Scott Brodbeck on Building Hyperlocal Media Brands in the D.C. Area
Jacob Cohen Donnelly: I always like to hear the origin stories of how people got into media because I don’t think most people start out with the dream of running a media company. How did you wind up working in media, and what prompted the launch of the first site in the Local News Now network, Arlington Now?
Scott Brodbeck: First of all, thank you for having me on. Really excited to be on this podcast where a lot of people I really admire and respect have been on before me. My journey to launching our sites started after college. I actually started out in TV news, local TV news specifically. I went to GW in DC and worked for a TV station here, NBC4. I also subsequently worked for FOX 5. I got my start in local broadcast journalism. Fast forward to 2009, the financial crisis is a thing. I’m getting an MBA at Georgetown because I always had an entrepreneurial bent, and I see a potential need to make my own luck in this business as things are crumbling in the traditional media space.
I’m working the overnight shift at NBC4 while getting my MBA, and I say to myself, “I am getting really, really burned out only working when it’s dark outside. I would really like to be doing something with the internet rather than just broadcast.” I tried to convince my bosses to let me do more daytime stuff and more internet stuff, and they said, “It’s not really in the cards,” and I quit. It was a couple of months after that I’m trying to decide what to do next that I was also trying to get a job with TBD, Jim Brady’s local news operation here in the DC area.
He was taking a while to launch it, so I decided, “I’m here living in Arlington. There’s only a weekly newspaper that no one my age reads. It doesn’t even come to the apartment building where I’m living. Maybe it’d be interesting to start a local news thing for Arlington.” That was pretty much the shower thought I had that turned into what is this business 11 years later.
Jacob: What were the early days like when you were running Arlington Now, was it just you doing all the writing and publishing and ad sales, or did you early on start to build a team?
Scott: I started out, I’ll be completely honest, with no business plan whatsoever. My plan was simply to get a camera, a police band scanner, and a laptop together and go out and report local news. Some of the first stories we reported were of the house fire and big snowstorm variety. This was early 2010. I didn’t have a plan for how we were going to make money. I didn’t know whether anybody was going to read it. I didn’t have any other employees. It was just me. In current media parlance, it was a creator-driven enterprise. It eventually started growing and it started to grow to new sites and new employees just over a year or two after I launched the initial site.
Jacob: A year or two into doing Arlington Now you started to expand into new areas. What were the parameters you were looking for that really piqued that interest to start growing into other cities in the DC metro area?
Scott: Once we started getting the audience and started getting advertising revenue, and I saw the business potential for this, I really started to think about what I wanted this business to be as it really grew into a business. I’ve always had a passion for local news working in local TV. There’s a reason why I went there in DC rather than trying to work in national news. Although I did that for a short period of time. I’ve always had a passion for local, and I decided that this business needed to have a mission of coming up with a business model that works for online local news and helping to spread that elsewhere.
That was the main impetus for launching new sites. I could have stayed just in Arlington and had a very comfortable lifestyle business doing pretty well. Instead, what I decided to do in 2012 was launch in Bethesda another DC area’s close-in suburb that has a demographics and a configuration similar to Arlington.
Jacob: I want to expand a bit on this because you’ve got a couple of sites in the network that don’t follow the same “City Now” structure. How did Tysons Reporter, RunWashington, and PoPville wind up in the network?
Scott: Tysons Now seemed like it would be a good domain name, but a gentleman named Tyson Snow owned it and I could never get in touch with him. That was how Tysons Reporter came to be. As far as the other two sites, those are actually sites we partner with. We have owned-and-operated sites. Our site in Arlington, then currently Tysons, Reston, and Alexandria in Northern Virginia. The other two sites are owned by others and we help them out with the tech and the sales. RunWashington is a regional running publication serving the DC area and Mid-Atlantic. PoPville is a neighborhood news blog that covers many neighborhoods of Washington DC and some of the very local goings on.
Jacob: One of the big things that I’ve noticed with a lot of publications that start with one and then start to evolve into multiple publications is they each have their own way of building out their teams. With your sites, does each publication have a specific team dedicated to it, or do the people who work at the company spread their time across the various publications? Then why did you make either of those decisions?
Scott: The staffing has evolved. Early on out of necessity, it was one person, one site in terms of the editorial. That’s obviously not very sustainable. You have one person and they need to take vacations and go to doctor’s appointments and if it’s just one person, one site, it’s difficult to fill in for them. In addition to that, local news often benefits from a more team environment, so two people can cover a community in more depth than one person obviously. The dimension of local we’re operating on here, which is an important distinction to make, is we’re more akin to a weekly newspaper in terms of covering suburbs, individual communities of a larger metro area.
We’re not a citywide publication more akin to a daily paper. The business model has not supported for us to have much more than one person per site. At this point, as we’ve grown we now have staffing across multiple sites. I’ve structured it so that we have one editor per site and then reporters who work across two sites, usually our Arlington site and one of our other sites in Northern Virginia.
Jacob: Then how do you think about the composition of the back office, so audience development, sales, technology, functions like that?
Scott: On the business side, we have one person who’s mostly sales in account management. We have one person who is mostly display ads and special projects. Right now we’re rolling out an awards program for our Arlington site. Then we have one person now, our most recent hire, who is dedicated just to sponsored content, which is in terms of our direct sales more than 50% of our direct sales. That’s our business side. It’s a pretty lean operation, and we’ve tried to really make it as efficient of an operation as possible. On the sales side, we’re mostly converting inbound leads.
Because of the popularity of our sites being very widely read in their individual communities, we get a fair number of advertisers coming to us and wanting to advertise rather than us needing to go out and prospect, or take a client out golfing or something like that that you might have done in the old days. Now most of our sales are being conducted via email. Some are still being conducted via phone. We’ve put systems in place between our CRM and project management software to be able to serve these clients very efficiently. Our three people, that doesn’t sound like a very big team, but they’re serving dozens and dozens of clients and doing so very effectively with good customer service.
Jacob: You have multiple publications all serving the DC metro area that is obviously a very thriving community seat of our government. As you start to think about continuing to grow, are there other areas in the DC metro area that you’re thinking about, or do you think that you are starting to reach a point where you might need to leave the DC metro area?
Scott: Growing on a owned-and-operated basis is hard. It’s hard. Launching a new site from scratch and hiring for it, and gaining an audience takes a lot of time and investment. I think we’re getting to a point where we’re going to see a lot more growth in the local space. I think we’re figuring out what the business models are going to be a lot more. I would say we’re in the iPhone 4 stage of online local news. In terms of most of the main business models and the way things work, those are mostly figured out at this point in my mind from where I sit. I think it’s refinement and being able to grow those things going forward.
I think with the acquisition of Charlotte Agenda by Axios, we’re at a point where we’re going to see a lot of things happening in the local online news space, and to grow on an owned-and-operated basis is going to take a lot of time and a lot of capital if you want to expand across the country, for instance. Our path to growth, I do not think is going to be the owned-and-operated route. I think our path to growth is going to be the partnership route. That’s what we do again with– we partner with PoPville and RunWashington. Those partnerships, from my perspective, have gone very well.
We’ve been able to take the scale we have on our business side, which doesn’t sound like much, three people, but that’s a lot more than you can have if you’re just an individual community site operator. We’ve been able to leverage that scale, again, not much scale, but enough to really grow revenue for our partner sites. I think that is a way to grow that makes a lot of sense, doing that in other areas. That is something we are pursuing, growing partnerships both here in the DC area and elsewhere.
Jacob: You mentioned the big investment needed to grow audience, so I want to spend a little time talking about that. What has been your strategy to grow the audience for the various publications? As you partner or launch new publications, do you have a playbook that you return to every time?
Scott: Yes, we do have a playbook that we’ve wrote out. I think it can use a little improvement where, for instance, we don’t have a referral program like an email subscriber referral program. That’s something I’m looking to implement and probably should have done earlier, but our general approach thus far has been to mostly leverage social media advertising, actually. Facebook lead ads to create an email list before relaunch has been part of that playbook, and it has been pretty effective, but in terms of making a local publication a regular habit, there’s only so much you can do before launch.
Really, it’s about the content and putting out news that is relevant to people that’s interesting that they want to share with their friends, and doing that over and over and over and over again, for many, many months before people start regularly coming back and knowing you as a brand name. That, executing on the editorial side, is difficult. It’s really hard, and I don’t think we have all the answers in terms of how to do that and how to scale that, but I think we’re getting closer. I also think that, if you can figure that out, if you can get the audience, then the business side is not that hard. I say this even though it’s taken me 11 years to get to this point, but again, most of our sales are inbound leads.
People coming to us for advertising because they want to reach our audience. When you have the audience, and you have an advertising business model, it’s just a matter of execution and not so much demand. At least if you’re in the right market, the market is a variable here. We are in some very attractive markets in DC and Northern Virginia. It doesn’t necessarily work in every market, especially if it’s smaller, our communities are generally 100,000 people and up, but I think it’s really about the audience here, and if you can get that, if you can really get a good portion of your local target audience to keep coming back, then you’re in a very good place.
Jacob: One of the other benefits of running multiple sites, and I’ve written about this multiple times now, is that you can share the technology stack across multiple sites. Every one of your sites looks identical with varying color schemes. Was that always the case, and what technology powers the Local News Now network?
Scott: That has always been the case that we’ve had all the sites on one look. We’re WordPress-based, big fan of WordPress. The look of our site and the backend functionality within WordPress is all custom developed. It’s become a bit of a Frankenstein over the years, as we’ve used a couple of different developers in a row, but ultimately, one thing that’s notable about how our sites look is that they’re all chronological blog-style sites. You go to the homepage and you can read full articles in chronological order. It’s not a list of photos and headlines and links. That I think works really well on this kind of community local level.
We’re producing I’d say about six to eight pieces of editorial content per weekday on our sites. That is a number that I really think works for our kind of local publication, and it’s also a number that works well for the more feed-style or blog-style homepage.
Jacob: Then is there any other technology that you think is critical to running this network of sites?
Scott: We’re pretty much off the shelf with a lot of what we do here. We’re using Pipedrive as the CRM, we’re using Asana for assigning editorial, we’re using Slack to communicate, Mailchimp for email. We’re not really doing anything too novel here. It’s just a matter of putting the processes in place, I think, in terms of especially on the business side to make sure that things are running smoothly and you’re executing well.
Are there pieces of custom technology I wish I had? If I could afford to develop it, sure, there are definitely things that I would like to automate. There are things that I think we could sell if we had the infrastructure on our website, but we operate in a world of constraints and we don’t have a huge web development budget, so we have just enough to make what we have and it’s working for us pretty well.
Jacob: Let’s move to the business model for the various sites. By and large, you’re an advertising business. By and large, most of your advertising comes from inbound leads. Can you break down the various products that you offer your advertising partners, and then to expand on that, are they mostly local ads, or have you reached an audience threshold where national brands are starting to look to advertise as well?
Scott: In terms of direct-sold, we’re almost all local ads. A lot of our ads are the kind of ads you would again, find in more of a weekly publication or very targeted on cable. We’re talking real estate agents, apartment buildings, medical offices, just to name a few. We’re not necessarily getting some of the large regional advertisers, although we are getting a bit more of that including health systems and other larger more regional advertisers. I think over time what we’ve seen is that advertisers have gotten more digital savvy. When this launched in 2010, it was a real uphill battle to get people to advertise on the internet.
Even then you’d think that it would be second nature, but we’re talking the long tail of advertising here. We’re talking very local advertisers. Our business has grown. I think it’s in large part to things we’re doing, but it’s also grown in part because local advertisers are just getting more comfortable with the internet and buying online advertising. As I mentioned before, our direct sold mix skews a little bit towards sponsored content. That’s an area I think we’ll continue to grow especially as we work to improve what we offer to those advertisers and maybe templatize it a little more to make it even more effective and more readable for readers.
Right now it’s a little freeform in terms of what advertisers can put up there. We still do direct selling of display ads of the rectangle boxes on the right-hand side of the page and we actually have clients who are very happy with that. I think the death of the banner is exaggerated. We have some very happy advertisers in there. Then to supplement that, we’ve gotten a little bigger into programmatic for our two highest-traffic sites over the past year or two. That provides a meaningful amount of revenue to us that’s allowed us to do some additional hiring in recent years, recent months rather. That of course is in terms of the ads I end up seeing on there it’s a mix of local, regional, and national. The national advertisers might not be coming to us to buy directly but they are coming to us through programmatic channels.
Jacob: When you’re trying to sell ads to these local partners who, by and large, don’t know too much about digital advertising, how are you pricing it? Are you trying to explain CPMs to them or are you selling on a sponsorship basis? What are they looking for when they advertise?
Scott: We are selling on a sponsorship basis. We tried CPM for a little bit. We dipped our toe into that water, but we’ve been mostly sponsorship based since launching. What we’ve found is that the majority of our clients like the flat rate sponsorship model. They like saying, “Okay, this ad is going to be in this position for this amount of time, and here’s how much it’s going to cost.” The problem with CPM is the variability. Also, a lot of our local advertisers just do not understand it, and it’s harder to explain to them how it works. Some of the local businesses, they judge whether their ad is being seen as– by whether they can go to the site and see it at any given time.
To say it’s in a rotation and it’s going to appear 50% of the time is a lot easier than saying, “It’s going to appear this many number of times, but who knows when that’s actually going to happen or who’s going to see it?” Yes, the sponsorship sale works very well for us and there have only been a few isolated instances where you have a larger, more regional advertiser that’s wanted the CPM, but that really hasn’t held our sales back.
Jacob: What is the breakdown of revenue between programmatic advertising and direct-sold?
Scott: That’s a good question. I would say, at this rate, it’s probably roughly about a quarter of our sales, of our revenues from programmatic. The majority of the remainder is through direct-sold advertising and sponsored content. We have a small membership component that we played around with last year as a result of the pandemic, essentially saying, “Look, if you are a big fan of our site and you want to help contribute and just get nothing in return other than allowing us to do more local journalism and not have to do less if things really turn south, join our Patreon and we’ll put your money to work.”
That has contributed probably a single-digit percent of revenue in 2020, but otherwise, the vast majority of our revenue is advertising. We’re starting out in January where we left off in 2020. 2020 we exceeded $1 million in revenue for the first time, and we’re just north of $250,000 in net income.
Jacob: I want to talk about that membership a little bit because when I was doing research for this, I noticed that you have Patreons for the various publications and subscription is all the rage at media companies today, but you haven’t gotten very aggressive with that strategy. Can you talk about what you’re thinking with regard to subscriptions and whether it’s something you’re going to prioritize going forward?
Scott: There’s a lot you can do when you have an audience. That is the main component you build on, and our sites have the audience. The question is, can we sell something to that audience that they really benefit from? The Patreon is, I’d say, a pretty low-bore effort. We’re saying that you’re not really getting anything other than the satisfaction of funding our journalism, and it has done exactly that. We’ve been able to hire more as a result of that, including a staff photographer, was a new position we added last year. It’s really upped our game in the visuals department, which I think is important.
Going forward, if we’re going to do more reader revenue, and I do want to do that eventually, I want to feel that we have something for which there is really strong demand. Right now there is demand for the advertising on our sites. We get advertisers coming to us, they get referred by other advertisers who’ve had a good experience. I think we have a very strong product that we’re offering on the advertising side. I want to feel that way about the reader revenue side if we’re going to proceed with it, and there’s just not anything at this point that I see that we can do effectively that gets me to that point. I think eventually we’ll get there, but we’re not there yet.
Jacob: In a perfect world, what does that environment look like? What is the offering that you believe local news companies like yours should offer for subscription products?
Scott: I have two trains of thought on this. One is that it can be content. There’s a lot of interest in people asking us on our Twitter feed, “Why did these police cars just go down the street? What’s happening with this business?” I can see a world in which we provide even more granular information to members and help answer their questions and that being a membership thing, but again, we’re pretty small. On the editorial side, we have just shy of two editorial staffers per site, and I think that would just be difficult to execute with existing staff. I don’t think that we could build that high enough at this point to really justify bringing on more staff.
As we perhaps continue growing the advertising business, that might build the editorial side enough where we can do more stuff like that. Absent that, the other train of thought is that there’s a lot going on in the community from an in-person standpoint. I don’t necessarily want to be an events business, but I think there are things you can do with a membership involving in-person stuff and physical things that could be interesting.
Newspapers in the past have found success having discount cards. I remember– what’s it called? There’s like a Washington Post points card at one point. I don’t know if that’s still a thing, but I do believe that that can continue to exist in a more modern context. It would just take execution and of course, the world coming back from the pandemic and doing in-person things again.
Jacob: You mentioned that you don’t really want to move in to becoming an events business. I know that there are other local media companies that, before COVID, were really starting to lean into that. What is your apprehension about post-COVID starting to do events, especially since you do think that there’s an opportunity for in-person things tied to a membership?
Scott: To be clear, I am considering some in-person events, and we’re going to do some experimentation hopefully later this year when things start to clear up. I really want those initial events to be focused on things that we can effectively monetize and that– service-specific informational or transactional purpose for the people attending. I think that there are things you can do around there that make some sense in terms of throwing events that just for a good time that’s harder. There are people in this world who specialize in doing that. I’m not convinced that I can do it any better than anybody else.
In the events, we’ve held in the past where it’s been like, “Let’s interview a newsmaker, let’s have a reader happy hour,” those have been nice, but they really have not been revenue drivers, and I don’t see the path to them being significant revenue drivers on this more hyperlocal level. Now, if we were a city-wide publisher, I could see that working more clearly, but you’re just dealing with ever smaller numbers as you go down to the more hyperlocal or community-level space, and it’s hard to make the numbers work in the current environment with the current options. Keeping my eyes open and seeing what we can do.
Maybe something comes along, but one reason I think we’ve had longevity is we don’t just throw everything at the wall to see if it sticks. We’ve been pretty disciplined in sticking to things we’re good at and trying to simplify down our revenue generation over time. Our media kit has shrunk not grown over the years, and we haven’t chased trends. I remember when everybody was doing daily deals, we never hopped on that trend, and it’s a good thing, it went away. I think a big part of making local work is execution, and if you get lost trying everything, you’re going to struggle with that on the things that matter.
Jacob: You mentioned earlier in the show that you were starting to investigate an awards business for I believe it was Arlington Now, can you talk about that and talk through what you’re thinking about launching?
Scott: If you look at pretty much any city magazine in the country, a big part of what they do is their annual awards. Oftentimes, best of Washington or best of whatever, and that is big business for these magazines. They’re often events associated with them, they help drive a lot of business-side awareness of their brand because businesses love winning awards, and like competing with each other and trying to be named the best. These publications, again, these are legacy print publications, but I happen to believe that they know a thing or two about what they’re doing here, and I am shamelessly taking a page out of their book and trying to replicate that online.
That sounds easy to do, is take this simple concept and then replicate it online. I found it to be a little more difficult to really translate it, but we’re working on it, and we’re in the midst of voting for our inaugural Arlies awards on ARLnow right now. The name sounds a little too much like the Dundies. We might have to evolve it over time. I don’t know. We’ll see.
Jacob: Let’s fast forward a few years, where do you see the Local News Now network in the next three to five years?
Scott: As I mentioned earlier, I think launching owned-and-operated sites is really hard. That’s been our expansion plan for the better part of a decade. I think for the time being, we want to focus on what we can scale and what we’ve been very good at, and that has been the business side of these community-level local sites. We’re pursuing additional partnerships this year and hope to get a few signed by the end of the year. We’ll see just how quickly we’re able to ramp up. What we do work for a very specific site serving a larger suburb or community that’s a subset of a city, a site that has a strong audience and an inbound sales interest from advertisers, I should say.
There are a fair number of sites that meet that criteria out there. I’m hoping to talk to everyone by the end of the year. What’s interesting is, okay, once you partner with those, and it’s a finite number out there, what do you do next? What’s the next part of that? Is it launching new sites? Is it acquiring other sites that might not have the audience but you can apply an editorial model and build an audience? I think what we’re doing from the partnership’s perspective is we’re taking sites that have the audience, but might not have the same level of monetization that we do, and we’re helping them monetize greater than they could otherwise, even with the revenue split, and our revenue split is generally about 50-50.
Once we partner with sites like that, as I said, we might look to partner with sites with not quite the same level of traffic, but apply an editorial model and help them grow their traffic. We might also look at legacy publications. I think an underrated thing in discussions of online local news right now is the remaining audience strength of legacy publications, whether it be daily newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, even some weekly publications and city magazines. These publications, they might have be weighed down by this print model that is going to go away largely, I believe, but they have strong existing brands often, they have big audiences.
You go to any given city and you’re probably still looking at the daily paper having the biggest audience in town. If not them, it’s probably a TV station. Does their business continue to degrade to the point where it might make sense for them to go online only, and then what is the way legacy publications like that– how do they go online only and retain a business? What I think will be interesting in a few years is whether a company like ours can play a role in that.
Jacob: Because you’ve been in local news now for over a decade, I want to spend a little time talking about it from a bit more of a macro perspective. For the longest time, local news was primarily owned by newspapers. Over the weekend, I watched two movies, which were both about The Washington Post newsroom, which used to be your local newspaper, but has since grown up to become a bit more of a national brand. For the majority of local newspapers in the country that can’t evolve like The Washington Post did, do you see a path forward for them, or do you think that they are doomed?
Scott: I too rewatched All the President’s Men this weekend. That’s ironic. As I said, these publications, they might be wounded dinosaurs staggering through a print wasteland right now, but they still have major brands and audiences. In media, the thing that really matters is the audience, is the concentration of eyeballs. As long as they can retain that, then there is a business to be had there. For a while, I thought that newspaper companies would eventually just die off. They still aren’t making very good decisions in many cases, and you have private equity players that are just buying daily newspapers to bleed them dry, but they’re still often the largest newsroom in town.
They still often have the biggest audience in town. Even when they’re sucked dry by the vampiric private equity funds, I still think that there’s a business to be had. Do not count them out. The question is what do some of the newer online players, what role do they play? You really don’t have an example right now of a pure-play online site that has grown up to be bigger than the biggest legacy player in town. Charlotte Agenda, which Axios bought, I think their numbers are about twice ours in the revenue and profitability standpoint as reported by The New York Times. They have a great reach in Charlotte, and they have an incredible product. I think they’re best breed.
I think Axios made an incredibly savvy move buying them in their expansion into local, but there’s still not– I believe that that local paper still has numbers on them. I’m pretty comfortable right now in our more hyper-local space, in our community-level space, again, competing with weekly newspapers. I think that’s a fight that we’re more able to win. I’m not actively competing against The Local Weekly, to be honest with you, but I think that the online peer plays in that space, in the more community-level space, have a greater opportunity to be the dominant player in their particular markets.
On a citywide basis, you have the dailies, you have the TV stations, you have public radio stations that are still strong. I don’t quite know how that will shake out, but what I suspect is that the online players, the Axios’ thing that they’re launching, at least for the starting out, are going to be more niche than the ubiquitous mainstream kind of an audience you have with the existing publications.
Jacob: You mentioned what Axios is rolling out and how they’re going to be a bit more niche than these major newspapers, and you also mentioned the Charlotte Agenda acquisition. What are your thoughts about what Axios is introducing in the local space, and what niche audience do you think they’re targeting?
Scott: I think what they’re trying to do is, they’re trying to cherry-pick the most attractive segment of the local markets they’re going in. They’re going after the upwardly mobile professionals, especially young professionals, people who are executive level, management in the local businesses. I think what they’re doing, and I don’t have any inside knowledge of this, but I suspect what they’re doing is, they’re going for that kind of more Axios-type audience, but on a local level, and they’re going to try to monetize that based on the strength of having this very attractive segment of the audience. I think it’s smart. [chuckles]
You don’t want to be the first to call a land rush on something because if no one else is rushing for the land, you end up looking silly. I think that’s what ultimately happened with Tim Armstrong of AOL and Patch. He launched like a thousand sites across the country thinking there was a land rush on and there wasn’t. I could talk more about Patch later, but I do think we are getting to the point, and again, I think we’re getting to the point with the business model of local where the timing of this might be actually right on point in terms of trying to establish that market position in the cities they’re launching. As far as I can tell, they probably want to take that nationwide if they can, if it proves successful.
Jacob: You’re also a founding board member of Local Independent Online News Publishers. Can you talk about why that organization was originally founded, and then what you’ve seen over the past few years with local publishers that are part of the org?
Scott: I’m really proud of LION and where it’s come. It really started as something that was a bit clubby for a few dozen publishers who were oddballs doing this very unique thing across the country. We’d get together on a Facebook group, and at an annual conference, and compare notes on what we were doing. It was cathartic because no one else was really doing much things like that, especially early on. Since that time, the organization has grown. There’s been more funding interest in local news and just from a grant standpoint, LION has expanded and has a full-time professional staff of a couple of people, and it’s continuing to grow and do new things.
The main constraint on LION’s growth is not really funding at this point, it’s the ecosystem of sites that can be considered LION sites. Now, that has grown. I think LION is in the 300s right now in terms of its membership, but what’s constraining some of the growth of sites like this is just a lack of infrastructure. That’s something that I’m hoping to solve potentially by partnering with other publishers, is that it’s hard to really grow a business operation and an editorial operation. To be able to execute on both is a skill that is not common. There are LIONs who are doing amazing jobs of doing both. There are also LIONs who are better at doing one thing than the other thing.
I think that there just needs to be more of a vendor ecosystem, more of a service ecosystem around these sites, to really allow the growth of LION-type sites. You’ve done some writing, Jacob, on the creator economy and some of the Substacks, the single-person, one-man band media operations out there, and you’ve noted that the business side of it is difficult. There might be interesting things happening in terms of supportive creators. I think it was this week, Forbes announced that they were doing this sort of network, where they’re doing a 50-50 split with some creators, and it was panned because Forbes website is clunky, and the brand isn’t what it once was, and 50-50 sounds pretty expensive.
I do think that, on a local level, that makes a lot of sense because it’s going to allow a lot more growth, and people who might launch sites and be really good at attracting an audience, but just don’t have the business side of it down, will have that opportunity as the space matures, I think.
Jacob: I want to close with the same two questions that I ask every operator that comes on this show. First, looking at your career, what is a mistake you or the organization made, and what did you learn from it that made you better professionally?
Scott: I’d say the main mistake that sticks out for me is, I think I mentioned launching in Bethesda. That had a largely happy ending. I ended up selling the site for a not unsubstantial sum to my competitor there, who runs Bethesda Magazine. I think that there was some hubris in launching Bethesda Now and thinking that we could just hire one person and have the same outcome as we had with the Arlington site. It really did require more active management, and Bethesda Magazine was not just going to lay over and let us attract an audience.
They launched a site called Bethesda Beat to actively compete with us, and we stalemated on audience. They bought us, and they were able to grow from that, and everybody was happy, but we did not necessarily achieve what we were setting out to. I think that’s partially just planning a strategy, but it’s also execution and making sure that if you’re going to go in and do something, that you have the resources to do it well. Even if you have to do so pretty lean because of the size of the market.
Jacob: Then if you could offer current or prospective media operators some advice to succeed in media, what would that advice be?
Scott: I have to go back to the audience. I think that’s where everything starts is attracting the audience. It’s easy for me to say, looking back. Luck and timing certainly might have played a big role in the success of our Arlington site that spawned everything else that we’ve done, but ultimately the thing that made that site work is we had great content that people wanted to read and come back and keep reading. It’s the audience from which everything else sprang. There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg question sometimes in media, “Can you be a business guy who’s just really good at selling, and figure out the editorial later?”
Some people have done that, but in my mind, the number one currency and the thing you really have to do well is get the audience. If you’re going to launch something new, especially in local, I think you need to get a sense of your market, your competition, and your potential audience, and what’s really going to attract them. Then you need to go out there and you need to execute every single day. You cannot take an off day. If you’re looking to get enough scale on a local level to be able to make a real business out of it, you can’t take off days.
You have to go out there every day, publish multiple pieces of news that different segments of your audience is going to find relevant and interesting, and rinse and repeat. It’s exhausting. If there’s one beat to this, it’s that doing this, doing a local site, or pretty much any media site, I would imagine, is exhausting. You just need to stick with it day in and day out, and sometimes it could take years to pay off.
