The Chair Comes First
We’ve spent a decade treating local journalism as a content problem. The hair salon model proves it’s actually an operations problem.
A Quick Disclaimer: These thoughts are mine alone. They don’t necessarily reflect the official position of my colleagues or the leadership at the American Press Institute. While my work at API deeply informs how I see the industry, Backstory & Strategy is my space for thinking out loud and poking at the frameworks we all have to navigate.
Drive down any commercial strip from Elkins Park to Allentown, and you’ll see the same thing: four, five, maybe six hair salons packed into a single quarter-mile. On paper, it looks like a bubble waiting to burst. You have to wonder who is actually getting that many haircuts.
But the way these shops stay alive is more than just a curiosity of small-business economics. It actually explains why we’ve spent the last decade getting local journalism exactly backwards.
How salons actually work
A salon owner isn’t usually running a traditional top-down company. They’re basically a landlord for practitioners. They lease the space, handle the plumbing, and rent out chairs for a weekly fee or a percentage of the till. The stylists aren’t employees; they’re micro-businesses operating under a shared roof.
The owner provides the four walls, the sinks, and the merchant account. The stylist provides the relationship.
That’s the part that matters. People don’t have loyalty to a salon brand; they have loyalty to the person holding the shears. If your stylist moves three miles away, you follow them. It’s a recurring bond built on the simple fact that you trust this one person with how you look to the world.
Because of that, five shops on one block aren’t actually competing. Each one is a collection of independent monopolies with their own client lists. The geographic radius is tiny, the demand is constant, and the startup costs are low. Most importantly, the value loop is closed. The person getting the haircut pays for it, right there, at the point of delivery.
Nearly every part of this has a parallel in local journalism. Well, nearly.
The parts that map
A newsroom covering a specific community isn’t really competing with a regional metro daily or a national outlet any more than a barbershop in Elkins Park is looking over its shoulder at a high-end salon in Center City. They serve a radius so specific that national-level hand-wringing about “media oversaturation” doesn’t mean anything on the ground. The salon model suggests we could actually have more small operators than we think. The problem isn’t too many outlets. It’s that there aren’t enough.
The relationship dynamic is identical. Substack proved the point recently, but local TV and radio have known this for decades. Audiences follow journalists, not institutions. When a reporter with a real following leaves an outlet, the audience usually follows them out the door.
Then you have the platform layer. Substack, Beehiiv, and Ghost are just the chair-rental model in digital form. They handle the “plumbing”—the email delivery, the payments, the discovery tools. The writer brings the audience, the platform takes a cut, and the writer owns the relationship.
These platforms have even cracked the payment problem for some. If a reader pays $7 a month for a newsletter they value, they’re closing the value loop. The money flows to the person they trust because that connection is worth the price.
Where the analogy hits a wall
There are two places where this comparison falls apart, and we have to be honest about them.
First, there’s market size. The people making a real living on Substack are usually writing for niche national audiences—tech, finance, or national politics. But the person covering a school board in a town of 8,000 doesn’t have a big enough “addressable market” to make the math work, even if their relationship with the readers is rock solid. Everyone needs a haircut. Not everyone thinks they need to pay for local news.
Then there’s the public goods problem. This is the big one. In a salon, if you don’t pay, you don’t get the service. In journalism, the value leaks everywhere. Good reporting benefits the whole community, including the people who never spend a dime on a subscription. School board coverage keeps the local government honest for everyone. The salon has a closed loop; journalism’s loop is wide open.
Which means the margins are thinner than any salon owner would tolerate. And that’s exactly why the infrastructure layer matters more here, not less. A stylist can absorb some operational waste. They have pricing power and a captive client. A reporter in a town of 8,000, subsidized by grants and surviving on free riders, cannot afford to lose a single hour to work that a shared platform could handle.
These aren’t marketing problems. They’re structural constraints. They explain why the platform model hasn’t “solved” the local news crisis yet. The infrastructure exists, the logic is sound, but the math just doesn’t close at a small scale. But even here, the analogy is pointing in the same direction: if anything, the case for shared infrastructure is stronger in journalism than it is in hair care, because the room for waste is so much smaller.
The chair comes first
Here is the point I keep coming back to: Nobody funds a stylist and then says, “Now go figure out where to put the chair.”
The chair comes first. The space, the booking system, the payment processing, the utilities—that’s the precondition. The platform is what makes the work possible.
For at least a decade, the people who fund and support journalism have done the exact opposite. They fund the reporter. They fund the beat. They assume the outlet will eventually figure out how to publish, distribute, and collect money. We’ve acted like the “journalism” was the only thing that mattered, and the “plumbing”—the distribution, the billing, the audience management—was just some boring utility that would magically take care of itself.
I think we have it backwards. We’ve treated journalism as a content problem when it’s actually an operations problem.
The content was never the bottleneck. There is no shortage of people who want to do the reporting. What’s missing is the operational scaffolding that lets them do it sustainably.
Right now, every small nonprofit newsroom in America is independently reinventing the same back-office functions on a shoestring budget. They’re all trying to figure out their own donor management, their own HR policies, and their own legal compliance. That isn’t journalism. That’s overhead. And it’s the exact kind of overhead a salon owner absorbs so the stylists can just focus on cutting hair.
Strategy vs. Survival
I know the pushback here. People will tell you that not every back-office function is just “plumbing.”
They’ll point to places like the Invisible Institute and argue that their data platforms or their unique collaborative models are what make them special. And they’re right. Some newsrooms have intentionally blurred the line between operations and strategy to create something distinctive. I’m not suggesting we wave that off.
But there is a massive difference between a newsroom choosing to build a bespoke data tool as a strategic move and a founder losing 30% of their week to QuickBooks and payroll compliance because there’s no other option. One is a choice. The other is a tax on survival. Most of the small and mid-size shops I see aren’t building “strategic capabilities”—they’re just drowning in administrative debt while trying to cover a city council meeting.
I’m not the first person to say “infrastructure matters”
People have been making versions of this argument for years. Kerri Hoffman at PRX wrote a Nieman Lab piece arguing that public media should treat infrastructure as a right, not a luxury. Victor Pickard at Penn has framed journalism as public infrastructure in the policy sense, like roads and bridges.
Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro’s recent analysis of 559 Press Forward infrastructure proposals found that the most persistent challenges facing local journalism aren’t isolated newsroom problems, but system-level constraints tied to fragmented infrastructure. On the other hand, Tracie Powell at the Pivot Fund has pushed back on the infrastructure-first framing entirely, arguing that infrastructure without direct capacity-building is a waste.
They’re all contributing something real. But notice what each of them is actually arguing about. Hoffman is talking about technology stacks and content delivery. Pickard is talking about government policy. Hansen Shapiro is diagnosing fragmentation at the field level. Powell is saying that none of it works if newsrooms don’t have the staff to use what’s being built.
And to be fair, the field has been listening. The American Journalism Project explicitly funds business-side capacity. Press Forward’s recent convenings have centered sustainability and revenue, not just editorial practice. LION Publishers built a whole sustainability audit process. The rhetoric has moved. Some of the dollars have followed. It would be dishonest to write this piece as if everyone in the ecosystem is still funding Pulitzer bait and ignoring the back office. That’s not where we are in 2026.
But the center of gravity hasn’t shifted as far as the rhetoric suggests. Look at where the prestige still accrues. Look at what gets celebrated at conferences or written up in the trades. It’s almost always the editorial win. A big investigation. A new beat. A coverage gap filled.
The organization that quietly lowers the operational costs for 40 different newsrooms doesn’t get a trophy. The biggest grants still go to “content production,” with operations treated as an afterthought.
I say this as someone who works at a journalism support organization. This critique implicates my own shop, not just everyone else’s. The pull toward content-first thinking is strong even when you know better, because that’s what the field rewards and that’s what funders want to hear about.
If the core problem is operational, then the job of a support organization isn’t “how do we help people do better journalism.” It’s “how do we drive the cost of doing journalism low enough that it can actually survive.” Those sound similar, but they are worlds apart. The first one builds training programs. The second one builds shared infrastructure and fights to make it universal.
The landing
I’m not suggesting everyone needs to be on Substack. I wouldn’t even try to make that case. Endorsing one commercial platform with its own baggage isn’t the point.
The point is the principle. Support should be about reducing the burden so the practitioner can focus on the work and the audience. Whether that happens on Ghost, a purpose-built nonprofit tool, or a WordPress plugin doesn’t matter. What matters is driving down the cost of the “commodity” functions.
We have spent years funding the stylist and telling them to go find their own chair. We’ve built an ecosystem that prizes editorial excellence while the people doing the work are drowning in administrative debt.
The chair comes first. It always has. We just kept forgetting to build it.
I’m curious—especially for those of you running small or nonprofit newsrooms—what is the one "commodity" task that eats 30% of your week? Is it payroll? The CMS? The audit? Drop a comment or hit reply. I want to know what piece of the "chair" we still haven't built for you.
Keep me honest. I’m a 30-year veteran of this industry, but that doesn’t mean I have every data point right. If I’ve missed a nuance about your organization’s infrastructure or if you think the salon analogy hits a different wall than the ones I mentioned, let me know. I’d rather be corrected than comfortable.