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Local News Website

2 pointsthejteam6 comments

How viable a business is starting a local news site today? Think original reporting in a city/county of about 100K people. What are the must-have features?

Right now where I live there are several local sites, all designed a little differently. Some do original reporting (low quality, in my opinion), others just repost press releases. Some allow comments on articles, some don't, and some run toxic forums.

The website for the local newspaper is behind a paywall, a source of frustration for people who want to share articles. Especially if they are about family members.

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The press releases and statements that come from police, councils or similar are easy to get but require a human to deal with and edit.

Original reporting and content would be your differentiator and that takes time and effort. What if you are a terrible writer? What if news breaks when you are away or 11 PM and later?

Creating an audience overnight is very hard so there needs to be a runway.

That local audience won't like you writing an inquest report into a local hero who used drugs, or a 'heart of gold' type who killed someone in opaque circumstances. Elections? You are biased! Even if you are not.

100k people should be able to do about 1m pageviews a month on non-rubbish content. Adsense base thats about $1000, but direct sales would be where the revenue is.

News is old almost instantly, you need to keep the ball spinning.

Don't build an aggregator, no one will care.

Do it properly, and don't expect to make money :-)

Good luck!

A big part of local print newspapers are photos of events (birthdays, parties, weddings etc) which drive sales to those related or just interested.

Local event photographers may be a good source of content, it obviously helps them too.

100K is a small audience. Since there is some competition, you can aspire to get 5-10K MAU.

With this audience, you'll need someone selling ads to have a viable business.

Probably not just ads, but sponsored content that makes local business reach customers. I mean, when a local googles for something like 'tire replacement offer' it should go to your sponsored content offer (don't call this SEO, btw).

You need to think about:

- is it free, subscription or ad supported?

- cost of reporters?

- automated sources of data (e.g. local government data)

- platform development and running costs?

- user content? - cost of moderation

Perhaps you could go and talk to the newspaper, explain your issue and see if they have a solution (e.g. subscribers can pass on 10 stories a week...)

Yet another news website? There are a ton of competitors for capturing the user’s time up to a point that it is unbearable.

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