delivered on a daily basis. But the newsletter for us, and for a lot of people, is the equivalent of the new morning paper. And so that's what we think about as our daily newsletter.

So it's December 2020. The price has been shaved a little bit because the newspapers have cratered. So you basically pull together your own financing, right, to kind of acquire this entire company from this guy, right?

Exactly. So I was able to acquire the company and closed in December 2020, self-financed. And then after we closed, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, this guy named Bill Torpy, who's like the last of the old school Metro columnists, at least for Atlanta, interviewed me.

We spent about 90 minutes on the phone talking and he wrote a column in which he said, I had to find out who this nut was that bought a newspaper company. It was very funny. It was very fair. And the next day or a couple of days later, I got an email from somebody very senior at Cox and they said, I read Bill Torpy's column and I need to know what you're doing. What do you know that we don't know, basically? So we met, and I said I've got this plan. I think it could be a good one. Here's what I see. Very transparent. Anyway, that person has since become a mentor, introduced me to leadership at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who's become a great partner of ours. So yeah, since then, we've been off to the races. So the first issue that was mine was January. And then with the second issue, revenue dropped in February by like 20%. And I completely freaked out. Might have been around the time that we first spoke because I was listening to all these industry podcasts and it just is doom and gloom everywhere.

And so I was just thinking to myself, what have I done? But I had a plan. I knew where we could lean in. I had a good sense of what the community needed, what people would respond to. So since that point, we've been growing every quarter.

Yeah. So let's talk about what that plan was. So as you said, when you were kicking the tires, each of these were just separate print newspapers with completely separate names. If you lived in one community, you wouldn't have known that these other newspapers existed. Your kind of first order of business when you took over was to consolidate – you kept all the print newspapers in terms of the names and stuff like that, but you consolidated all the web versions into one website.

That's right. So we collapsed the three different websites into one so that we would only have one design, one website to maintain, one SEO. It was the same with the social media handles. That took a little bit longer, but we eventually got all of those transitioned into one handle. And we made that name. We kind of rebranded as Rough Draft Atlanta. And that name came from the newsletter that we started. 

So I bought the company in December of 2020. In March of 2021, we launched a morning newsletter called Rough Draft Atlanta. And it was a new endeavor. It was a new brand. We started from zero. It was a new model for Atlanta. So Axios wasn't here yet. They hadn't launched Axios local. I had been following what Ted had done with the Charlotte agenda. So that was the vision – something between the Morning Brew, the Skim, the Hustle, and what they were doing in Charlotte. I took all of those inputs and, and knew that we needed something like Rough Draft in Atlanta.

There just wasn't something like that. And it was for an audience of one, because I had moved back here after being away for a long time. And I wanted to know what was happening around town where – what did I need to know about food concerts, et cetera. So that was what we had in mind when we built Rough Draft. So that was the name that has led to the entire digital presence and the company being rebranded as Rough Draft Atlanta.

And is that name a reference to that saying around journalism being the first draft of history?

Yeah, it's a play on that. We had a bunch of names that I was playing around with, and one of my close friends was a very senior executive at Turner over Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, and those products, and I got a text from them at like three in the morning that just said, ‘rough draft,’ that's it. And so I went with that. And yeah, I think it's great. It gives us plausible deniability on typos and other mistakes that we may have. 

What was the thinking behind the consolidation? There were people who weren't getting access to different nodes of journalism just because they didn't happen to live in that community, even though if you live in a suburb of Atlanta, you might be interested in restaurants or something happening in actual downtown Atlanta versus a nearby suburb, and this allowed a lot more for cross pollination of audiences? Was that part of the thinking behind that, that consolidation of the brand?

That's right. It allows us to grow our audience. I mean, otherwise the audience is just constrained by those geographies. I think the best use case is an example of a hip restaurant opening in Atlanta and people from the suburbs want to come to that restaurant. And the restaurant wants people in the suburbs to know about it. So both from a content perspective and also for advertisers, it's allowed us to really just kind of take down the geographic constraints. And by also not having one of the neighborhood restaurants – there were suburb names in our title digitally – it allows me to grow our audience. So we're able to really continue to reach into the Metro area to grow our digital audience. And so otherwise we would just be so constrained. 

We're not a news desert. There are news deserts in and around Metro Atlanta, but in the areas where we are, there's a lot of news outlets, right? There's at least three TV affiliates with local news. There's at least one or two radio stations. There's the local paper. There's a bunch of independent people. If we're going to grow, if we're going to be able to expand our reach, we've got to figure out how to do that with verticals like dining and real estate, but also in art, but also geographically. And so having one website that wasn't tied just to one suburb allows me to do that.

And then in terms of the publication process, how did that change? Because before the print product would go out each month and then all the articles would be published to the web. How did you change up the publication schedule for print versus the web?

Everything goes web first, and we don't spend any time thinking about the homepage layout design, et cetera, anymore. Like everything just goes on the feed. I think there's a lot of brain space that gets wasted thinking about design of a website where in actuality, all that matters is the feed.

So everything goes on the website first, and then a percentage of that goes into the morning newsletter. And then at the end of the month, the print papers are sort of the best of the web. So what you're getting in that monthly print publication that's mailed to your house. There's nothing that's in there that you should not have already seen on the website or in the newsletter.

And because now stuff's being published as it's finished, it also changed what you were putting in the print paper in the sense of it needs to be more evergreen and stuff like that. You're not going to print some three-week-old piece of news or something like that.

Right. Much more features. We have a handful of columnists that run every month in the print paper. We have a lot more pages on food coverage and then less breaking news that's in the print paper.

And so you said that you had this crisis moment the second month. When you looked at the website after this consolidation and the quicker metabolism of the publication and stuff like that, also consolidating your social media accounts and getting the newsletter running, did it look like a hockey stick growth in terms of traffic? Did you see pretty immediate results in terms of building an audience?

No, the only hockey stick growth has been around newsletter growth. Our website has actually grown a lot more this year than it did before, but it's been growing kind of slow and steady. We were doing no paid acquisition. We had asked the team to become digital first, that didn't mean that suddenly everybody was, you know, a digital expert, including myself.

And so it's taken time for us to really dig into the bells and whistles around what Newspack can do for us. We recently got into the Google showcase program, which got us featured in Google news and discovery. So there are just always things that I didn't even know existed that we're learning about and trying. We're experimental, we're willing to try a lot of different things, but the growth didn't come right away. It came on the newsletter side and it came on the newsletter and digital revenue side. So their revenue grew significantly, but the traffic numbers have recently caught up, but it took a minute to get there.

Interesting. I would have thought it would have been more immediate. So in terms of the Rough Draft brand, what's your sense of how much that city now recognizes that brand? Because obviously before, like you said, you were getting no kind of brand cohesion from having these different print newspapers. How quickly do you think you've built brand affinity, brand recognition there? 

Well, I'm a first time business owner and I'm still a psycho, so not fast enough for me. But I mean, we have a tremendous amount of goodwill in the community, I think. I think people are noticing us more and more. This year in January, we were able to hire the editor of Eater Atlanta. So we got Beth McKibben, who's one of the most respected food writers in Atlanta and the Southeast to come over to work for us. So she left Vox and joined us in January. And so that raised our profile a lot. I'm the chair of the Atlanta Press Club. I'm constantly out and about at a lot of different events. We're working hard to raise our profile that way. So I don't know.

Anecdotally, when you're out meeting new people and you say Rough Draft Atlanta, do you feel like you're getting more and more people who are saying, oh, yeah, I know that?

Yes. Anecdotally. Yeah. Yeah.

So, you saw this like hockey sick growth on the newsletters. What were you doing? I mean, obviously you've launched the newsletter, so you were producing this product, but what was driving people to convert into newsletter subscribers?

So we sponsor a lot of events. So we're engaged in the nonprofit and event world. So that helped. The product is really good. There wasn't something like it in Atlanta. And we work with companies like Sparkloop on the referral program. We got into an accelerator through Google News Initiative and Village Media. So we were able to do a lot of acquisition through Instagram and Facebook ads. So in that program, any paid marketing that we've ever done, we only do related to newsletter signups. So we're really focused on that. And then having the print papers gives us a unique opportunity and a unique advantage to promote the newsletter in there.

So it's really been a combination, but mostly organic. I mean, we did some paid acquisition through Village Media in a program that we're in with them, but those really don't stick around like you get when you're doing organic stuff through local community events that we sponsor or that we're out and about at.

On the website, how are you funneling people into signing up for the newsletters?

So a couple of different ways. I mean, one, we're very early users of Google's Reader Revenue Manager program. So when you go to our site, you may see a Google pop-up that asks you for a contribution. That's a revenue contribution. And if you dismiss that, or if you donate, then you'll get another one that's for newsletter signups.

So that's one way. NewsPack campaigns. So NewsPack has a lot of built-in, they call campaigns. So these are things that you may see in line in an article that says ‘sign up for our newsletter.’ There are pop-ups – we don't do a ton of those. We've got the Google one that comes up, but I don't like that. We don't like to do a lot of pop-ups, but we could do it through that. And then we work very closely with Dan Oshinsky, and he's helped me really think about how to position the newsletters, the value proposition, and make sure our landing pages are optimized the right way.

So just like a lot of small optimizations that all kind of added up to a lot altogether. 

Yeah. There's not been a silver bullet. 

So when you bought it, it was 98% print advertising. So what did you do to reorient your sales process, your sales staff towards advertising? What kind of ad products did you develop and how did you get your advertising staff oriented around selling that? Because anecdotally, I've heard from people who run print newspapers and they tell me that they're kind of old school salespeople. They hate selling web ads because they don't know how to do it. They've been selling, you know, print ads for 20 plus years or whatever it is. So it's just like such a pain in the ass to get them to sell these things. So what was kind of your process for trying to move a bigger piece of that pie to the digital side?

So this is a great question. And you hit on a couple of different things. So I've got a team that's been selling print ads for 40 plus years. So I think it's even more so than that. The first thing that we did is we stopped giving it away for free. So we said no more free digital ads. So we put a value on it. That was the first thing we did. 

Because before it was like a free add-on to the print ads.

Right. It was a free add-on to the print ads. And so we instantly put a value on it. And then when we redesigned the website and we moved over to Newspack, we cleaned it up. We totally cleaned up the site. So we only have four different ad units. They're all high impact, super clean. There's no programmatic on our website. So we make almost $0 from programmatic, We decided we're going to have no programmatic. We're only going to sell local. And we sell our ads on a share of voice. We sell it on a share of voice sponsorship model. So I know what I want to make every month on our digital revenue. And so we set that as a goal. And then we divide that into 10% tranches. And so we sell 10% share of voice to local advertisers. And so some months you may get a really high traffic month. Some months we may have a low traffic month, but they know that they're buying a local audience, high impact, brand safe, clean, well lit website. And so that's the value prop that we put out there into the community. We still need to do a better job of it.

One of the things that we also do on our website is we keep 10% of our inventory for nonprofits. So we get a lot of requests from nonprofits, sponsor events, trade for advertising kind of things. So we keep a percentage of our website where we can promote local nonprofits that we support. But what the Share a Voice model does for us, and I think this is something that would benefit other local sites like us, is that it allows us to keep rate integrity, but to have a price for people that may need to to spend less. So if you only need an ad for two weeks or if you can only spend half of what we propose, then we can just prorate that for you and that allows us to keep our rate card integrity, but it gives you a product where you're still getting a great value in terms of digital advertising.

So when you say pro rate, the ad would only load on a certain percentage of page loads that is, that is comparable to whatever you paid or something like that.

Exactly. So when we put it into Google, we use Google ad manager and you can just set the share of voice percentage. So it's a sponsorship versus it being a CPM. Instead of saying, you're going to pay X CPM, we say you get 10% share of voice. And if your budget only allows you to spend half that, then we give you 5% share voice.

So if you say you get 10% share voice, that means that if the page is loaded a hundred times, 10 of those times, your ad will be showing on that page.

Almost, but because every ad, every page has between like six and 10 ad units, it's the aggregate of all the ad units of all the pages. You should be there for 10 percent of the time. 

So that allows you to scale up and down your pricing to hit anybody at any price point that they can actually afford basically.

Right. But to keep my integrity of the rate card. I'm not discounting. We're just prorating. So it's much better from a sales perspective. It's much better. Now that's part of the answer. I mean, the other answer to your question rather is that, not everybody wants to be in print anymore. So advertisers are telling us we don't want to do print. That's also driving the shift towards our digital numbers going up. But the business has really shifted.

I mean, that 98% number that I told you when I bought the company, I mean, this year we're pacing almost 27% digital. So that's the hockey stick that you're seeing on that growth. But that’s only part of the story. The piece that makes it a good story is that our print revenue has stayed steady. So some months print goes down, some months it goes up a little, but overall print has remained steady for us. And so that's why the digital growth is a real positive If it was only the digital growth and print was falling off a cliff, then that would just be the tale of the newspaper industry for the last, you know, 30 years.

And are these just all display ads or have you created any kind of native advertising units or anything like that?

Yeah. So we have sponsored content on our website. We do sponsored articles for people. And then our newsletter ads are almost all native ads. So those are inline, you know, traditional native ads that are in our newsletters.

And so you were 98%, print 2% web before, what's that kind of pie chart look like now?

So now we're pacing this year for 27% digital. 

Wow. And you said that's all growth on the digital side without giving up much on the print side.

Print remained flat. It's probably gone down a little bit this year, but 1% of our revenue now is reader revenue. So we have a very nascent reader revenue strategy, but it's there if we need to turn it up, but we kind of don't push it very much because our advertising revenue is going pretty well, but the print has remained steady. When it goes down in certain months –, so July in particular is not a great month for advertising – we can just print fewer pages. So I'm able to maintain the margin in that we were able to stay within a range of pages within the print product to keep our margins there.

And so now that you've had that increase, what has that allowed you to do in terms of reinvesting in the product and stuff like that?

Yeah, so now we have seven full-time journalists. We're spending a lot more editorially than we were.

So you had two before and you have seven now.

Right. Yeah. We hired a full-time journalist, a senior dining editor from Eater. We've added two more full-time beat reporters and we've got two that are basically full-time, part-time beat reporters for the cities that we're covering.

How are you prioritizing that coverage? Like obviously you have someone who's going to restaurants and stuff, but for the other ones, do you have reporters who are going to like government meetings and stuff like that? Are you doing in-depth civics reporting?

Yeah. So we've got people that cover specific cities. So they're going to city council meetings and other public meetings for those cities that they cover. Atlanta is one of our cities. We don't cover every Atlanta city council meeting because of what I said earlier.There's a lot of people that are covering those meetings, but for other markets that we're in we are sometimes the only people that are covering those meetings. So if you think about the continuum of on one side, what we call the news people need, that's local government, public safety, education. And on the other side of that continuum is what we call the stories people crave. So real estate, food, arts and culture. You know, our goal is to be somewhere in the middle on average, we want to be somewhere in the middle of those two things.

The print paper probably skews a little bit towards the feature stuff. And depending on what's happening, there's no slow news weeks in Atlanta as the people like to say, or in the state of Georgia, especially during election season. But, you know, between the hurricane last week, there's a chemical fire today. There's a water main break earlier this summer. There's a lot of hard news that we've been thrown into, but, I think of that continuum, the way we think about it, we're probably on average somewhere in the middle.

And you mentioned this nascent reader revenue strategy. It's basically kind of almost like a donation type system, right? Like you're keeping everything 100% free, but you're trying to use language about supporting local journalism and stuff like that.

Yeah, we're dipping our toes in. So because we're for-profit, I don't think we use the word donate. So we try to use the language of ‘become a member.’ We've got some decent swag that we give people. Last year, we had two events. I'd like to get the event bucket dialed up a little bit more in the coming year.

It's a goal that we're probably not going to hit this year of doing more events, but I think that, yeah, we're looking at it as a way for people to become a member. I don't foresee us ever having a paywall or ever having paid products for people.

It's just a lot to manage. So I think that the route for us will be around access to certain events, some cool swag. And then there's just the feeling that you're supporting independent local media.

And so do you feel like you do want to dial that up a little bit more in the future? Or would you hire a director of memberships or something like that to try to focus on that? It seems like you're like, this is nice to have extra money, but I'm not really focused on it. Would that be an accurate summary of how you regard the reader revenue thing?

I'm totally conflicted on it. Absolutely. I would love to not ever dial it up. I think if we can have a healthy advertising program, that would be my dream. I think for me, I feel a lot of responsibility for the product. I feel a lot of responsibility to the community. I'm from here and my family's from here. I think if we put out an appeal that we were in this dire straits, as you kind of see a lot with some small local publishers, I think we'd get a lot of response and then I'd feel even more pressure to deliver. I've got enough anxiety as it is, I think having that outside investment, whether it's from the community or whether it's from investors, would not really jive with my personality. I would love for our advertising to continue to be strong, but I'm also realistic in watching the trends in the market and watching what's happening in the industry. So I know that it's something that we need to be prepared to do. I just think it definitely changes the dynamic of the relationship with the readers.

So like there's this debate that's going on within local news about whether it's fundamentally sustainable to run a for-profit local news company. And so that's why you're seeing a lot more nonprofits in the space. But you're also seeing some pushback from some people being like, hey, don't give up on profitability yet. Like, there's still a lot of juice to squeeze out of this. It's like, don't don't give up on this. Obviously, you're running a for profit entity. What is your view? Do you think that people are giving up too early in terms of thinking there could be an actual profitable model for local news?

None of this is easy. I’ve worked since I was a teenager and I'm a worker. You don't know me enough to know this, but I've never worked so much in my life. But I love it. I love what I'm doing. But when I think about how this would scale to other markets, it gets even more difficult.

I can see how we're beginning to scale locally and we're gaining readers digitally in and around the metro area. We've launched a new print product in an adjacent community, but all of our print products are contiguous or essentially contiguous to each other. So my writer can be at one meeting in Tucker and then be in Dunwoody for another meeting that afternoon, right? I can be at coffee with a client in Atlanta and then 20 minutes later, be at coffee with a different client in Brookhaven. So that gets really difficult when you start to scale geographies, when I have to get on a plane or drive a few hours. 

I think the other piece that makes what we do more sustainable is that I'm in the community. Right. So I'm the owner. I'm in many cases the face of the company. I'm out at chamber of commerce meetings. Last week it was seven nights in a row of events. You know, whether those are nonprofits, whether they're civic things, whether it's entertainment stuff, I'm there. So that gets a lot harder when you try to scale things. We are profitable. We're growing. We've added more journalists. We paid our journalists bonuses. Are we doing a ton of investigative journalism? No, we're not, but we're not saying that that's what we're doing.

So we're saying we're going to get people this product that we think is clean, engaging, brand safe for advertisers, has gotten some local scale in terms of our numbers and as a differentiator. I mean, our print product is a huge differentiator in the market, both in the quality of it, the timing of it, right? I think the cadence of monthly for print is right. And the way it's delivered through the mail is unique for the market. But those are hard to start.Starting a print product from scratch is not for the faint of heart

I guess the question that I was trying to get at is like, do you think those people who say the state of local news or something fundamentally unprofitable –  that those people are being a little bit too reductionist and painting with too broad a brush by kind of insinuating that the future  of local news 10 years from now will be basically run as a nonprofit?

I guess I believe it's possible because we're doing it. I'm not ready to throw in the towel. I have to constantly come up with these caveats. We had a print product that was already up and running when I got it. We're in a big market here in Atlanta. We have a larger advertising base to draw from. So I think those are two things that are critical. We've got a big audience that we can grow. I don't have a great answer for you on that. I mean, I hope that it's possible.

But I also think there's a lot of great nonprofits that are doing really cool work. I think some of those will need to consolidate as well. And we work with a lot of nonprofits. We provide some of the nonprofit journalism outfits that are here in Atlanta, we run their content in print because they don't have a print outlet. So we'll take a story from them and we'll give them distribution in our print paper. And that's a great partnership for us. And we've done a lot of collaborations locally with both for-profit and nonprofit companies that have been positives across the board for people.

So what do you hope to be doing two or three years from now that you're not currently doing? Like, would you like to just be employing more reporters or expanding to new regions or new beats or launching a podcast or video? Like, what do you want to be doing that you currently can't do, but you're hoping two or three years from now?

So I'd like to see us continue to grow our newsletter and grow more in the vertical. So we didn't even get into talking about this, but we've launched vertical newsletters. So every morning we've got our main one that goes out to 50,000 subscribers. And then each afternoon we have a vertical newsletter. So we do one for seniors. We do one for art. We have one for film. obviously one for food. We have one for the Jewish community. We have a monthly one on books. Every Saturday we do a news quiz. So I see a bunch of ways to continue to grow those vertical newsletters.

I think that there are some geographic expansions that we can look at. So again, in contiguous areas around where we are. And then I think one of the things that I'd like to do, I've had on my whiteboard for the last almost year is, I'd like to write more. I'd like to launch more of a personal column just both about the process of what we're doing of building media company or rebuilding and growing the media company. That kind of a local column for Atlanta would be really fun for me to do.

So those are things that are on my radar. But for the most part, the first year, I think when we first met, I woke up every day and the first thing I did was check the bank account. Now it's probably like the 10th thing I do, three days a week. But I think for me being a first time business owner, the first year was like, can I do this? The first year was like, what have I done? The second, then we ended up growing. The second year was like, Oh, this is kind of fun. Let's try to grow some more. Now I've got much more confidence than I have before. And I'm having so much fun. So, you know, yes, I would love to continue to hire more journalists. I'd love to continue to build out the verticals that we're doing. I mean, food is, you know, is, is a passion of mine and, passion of Beth's, who's the editor that we have for that. 

So for the verticals, is that just creating a better user experience or is that also an advertising strategy of having a more kind of narrow audience?

It's very much of an advertising strategy because we needed more inventory to sell. So our newsletter very quickly became very popular and also is essentially sold out for the rest of the year. One of the things that makes our newsletter really good is there's not a lot of ads in it. And so once that's sold out, we needed to create more inventory. And so it's, you know, it's both, it's a good user experience. It gives the writers, you know, fun things, ways for them to dig in deeper. We have an associate editor who's a young journalist named Sammie Purcell, who has passion for film and film reviews. And so we've given her a newsletter on Atlanta's film scene, but also she's reviewing movies every week and it's become quite a thing. I don't see us getting into podcasts. I like that we partner with other people on podcasts.