How Local News Now built its loyal audience

Probably the chief worry right now in the media industry is how publishers will survive as large platforms like Google and Facebook continue to send less and less traffic, but Scott Brodbeck doesn’t lose much sleep wondering where his audience will come from. In 2010, he launched Arlington Now, and he’s grown the company into a network of news websites operating in the DC metro area. Not only is the network’s homepage traffic well above the industry average, but Scott is confident that his approach of producing differentiated content will protect him from platform disruption.

In a recent interview, Scott walked through every aspect of his audience engagement process, including how he automates his social media distribution, why he never shut down his website comments section, how he gets 40% of his audience to come to the homepage, and why he doesn’t bother with organizing live, in-person events:

So, you know, in my view, I do think that the traffic has declined. I haven't looked at the latest numbers, but my sense is it has declined. But we also see a bit of an effect where it's become more of a hits business. It used to be we'd publish an article and we'd see an immediate traffic spike once we put it out on social. And we very rarely see that now. It's only certain stories that do that.And then the effect over time is it becomes a hits business where there are days where we'll have one article that'll do 10 times the readership of any other article and stuff that used to reliably do a few thousand views in a day are like doing a thousand, but that that one over there is doing like 10,000 or more. We don’t want to go overboard optimizing for readership, but we do want people to come to our site and consume our content. That's kind of the point of the whole thing we're doing here is we want people reading us, so I'd say it hasn't resulted in us adjusting our editorial strategy. It's just a recognition that whereas we might publish three things and they'd all do pretty well, we're going to publish three things, and one's going to do really well and the rest are going to do okay. That's kind of our expectation at this point.

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Transcript

Hey, Scott, thanks for joining us.

Happy to be here. Thanks, Simon.

So you are a very successful local news media entrepreneur and you run a series of sites covering basically the suburbs around Washington, D.C. I've actually had you on the podcast before, a real long form interview where we talked about the entire origin story of your company and how it expanded and I would definitely encourage people to go back and listen to that if they want the full story of how you started everything. For this interview, we want to drill down a little bit and talk specifically about your audience engagement, but I just want to catch everybody up to like what it is that you actually run. So the first site that you launched was called Arlington Now. When did you launch that?

Yeah, so Arlington Now or ARL Now, that was our first site and remains our flagship site. It was launched in January 2010, and it was launched on a whim. I was getting my MBA at the time, and I was going to go work for Jim Brady's TBD.com, also in Arlington. I got a little impatient. It was taking a while to launch it, and so I launched my own site, and it was like a shower thought that turned into a business.

So we're coming up on 15 years here, which is kind of nuts. I was in my mid twenties when I launched this. I'm now a 40 year old with kids and back problems.

And you eventually then launched to several other sites. When did you expand to the other sites?

So we've had kind of a checkered history of expansion. It's always been the goal to come up with a good, really strong model for original local news reporting supported by advertising, so no paywall. And we launched a site for Bethesda in, I want to say, 2012, so like two years after the Arlington site. I ate ramen noodles for a year, but after a year, it started doing decently well.

And for context, Arlington is a suburb of DC that's in Virginia, and Bethesda is a suburb of DC that's in Maryland.

That's right. So we launched the Bethesda site. It came into direct competition with a very strong publication called Bethesda Magazine, which was like the vogue of the DC area, just like a massive magazine full of ads. And they launched a direct competitor to go up against it.

Long story short, it did not end up being a profitable venture for us. And we sold the site to Bethesda Magazine, which folded into their site. But, you know, going forward from there, I launched a couple of sites in the district in D.C. itself. Those also did decently well, but were not sustainable.

Had to close them, took on some debt. Eventually, we launched sites in Fairfax County and Alexandria, which are neighboring jurisdictions to Arlington. And those are now going strong.

Fairfax is a very large county. It's like over a million people. Originally, we kind of broke that down into two different areas, Tyson's, which is this emerging kind of edge city off the Beltway, and then Reston, which is in the Dulles technology corridor with a lot of corporate headquarters and tech company offices there. What we found was that it was challenging from a business perspective to have those sites broken down as they were. So we merged them into one larger Fairfax County site while still doing hyperlocal coverage focused on those areas.

So you own three separate websites?

Yes. So three sites. And then we partner with some other sites. So PoPville, Prince of Petworth, covers neighborhood issues in the district. MoCoShow is in Montgomery County, Maryland. And then Potomac Local is in Prince William and Stafford Counties, Virginia. Those are owned and operated by other very talented local news operators, but we help them out with some of the web hosting and the sales side of things that, you know, part of the business that kind of scales a bit as opposed to the news coverage.

And how big is your staff?

So we're actually expanding the staff right now. We have someone starting next week, someone else starting next month. We also just onboarded a new executive assistant. So if you include myself, we're 14 people as of July 1st.

And how much of that is editorial?

Eight editorial, then five business team members, and then I kind of wear multiple hats here.

And as you mentioned before, your company is primarily ad-supported.

We are like 95% ad supported. There is a small component of membership revenue here and some merch revenue, some affiliate, some licensing. So actually that 95, if I were to look that up, it might be a little closer to 90, but it's still very much majority advertising.

And a lot of that advertising is just local direct sold ads. And then you also have like some programmatic.

Yeah, programmatic is, I want to say, like 20 or so percent of our overall revenue. So it's not insignificant. And, you know, while direct sold is our bread and butter and we sell everything from display ads to email blasts to sponsor content, the programmatic is, I mean, if you look at where we would be without it, we would be a smaller organization for sure. I think I'll give us a little bit of a pat on the back because I think we do our programmatic in a more thoughtful way that doesn't severely distract from the user experience. The user experience of the sites is important to me. And so we don't have videos popping up in the middle of the screen and what have you.

Well, I think that's a good overview. I encourage people, if they really want the full story of the founding, to go back and listen to that original episode, but I want to kind of drill down into specifically how you grew your audience. 

I know it was 15 years ago, but when you think back to the launch of Arlington Now, how did you notice that people were discovering it in those early days?

Yeah, so it was a different world. 2010 was very much a different world than we have right now. Now, you still had Facebook and Twitter. Those were still our main social channels at the time. And you still have search. So in some ways, it's not that different. Those were the ways people were discovering us in large part.

There was some component of people emailing stories to one another. But Google was, very early on, it was Google. People would be search for things like, house fire in Penrose, or something along those lines. And we'd be the only ones reporting on it, so we would pop up.

The behavior that was different that we saw back then was there was more bookmarking. There were more people actively seeking out and following an RSS feed. We saw more of that when we had a big story than we do right now. People expect stories to come to them right now to a greater extent than back then, where it was a more manual, deliberate process.

Yeah, and I've talked to a lot of media entrepreneurs, like local media, and they find that Google is always the first big traffic driver. Because there's kind of a scarcity of local information, there's not a lot of competition for keywords relating to local information. So it's not like you can actually start generating Google traffic a lot earlier than if you are starting a brand new site on something that's a little bit more catering to a broad-based national audience because there are already so many sites competing for those keywords at the national level, but at the local level there's like a lot less competition. I'm guessing that's especially so back all the way in 2010.

Yeah, and this is one of the reasons why I like local news as a business, as challenging as it is, is because my dad was always a big fish, small pond guy. And that's very much what you are when you do local news, is you can become the primary source of information for a community. And that lack of competition, while it's hard to operate in a smaller market, the lack of competition makes it a bit easier to get ahead. And as we record this podcast, Google has just announced it is rolling out its search experience with AI. And if I owned a site that did commodity content about what time the Super Bowl is or what have you, I'd be quaking in my boots, because that that's gonna just wipe out my business. But as I sit here right now, I'm a little worried about it, but I'm less worried about it because we are often the only source of information on a given topic. And we also, by being very local and boots on the ground, we'll go out there and we'll get photos of the scene and people will comment on it in our comment section. I know not everybody loves comment sections, but we have an active comment section. So I think we have reasons for people to go to our site and not just read a summary on Google, which is a good place to be.

Yeah, AI can't replicate original content. And that's why I think the next stage of media involves just doubling down on original reporting, which AI can't do.

Yeah. If you're not doing that, then you're going to have a tough time in the years to come. There was a time where it felt like stronger businesses would be born out of aggregation than out of original reporting, I now feel very good about continuing on with the original reporting side because without that, you are very likely to be disrupted by AI.

So you mentioned social media being an early driver. When you look at your social media strategy today, what does it look like? Which platforms are you prioritizing and how are you using them to basically increase traffic to your site or to increase your visibility?

So on the average day, I spend zero minutes on social media in terms of our posting. And that's because we've created automations around our business to automatically post on social. So we're posting on Facebook, we're posting on Twitter, we're posting on Threads, in Instagram.

For Instagram, we take our top stories of the day and put them up later in the day. But these are all automated, and we, myself and my colleagues, do not have to spend a minute doing it in the average day, which, I think, lets us focus on original reporting. Look, the social networks, they don't send as much traffic as they once did, but they are still important channels. And so getting our headlines and links out to our audience on those channels, if that's where they choose to spend their time, that's important, but I don't want to spend a ton of time trying to produce content exclusively for the social networks. We’re going to do so in an efficient manner. It's generally just the headline and the link.In some instances we use a little AI to mix up the the post, but no, we're not spending a lot of time bashing our heads against the wall trying to think about how we can do more on social. It's just the basics.

So to translate what you're saying, when a reporter publishes a story, there's something in your CMS that automatically generates a Facebook post, a Twitter post, a Threads post. And then does that just sent out right away or is there something in the automation that spaces them out or anything like that?

We use Zapier extensively for automations. And actually, it's driven through RSS. So once it posts and it's seen on RSS, it'll put out the post on Twitter, put out the post on Facebook, and then there's another series of automations that later in the day looks at what were the most viewed posts of the day, and that informs what ends up going out on Instagram and what gets re-socialed on Twitter and Facebook later for a second post.

And what does it look like on Instagram?

On Instagram, we use a tool called Bannerbear. It will take the main image of the post and the headline and put it in this little kind of square format with our logo on it. And then that's the visual element that goes on Instagram. And then people can access the article through the link in bio. It puts that little square on a page. And if people click on it, it goes to the article. We generate about a few hundred clicks per day on our Arlington site through that. So it's not big.That's like a 10th of, you know, Facebook or Twitter, depending on the day. But it's something, and we know that there are people who just spend their time scrolling Instagram at night and we wanted to have a way to reach them.

And so do you spend like zero time monitoring comments and stuff like that on your social media posts?

My EA does most of the moderation of the comments on the site. In terms of moderating stuff on social, to me, that's Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk's problem. That's not something that I want to be spending our valuable time on.

And how has social media traffic referrals, like how have they changed over the years when you look back to maybe 2014 versus today?

So, you know, in my view, I do think that the traffic has declined. I haven't looked at the latest numbers, but my sense is it has declined. But we also see a bit of an effect where it's become more of a hits business. It used to be we'd publish an article and we'd see an immediate traffic spike once we put it out on social. And we very rarely see that now. It's only certain stories that do that.And then the effect over time is it becomes a hits business where there are days where we'll have one article that'll do 10 times the readership of any other article and stuff that used to reliably do a few thousand views in a day are like doing a thousand, but that that one over there is doing like 10,000 or more. We don’t want to go overboard optimizing for readership, but we do want people to come to our site and consume our content. That's kind of the point of the whole thing we're doing here is we want people reading us, so I'd say it hasn't resulted in us adjusting our editorial strategy. It's just a recognition that whereas we might publish three things and they'd all do pretty well, we're going to publish three things, and one's going to do really well and the rest are going to do okay. That's kind of our expectation at this point.

And by doing really well, you mean on social media in terms of people sharing it and stuff?

Yeah, I mean, social drives a lot of that. I don't want to say it's the only thing driving it. We see sometimes... Actually, a really important readership source is the app Newsbreak. People don't talk enough about Newsbreak, but they seem to have a huge audience because every once in a while, it just sends a...it's like the Drudge Report of local news. Every once in a while, a headline will hit, and it'll just send a ton of traffic to you.

And Newsbreak is like a mobile app you can download, and it's just like an Apple News or a Flipboard or something like that, and it just aggregates news.

Yeah, it's a news aggregator app. They've amassed a large audience somehow. I get the sense that the audience is a bit on the older side, but every once in a while one will hit and then you'll get this ton of traffic. It does seem to to skew a little more crimey, they like crime and breaking news more, but um we haven't to this point really adjusted the mix just to optimize for that. I still think that having a kind of balanced mix is important. And while, you know, I think it would be a mistake to be like, OK, we're only doing crime news because Newsbreak sends us big traffic for our crime news.

And they're not pulling your content into the app itself. They're just sending traffic out to your site.

Yeah. Look, I have some issues with the social networks and the Newsbreaks of the world. But at the end of the day, if they're allowing their readers to click out of their network and visit our site and see our ads and help us monetize, then I think that's good for the information ecosystem here. 

Newsbreak has a program to let you consume content right on the app. Ultimately, those schemes just don't result in the same level of revenue and engagement that bringing someone directly to the site results in.

Are you indexed on Google News? Do you also get rushes of traffic from that?

We're indexed on Google News and we're also part of Google News Showcase. We actually see decent traffic from both of those. I was somewhat surprised by the showcase traffic. It does seem that there's a decent chunk of people who are using that.

And what about Reddit? Because I know there are some active subreddits in the D.C. area.

Reddit's not a big source of readership for us. The ethos I get from Reddit is that they wouldn't be big fans of me coming in and posting our links. So we just sort of let that play out organically. There's another message board where we sometimes see readership from called DC Urban Moms and Dads. It's another UGC based, you know, huge message board with lots of topics. And sometimes when a link's posted, it drives readership, but it's very small compared to the Google and social network stack.

Do you do anything to make your site sticky to keep people, once someone's landing on the homepage or an article or something, to keep them clicking around the site in terms of recommended content or different things like that?

The bigger companies have more sophisticated strategies here, but we do make a point of having – once people scroll to the bottom of the site – having links to other recent news stories, having links to some of our self-serve sponsored content, so events and announcements. People can post those on our sites directly for free or for a fee to promote it. So we do put a number of links down there kind of in the square. You know, here's the image. Here's the headline that you might see in an Outbrain or Taboola. But we don't use Outbrain or Taboola. We want to promote our own content.

Do you train your reporters like whenever they're referencing something they've reported on before to always make sure to link to that?

Certainly that's encouraged. It's not so formal that we have a very systematic way of doing it, but in general, part of what makes local interesting is the context of the stories. And so we encourage our editors and reporters to always do story research, no matter what the topic, to see what we've written about it in the past. And if we've written about something relevant, link it back. I mean, look, that oftentimes will not result in that much traffic. The number of people clicking through to contextual links like that is very small, discouragingly small in some cases. But I do think it's important to at least give people that option.

Are you actually running different social media accounts for each of your verticals?

So our Arlington site and our Alexandria site have their own social media, but there's no topic vertical that we have additional accounts for. In Fairfax County, I mentioned those started as two separate sites covering Tysons and Reston. Those accounts remain, and so we've structured the automation as such that when we publish something of interest to Reston or of interest to Tyson's, those will specifically go out on those accounts in addition to the larger Fairfax County FFXNow account.

And obviously all these counties are right next to each other. People travel between these counties. What do you do to drive audience engagement synergies across your sites? Because obviously someone who's reading the Fairfax site will be interested in things happening in Alexandria and Arlington. Do you do anything to try to cross-pollinate those audiences?

Very little. Ultimately, people in Reston don't give two hoots about what's happening in Arlington unless they happen to work in Arlington or spend significant time in Arlington. 

We have a morning news aggregation post where we link mostly to other news outlets, you know, the Post, the weekly papers in town, and those kind of places, TV stations. And once in a while, we'll link back to each other's articles. There might be something of relevance happening in Alexandria that we link to in Arlington, but there's not a systematic approach here. It's just what makes sense for the reader. There are some instances where we have something like right on the border. Our sites, geographically, the coverage areas border each other. And so sometimes something right on the border will be of relevance and we'll be able to create two different localized articles out of it. And there are some regional stories. For instance, there's a regional homeless count that looks at homeless individuals by jurisdiction. And so our reporter was able to do a story for Arlington and is going to be likely doing a story for Fairfax as well. But those, you know, that kind of synergy, it's nice to have, but it's not, you know, a significant driver of business or cost reduction or anything like that.

You mentioned your newsletter. What's your newsletter strategy?

Our newsletter strategy is very much like our social media strategy in that we don't really spend much time on it on a day-to-day basis. The newsletter is automated. We're switching out the technology from RSS to some other backend automations, but it generates at the end of the day around 4 o'clock PM and sends out the links from the past 24 hours. And that's what our readers want. They have not shown a great desire to have some very voicey written email. I respect those who do that, and I think it works in some areas. 

We had an AI version of that. Actually, we still kind of do. Just as an experiment, we created a more voicey AI email. And it never caught on. And when I read it, I'm not super impressed. So... Look, and we had a human written email like that as well. There are some people who liked it , but it didn't get the broad reach of our just basic automated headlines, photos and links email that we send out reliably at 4 p.m.

So, yeah, a lot of local news orgs obviously have a morning newsletter. But have you experimented with the morning versus the evening or you just decided that's what you wanted to do?

The conclusion I've come to, and I've been wrong on stuff before, but the conclusion that I've come to is that let's say that we need to spend the same amount of time writing that email every day as we do for one article, one reported article. Reporting that one additional article would almost always be worth it compared to the time spent writing the email if you look at overall audience engagement. It's the news that brings people in. There might be some people who prefer the voiceier morning email, but at the end of the day, what value we provide to people is the news reporting. That's what I focused on.

If we find ourselves in a position down the road where we are much better resourced than we are right now, maybe then I start thinking about, okay, we should have an Axios-like email in the morning. As it stands right now, I don't see the value.

And I also kind of think that AI will get to a point where the difference between a human-written voicing morning email versus an AI-written voicing morning email will be negligible, at least at the scale that we operate in.

How do you drive sign-ups to the newsletters?

We've mostly eschewed doing the pop-ups just because I don't like the pop-ups and I want to have a site that feels like a place you actually want to go to rather than a place where you get bombarded by stuff you have to close or it's trying to fight for your attention. So our advertising strives to be more polite and our email newsletter signups strive to be more polite. We have a link at the top of the site on the menu bar. We will remind people on our pages every once in a while to sign up for the email newsletter. But that's what we're doing.

There's an argument to be made that maybe we should be doing more. Email is an important channel. It is a great hedge against the Googles and the social networks of the world because you get to reach people directly. But at the end of the day,  I'm not willing to significantly sacrifice the user experience just to drive email signups.

When people register to create comments or something like that? Does that generate signups for the newsletter or anything like that?

No, we've thought about doing contests and stuff that would automatically sign people up. We might revisit that someday, but right now that's not something we're doing. Actually, one strategy we employ, I forgot to mention this, is paid Facebook lead ads. A couple times a year we'll run a lead ad campaign for each of our sites. That'll generate 500 to a thousand signups and that'll help keep the list growing and also help us reach some new readers that, you know, maybe they just moved to the area, didn't know about the site. But this is a longterm thing. So if I were to be launching a new site right now, I'd go hard on, you know, lead ads and other email strategies. I'd probably have that pop up, but these are mature sites that have been around for a few years and they get good readership as it is. So we're taking the slower and steadier approach.

One of the things you see a lot of publishers prioritize is homepage traffic, especially as the Googles and the Facebooks retreat from sending traffic to new sites. Do you do anything to optimize your homepage or make it something that people would want to actually just visit the homepage versus subscribing on Facebook or whatever?

Yeah, for sure. Some of our sites, the homepage traffic is like 10%. For more mature sites, you see higher percentages. So like Popville and ARLNow, it's close to like 40%, I want to say. So these are people who are just used to typing in the name of the site or have bookmarked it. I think that's one of the advantages of being earlier to this. In 2010, people were more used to memorizing URLs and it became a habit. I mean, local news is a habit game. The people sitting down with the paper with the morning coffee, you know, that drove a lot of the newspaper business for a while. So I do think that's one of the things that makes it harder. But yeah, we want a homepage that people can use as a front page. Ours is kind of more of a feed.

Yeah, like you have a very clean kind of feed versus you go to some of these local newspaper sites and it's just making your eyes bleed because there are like a hundred different headlines above the fold and there are flashing things and widgets and stuff like that. Is it just reverse chronological, or are you doing anything to prioritize what people see on the homepage?

It is straight reverse chronological. You can make an argument that would be better if we put our top performing article at the top maybe but you know what there's also the question of what utility are your readers getting out of it they’re coming to our home page just to have as little scrolling as possible to make it to the top story of the day, or are they coming because they want the feed, they want they want to get a sense of what's going on. I'd argue that our readers are coming because they want that scroll. They want to see what the news of the day is. We only publish six to eight articles a day, so they can scroll down the homepage and get a sense of what the news is of the day. I think that's the utility that they're getting from it. A lot of news businesses get run on metrics. They pop up the email banner because they see that when they pop up the email box, they get more signups. Or they put the flashy headline at the top because it gets more clicks. But what they aren't doing is they aren't thinking about the long term of, is this a good user experience? Are you driving habits? What is the bigger picture over time of the choices you're making? And that's why I'm happy to be doing things the way we are. Maybe that's naive. Maybe the metrics guys will show me that I could be doing better, but that's kind of the approach we've taken over the years and what I'm sticking with for now.

And do you have any widget anywhere on the site that ranks content by popularity? Like of the day or whatever?

No, no. Well, we don't do that, but we do a weekly countdown of the most read. So that's another automation we have. So there's a post at the end of the week that has the most read stories of the week. And there's also a daily one that puts out the most read stories on social. So it's kind of social where we try to drive traffic in that way.

How do you encourage audience engagement? You mentioned that you had a comment section. What are you doing on that front to encourage comments or utilize the comments in some way? You said you have a person that's part of their job. Is it just straight moderation or are you trying to do crowdsourcing?

So for sure, a lot of our news coverage comes from tips. Those don't necessarily go to the comment section, but people emailing us or filling out an anonymous tip box. We get a fair amount of news that way. In terms of the comments, what I've come to believe is that the utility of the comment section isn't for the people doing the commenting. It's for the people... casual lurkers who just like reading an article and then seeing some people post funny memes about it or argue between two different points of the article.

So our comment community, I kind of thought it would expand and what it's become is this relatively small community of names you see over and over again. You do get new people here and there, but it's become this kind of very, I don't want to say insular, but community where people will reference each other and whatnot, and the overall number of commenters is probably in the dozens as opposed to hundreds or thousands. And I think that the purpose that serves is to give another dimension to articles for readers as opposed to because we're trying to encourage those dozens of people to engage more time on the site.

I will grant the point that at a larger scale, if you're a regional daily or something, the comments become worse and unwieldy. But I think eliminating the comments section was one of the biggest mistakes that news outlets made. A lot did that. They weren't willing to put in their time or the effort to moderate the comments. They didn't like people complaining about them. We rarely see complaints about the comment section. We used to get a fair number. But I don't think it's because we're doing anything different. I think it's because people have kind of accepted that modality of the way people interact.

I really think that they were giving something up when those news outlets were like, oh, we're going to let people engage on social media. What a mistake in my view.

I can't imagine why you would want that to be on a platform other than your own.

Yeah, also I think the more niche you are, the better the comments. Like my Substack doesn't have a super robust comment section, but almost every single comment that's left on one of my articles is high quality and from people who are actually interested in the topic.

I think when you get really broad and you're writing about like national politics and stuff like that, like it's completely useless. But something, especially at the local level or on the specific niche or something like that, I think that's where a comment section can really shine.

In terms of the moderation, the moderation of the entirety of our comments section, which is pretty active for our owned and operated sites, is being done by a Philippine-based executive assistant as like one-tenth of her job. So it's not like you needa full time person doing this. 

Yeah, especially since so many larger news organizations employ community managers or social media editors and stuff like that. It seems like that would be a natural thing that they could do. But so many publishers just never really wanted to touch it, so they were just like, we're just going to get rid of it completely rather than engage in any sort of moderation. Do you do any in-person engagements?

We've experimented with it over the years. It's just like such a lift to plan out an in-person event. It never matched for us with the amount of benefit we've gotten from a business or an engagement standpoint, you know, basically the hardcore fans show up and that's great, but it takes so much of our time to plan it out. We get so much more leverage out of our time doing internet stuff, posting articles, slightly enhancing how we do our social media posts or stuff like that on an automated basis. It's just not something that I've seen as worth the investment of time and effort.

What content categories tend to reliably drive the most traffic?

So we actually just added a new beat that will go across our three sites, and we added that because it's two of the beats that reliably get the most traffic, to your point. Breaking news and public safety is one of them, and then local business.

Breaking news is like a car crash or a fire or something like that?

Yeah, yeah, we had one this morning, you know, fire in a shed that set off firearms at a middle school., and the middle school was evacuated. So stuff like that. The TV stations aren't going to cover a fire, but a bunch of parents at that middle school were wondering what was going on and why their kids were evacuated. That's the perfect kind of story for us. We want to build some more expertise around breaking news and have an editor whose job it is to be monitoring for that across the sites.

I think that scales across the sites a little better. With local business, you get businesses that operate across Northern Virginia. I think it makes sense for that to be this cross-site beat. And then the editors of our sites focused on specific geographies will get to focus more on the county board, the city council, some of the more governmental-related stuff. Again, from my view, you want a balance here. If you go all breaking news, it's going to get boring for a lot of people. If you do all government coverage, it's going to get boring for a lot of people. If you do all restaurants, it gets old. You need the mix and that also brings in a greater size audience because there are going to be some people who are more interested in the restaurants and there are going to be some people more interested in the schools.