A Quick Disclaimer: Backstory & Strategy is a personal, independent publication. The views, analysis, and commentary expressed here are strictly my own and do not represent the official position, strategy, or endorsement of the American Press Institute, its leadership, or its board. This is my personal space for analyzing the media landscape, testing new frameworks, and thinking out loud.
A few months ago, I did something I almost never do and answered a cold LinkedIn pitch from a franchise broker. I should say up front that I am about the least likely person on earth to buy a fast-casual sandwich shop or an oil-change territory. Curiosity got the better of me, and the conversation turned into one of the more educational hours I’ve spent all year.
Nobody started with brand or culture. They started with a feasibility model: foot traffic, county wage minimums, household income, and how many other locations already sat in the territory. Before anyone signs a lease or hires a manager, they work out their break-even horizon, and the math doesn’t much care how they feel about it.
I kept staring at those spreadsheets and wondering why local news doesn’t have anything like this.
I know what that absence costs, because I’ve been on the wrong side of it. In 2006, I left a good job at the Courier-Post to try to start a weekly print paper for South Jersey’s Jewish community. I spent about a year on it, meeting with dozens of industry people and community leaders, and it never got off the ground. With the Inquirer and the Daily News being sold off amid steep losses, one potential funder put the problem about as plainly as it can be put: if they can’t make money, how will you? I had plenty of conviction and plenty of meetings. What I didn’t have was a model that could answer him.
So today I’m launching PressViable.
It’s an underwriting tool for local journalism. It takes a newsroom’s financials and sets them against its own market’s numbers, so that funders, buyers, civic trusts, and independent publishers have something solid to check before the money goes out. For the online side of the ledger, it works alongside AI Readiness Check, the crawler tool I launched in September.
Local news has a diligence problem
Late last month, Social Finance launched the $21 million Local News Impact Investment Fund, backed by Knight and MacArthur alongside Press Forward. It will invest $500,000 to $2 million per deal, as debt and equity, in nonprofit and for-profit newsrooms, aimed at what Press Forward calls the “missing middle” of financing. For smaller outlets, URL Media’s Media Resilience Fund offers low-interest working-capital loans of up to $100,000. Loans and investments ask a question grants mostly don’t: do the numbers work? I don’t know how these funds will answer it, and I won’t guess. But anyone asking should have a way to show their work.
When someone launches an independent newsroom, or a trust buys a legacy chain, we mostly look at the wrong things. We weigh brand goodwill and last year’s tax return, and we write long grant narratives about civic health. It’s rare for anyone to sit down with a model built on the county’s actual numbers and ask whether the math holds up against today’s economics.
Meanwhile, nearly every newsroom is experimenting with AI, and most of that work sits inside the editorial process: transcribing council meetings, drafting summaries, tweaking headlines. Of the 1,047 newsroom AI projects in AI For Newsroom, the largest public inventory of its kind, just 77 are about making money. Saving twenty minutes on a school board transcript feels like a win inside the CMS. It does nothing for a leaking balance sheet.
Two forces from the outside are wearing at local sustainability while we celebrate those gains. Search is being rewritten, with zero-click answers and AI overviews steadily replacing the referral traffic that regional publications count on for subscriptions and ad revenue. And archives are getting scraped without payment. Crawlers pull local reporting, municipal records, and investigative work to train commercial models, and most newsrooms have no idea how much of their server traffic is bots, never mind what that’s worth under the licensing standards now taking shape. I wrote about the public media version of this in September.
None of it shows up on a 990 or a profit and loss statement. A P&L tells you what you spent on printing, rent, and health insurance a year ago. It can’t tell you how exposed you are to search, what unblocked bots cost you, or what happens to your budget when a bridge grant runs out.
What PressViable does about it
It benchmarks a newsroom’s pay against state wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and its market against Census demographics and local giving, by county or by ZIP code. Nonprofit newsrooms can fill in their numbers straight from their own 990s. It separates payroll from overhead, and it lets you step a grant down over three years to see whether earned revenue catches up before the cash runs out. AI Readiness Check, at crawlready.org, covers the digital side: it reads a newsroom’s actual crawler posture and puts a range on what that exposure may be worth.
For civic trusts, funders, and network operators, the output is a scorecard you can bring to a board or an investment committee, with the reasoning visible so people can argue with it before the capital is committed. For anyone buying a paper, it sets the deal’s own terms beside the paper as it stands: the shared services an operator brings, a new payroll, revenue by year straight from the deal memo. Then it asks the question an investment committee should ask first: what happens if only half the expected gains show up?
One thing I was careful about. A low score in a wealthy county and a low score in a county with little money to give don’t mean the same thing, so the tool shows how deep a market’s wells are, compared with every county in the country. Where they’re shallow, it reads the gap as the outside support a community may need, not as a verdict on the newsroom. A tool like this should strengthen the case for help where help is needed, not undercut it.
A lot of the best experiments in local media start small, though, so there’s also a free planning lab for founders at pressviable.org/startups. Pick your county, cost out your staffing against real wage data for your state, and stress-test how much of your revenue comes from earnings versus contributions while there’s still time to change the plan. I would have loved to have that in 2006.
Local journalism has never lacked courage or dedication. What it has lacked is a shared way to check the math.
If you’re building something new, run your numbers in the planning lab. If you’re weighing an acquisition, a trust or a portfolio, look at the methodology, or write to me and I’ll walk you through it. We can do that under a mutual NDA if that makes it easier.
As always, I’d love to hear what you think.
Acknowledged, but I think you are overestimating competent understanding of the marketplace and potential opportunity. Working with all four Philadelphia DMA stations, and with stations in several other markets (SF, Chicago, etc.), I found profound gaps in that understanding. In many cases, rural counties were discounted, and diversity of communities and neighborhoods was ignored. In others, much of the 18-54 cohort was overestimated by a large measure, non-white was treated as white, and audience composition of local commercial news was based upon long-held but often shaky assumptions. My most complete analysis was for Beta stations nationally and how they fit into the marketplaces, and also the combined impact of PBS39 + WYBE, which covered about 50 counties (I don't recall the precise count).
Although it's difficult to comment without seeing a full demo, the overall thrust seems to be on the sell side. I wonder about the buy side. What is the market need? Who are the competitors and are they well-funded, stable? Are they growing their revenues and staff and offerings, or are they on decline? Are they independently controlled and local or are they controlled by third parties who operate news as a cost center with modest local involvement? Is the market (DMA, etc.) highly fragmented, as it is in Philadelphia, with rural, urban, suburban communities who don't much care about one another, or is the market more unified with a significant common culture? What is the core planning assumption for the news operation: serve all of Philadelphia, serve all of the Jewish people in certain Southern New Jersey communities, serve Delaware County or Upper Bucks or Lower Moreland? How much population in the chosen area -- and what does news and media coverage look like specifically in that area? Is there a willingness to watch / read / listen based upon confirmed evidence and meaningful trends? Is there a willingness to pay / support with actual dollars that can be used to pay salaries?
Maybe your current model covers all of this, and I missed it. Anyway, I would start on the user side of the equation, figure out the allowable spend and its trajectories based upon several key variables, and then, look at the product side. If they don't match, then the AI behind the tool should issue a stern warning about magical thinking, and should suggest three or five key variables (on either side of the equation) that could transform a challenged model into something viable.