In this episode, Kyle Scott talks to Geoff Sharpe, founder of Lookout Media, who brings a refreshing approach to local journalism by focusing on in-depth civics news rather than the typical lifestyle content that dominates many local newsletters. With publications in Ottawa and Vancouver, Sharp emphasizes the importance of quality journalism, which has allowed him to command premium subscriptions, with over 75% of his revenue coming from dedicated members.

This conversation delves into the challenges of monetizing local media, the significance of building trust through consistent and insightful reporting, and the potential for niche local newsletters to thrive. Sharp also shares insights on audience engagement and the balance between hard news and lighter content, stressing that a well-rounded approach can create a strong community connection. As the media landscape evolves, his strategies offer valuable lessons for anyone looking to build a sustainable local news brand.

Chapters

00:00 Intro

04:16 Challenges and Strategies in Local News Monetization

06:45 Local News Dynamics

12:13 Marketing Strategies for Local News

18:02 The Role of Opinion in Local Journalism

23:47 Business Model Insights and Revenue Streams

33:21 Challenges in Local Business Marketing

38:42 Niche Opportunities in Local Newsletters

44:22 Building Community Through Local Newsletters

50:08 Tools and Strategies for Success

Links

Lookout Media

Ottawa Lookout

Follow Geoff on X (@Geoff_Sharpe)

Subscribe to the Monetize Media newsletter

Follow Kyle on X (@KyleScottL)

Kyle's brands

AccessGMT.com

WalkingTheBoards.com

Tip.News

OnPattison.com

All right, welcome back to Monetize Media. I am Kyle Scott. On today's episode, I talk to Jeff Sharp, founder of Lookout Media, which has three local newsletter publications in Canada.

He has Ottawa, Lookout, Capital, Eats, and Vancity in Vancouver.

Just a really good conversation with Jeff, who is approaching local media from an entirely different perspective than the way many people are kind of currently building local newsletters. Most people right now are focusing on lifestyle things like events and restaurants.

And while Jeff is certainly looking into the restaurant side, his publications focus on civics news, covering city hall, covering the issues that are important to people. While many upstart local media brands have kind of stayed away from hard news, Jeff is going all in.

And because of that, he's able to command premium subscribers. In fact, more than 75% of his revenue comes from from premium memberships that charge up to a hundred dollars per year.

And he has thousands of subscribers.

Great conversation with Jeff as we get into what premium content means for local media, the business models behind local newsletters, and his thoughts on the newsletter and digital media space in general. Here now, my conversation with Jeff. Before we get into it, let me ask you a favor. Go to your podcast player of choice. Go to the comments on YouTube.

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Onto the interview with Jeff. All right, want to welcome in Jeff Sharp from Lookout Media. Welcome to the show.

Great to be here.

So why don't.

There was a little bit of an intro there in the beginning, but why don't you give listeners a little bit about your background and how you sort of found your way to the Lookout?

Yeah, so I'll just say Lookout's a local newsletter network publication up here in Canada. Been around for just over three years. My background is in sort of digital marketing. Run my own agency for about eight years now.

Worked on agency side stuff lot in nonprofit charity world too, which I think there's a lot of interesting applications to the local newsletter space.

A lot of it on sort of like online fundraising, membership engagement, things like that so dabbled in, you know, one of those digital people that basically dabbles in a bunch of different stuff. And you know, 10 years later I finally found the one thing I want to focus on.

So you're local.

Talk about the three brands you have of the lookout and describe the product a little bit because it is a little bit different than what I think a lot of people are doing in local media. Especially like the newsletter centric local media we've seen and talked about a lot lately.

Yeah, it is a bit different. Maybe I'll just talk through where we are and a little bit of how we're different. So we're right now in two cities.

We have a local news publication which covers the news in the space. Talk more about the specifics on that after then we also have a food publication in each city. Kind of differs.

In Ottawa, which is a big city up in Canada, we have a separate sort of website and food publication for that that does very specific, like actual restaurant reviews, goes and tries the food. Very different than, you know, this sort of like listicle summary type stuff intentionally.

And then the news side of stuff is more on the, more on the journalism side than what you might see with sort of what's happening in the local newsletter space right now. The way I've approach over the years and it's changed, which we can, you know, definitely talk about.

I've had a lot of theories and that haven't been proven out and I think we finally found the model that works. But it's more on the journalism side and there's a specific reason for that on from the revenue side.

But basically it's a product that goes out three times a week.

It's a summary of what's going on in the city with exclusive news coverage as well, specific stories that are, you know, our team is going out and finding very similar to like a local, like a traditional local news publication.

But it brings a lot of different things together in the sense of marrying the traditional journalism stuff with engaging with an audience, you know, good email, best practices for audience engagement. And so the product itself includes events like a lot of these other local newsletters are doing.

It includes news summaries and then we have a very civic product in each city that's kind of the same where it's, you know, you've got the events, you've got the local news summaries, we've called them like community highlights which are essentially just, you know, what groups are doing little fun little stuff. We have, you know, house of the week.

A lot of the stuff that you find in these other newsletters, but it is anchored by a more robust journalism aspect to it. And partially that comes from just my experience in that world and, you know, having worked with journalists in past jobs and things like that.

Not, you know, not everyone can do that, obviously.

But the big reason for that is because, and this is what we're seeing with a lot of local newsletters, it's very hard to drive revenue from individuals. Ads. Great business, super profitable, but getting people to contribute or purchase stuff can be sometimes a bit of a challenge.

And love to explore that more. But what we found is people are willing to pay for good journalism that dives deep into some of these issues.

And so I'll end it by saying our revenue is quite different than other platforms. About 75% of our revenue comes from membership, about 25% from ads. And we don't really have a set like outreach strategy for advertising.

It's kind of a thing we need to work on in the future. But yeah, a lot of it is membership based. So I'll leave it there by saying, yeah, we're a little bit different than some of these other ones.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a lot there and I'll call out a couple of things that I heard there.

So I think first, so many of the local newsletters that are building on Beehive, which are definitely having a bit of a moment right now, have really keyed, keyed in on the lifestyle stuff. They've followed a little bit of the, I think 6am cities playbooks, a little bit like this.

They kind of talk about not wanting the ruffle feathers, not wanting to dig into politics, lifestyle, restaurants, events, things like that. They move the needle. It's useful for people and obviously it's a pretty easy business model.

I think the downside of that is it doesn't give you a great moat. You're performing a service, but it doesn't really prevent anybody else from coming in and doing it.

One of the things we're doing in Philly with Access Media is we have a bunch of traditional websites and we're kind of building out the newsletter component, but we cover everything. The lifestyle stuff, but also the, the accident and the crime. We try to balance that mix. You guys, you guys really double down on the civic stuff.

And I, I'm, if I'm hearing you right, that kind of connects. You know, you have a lot of, I think you said 75% of your subscribers, you told me, are Premium subscribers. I'm sorry, 75% of your revenue.

Yes.

Yeah, is, is premium subscriber revenue and I'm guessing that has a lot to do with, with the civics coverage. Each.

If anyone goes to your site, lookout mediaco.com and clicks on some of your newsletters, I mean, these are long, they're like meatballs of newsletters with really in depth, well structured, easy to read. Even as an outsider who knows nothing about what's going on in Ottawa, I found it very easy to read.

But talk about why it's important for you guys to go so in depth on so many.

Like I read a niche topic about, you know, whether, whether a city like Ottawa was ready for snow, which I found kind of humorous but also really interesting from a local politics angle and how you use that to drive premium subscribers, which makes up a majority of your revenue.

Yeah. So I'll just say quickly to find it. If you want to see some of The Stuff, Ottawa Lookout.com, best place to find it.

Each city has its own sort of unique URL, whereas our, you know, our whole company has its own, you know, own URL. But yeah, so getting membership revenue is pretty tough and we definitely have made the decision to do that.

Maybe I'll back up by saying that like when my business partner who's no longer with us, he's going off and doing his own thing now. But when we started it originally the idea was it would be a little bit lighter in that sense, it would be more. Here's a quick summary of the news.

Like, yes, we have news stuff, but you know, 40, 30% of the stuff will be a little bit lighter. It'll be more of a fun experience for people to engage with.

I think, you know, I had seen 6am City, I had seen Axios and was trying to marry a little bit of the two together to create something different. And you know, just generally speaking in Canada there's not a lot of newsletter based publications, a lot of traditional stuff.

And so you see what goes on in the US and you think, oh, this is, you know, very easy to apply up here in Canada. What we found over time is that, you know, my experience has been in driving and turning, you know, readers and stuff into members and paying people.

Pretty hard to do with lifestyle content. There's a lot of benefits to focusing on that, obviously. One being not everyone can do hard news journalism analysis, things like that.

That's just the nature of it and totally understand why people do, you know, focus more on the lifestyle content. And then in a lot of places there's not a lot of actual lifestyle content in the sense that there's no competitors.

And so it makes total sense to focus on that as a main product. You know, hard to find events in some of these communities. So you're meeting a real need there.

For a lot of places in Canada, in a lot of the cities, they do have a pretty robust lifestyle coverage.

You know, we have our, I don't know what the comparison would be down the US but you have your sort of listicle sites, the ones pulling together events, things like that.

But what you find is that a lot of times that's not high quality enough content to push people along in an engagement type way of like from just a reader to actually doing something.

Now I do see a lot of examples and you've interviewed a few people and others who are able to take some of this lifestyle stuff and turn it into people attending events and things like that. And that's awesome and huge there. Kudos to them because that's still something we're working on from a capacity standpoint.

It's a different lifestyle too. You have to a be really creative about it. But you also the editorial team in a lot of these are one or two person shops.

You have to be willing to be in the events business so it can work. But it's also, if you want to be a reporter, those tend to be two different hats.

The people who want to report and the people who want to go to happy hours.

Frankly, totally, totally different thing. And that's I guess where we, we came from.

Just having a bit of experience working with journalists and things like that where it's like, okay, we know how to work with these people, we know what gets people going. And I think we definitely started out thinking with being more lifestyle and like on the food side too. We were like, we'll just do listicles.

Like, you know, we'll summarize that. And what we found over time is that people are just willing to engage.

And this is not anything new, but people are willing to engage more with like very in depth journalism and stories that help them understand their city and explore issues that they just aren't aware of.

What that does is it really moves people farther down the engagement ladder of building that trust and seeing the things that are happening and building that relationship with reporters and you know, people writing the newsletter in a way that you just can't do as a traditional publication.

So the way it kind of has evolved is taking the best parts of news gathering and journalism and marrying that with sort of like the, the newsletter piece where you can build that relationship, you can have that consistent habit with people and it turns it into a product that is just so effective at taking people from being subscribers to being someone who's willing to pay, you know, a yearly or monthly membership to support the work because they're seeing what type of stuff you're doing.

I think the challenge with turning readers into, into paying members, you know, I see this a few times with some of these local people and not meant to be criticism at all, but doing these sort of like discount cards and other things and it's, you know, sometimes they work. I've seen a few times where they haven't sold out on certain things.

And it just goes to the fact that it's really difficult to monetize the payment from people on the lifestyle type stuff versus on the ads, which is a great, you know, great business. But taking it from that to that is really challenging. And I've talked to a few people about this and how they're thinking about it.

It is a challenge to do and, you know, I think people are starting to figure it out. But there is something to be said for sort of like an older model of doing things.

And that's not to say that everyone can just spool up a local journalism publication. Like, like I said, you know, there's certain things you have to do.

But I think there are some lessons here around like flight to quality being really important. And your point about a moat as well is just critically important.

The only thing stopping someone else from starting another local newsletter in your space if you're just summarizing events, is having more money to run on ads. Right. Because it's cheap, it's easy to do. So maybe that's a motive in and of itself that no one has those skills, but it's a, it's a.

Certainly a challenge.

And I think some of the local people in the space on Beehive especially some of them are starting to figure it out and do really well from like a branding perspective, sort of differentiating it that way, making the person sort of central to that. I think a good example of someone who's done that really well marrying a lot of that is like the Life of Scoot or the Ryan Sneddon.

Yeah, Ryan Sneddon, exactly. I think he's done a good job there of sort of marrying the different things.

Yeah. So I've talked to. I think I've talked to Ryan once or twice, but I followed him online and my sense is he enjoys that he, he thrives on that.

He likes being the guy and you know, for the certain type of personality that works. But there's also a lot of people who, who don't want to be out impressing the flesh.

You know, some of us are digital media people because we like sitting at home behind a desk 20, 28 hours a day. Let me. There's a. So there's a bunch there.

I want to kind of talk about the growth aspect of this because I agree with you that you got this premium content really in depth. And I want to kind of talk about the kind of journalistic angle you guys take.

But to get people to pay for a subscription, there is some level of marketing, some education, a bit of a sign up flow. So talk.

I'm sure a good number of people listening to this either have newsletters or online brands and will be interested in how you sort of nurture that person from the first touch point the Lookout has or Ottawa Lookout has and then how you sort of funnel them down into a paid subscriber and then even into the, you know, do you lead with the lifestyle stuff or you lead with the news brand? Just talk through that whole process.

Yeah, so maybe I'll start at the 100 foot level and then work down to sort of the tactical piece that supports that. I think the way like obviously you're trying to solve a problem for people.

So like on a lot of our ads that we acquire people on, it's like, you know, do you struggle to follow local news and events? You know, sign up. That's the very first, you know, touch point. It's a transaction, it's very simple. You're solving a little bit of a problem.

What then you sort of get into. And I like to think of it as sort of like it's almost like you're telling a story, right.

Like if anyone can go and just search for local events or if there's other local news competitors, you kind of have to try to differentiate yourself. Right. That's through format. But a lot of it is sort of the storytelling aspect. So the story that we're telling people is that local news is broken.

There's a lot of pop ups on websites. It's a really annoying experience. It's brutal to find stuff. You know, there's always paywalls stopping you from seeing stuff.

And we want to try to make it as easy as possible. And we also really emphasize sort of the mission aspect of it too. And I think that's maybe an under emphasize peace.

So, you know, we're talking about how we want to fix local news, make it, you know, help uncover those issues that people aren't finding. And the storytelling takes place throughout sort of the entire duration of the experience.

So in the introduction of the newsletter, we talk about, oh, some stories that we're pursuing, you know, maybe you want to contribute, you know, what do you think about this? And you know, we just saw this local newsletter, local news publication, Fire 50 People. You know, that's we're not about that, we're different.

And so it's kind of you need to figure out what your story that you're trying to tell people about, who your publication is, what you're trying to solve, how that helps people. And then, you know, it really is sort of a narrative driven piece.

I know it's kind of like pie in the sky thing, but if you're in marketing or anything like that, you know how powerful stories are and you kind of need to apply that to what you're doing locally. Now ours is very mission driven. You know, we're trying to solve a big problem, but you can apply that to anything locally. Right?

Like there's different ways to tweak that message. Maybe it's more of a personal thing where, you know, you found a problem and you're trying to fix it for people locally or help them do that.

You're trying to bring people along. So it's more than just a utility product.

It's obviously lifestyle is not the right word, but it's something that people care about beyond just the transactional utility element.

I'm a big believer that there has to be some sort of story, emotional connection to what you're doing on how do you turn actual people into members and stuff like that. For us it's, it's. We offer extra, extra stories that are unpaywalled. That's not a lot of time. It's not a big reason people join.

They sort of, again, it goes back to seeing the mission and what we're doing. But the way I sort of describe it is like you're taking a campaign approach to asking people to become members.

So what you find with a lot of publications is they'll just send a one off email and be like, hey, you know, I'd love if you could like, you know, buy me a coffee or contribute $5 to help with our mission and our journalism. That can work for a little bit. But really you have to start thinking about it as sort of like a multi touch point, essentially marketing campaign.

And so the way that we approach that is like we have a goal that we're trying to achieve. We've built that relationship and that sort of mission with our readers so they understand what we're doing. We have that relationship.

So when we go to them and say we need 20 new members at the end of the month to write this new story on this, they trust us to do it. They know we're going to deliver and they see the value of what we're trying to accomplish. And so we use the introduction to do that over a month.

We'll include like ad, not ads, but the messages, like the ads in there. We'll send one off emails to do it. And so yes, the piece of content that people are getting is important.

Yes, the paywall is good because they're seeing the stuff that they might be missing. But I think with the local news stuff there has to be that mission oriented piece.

And that works really well with a long term, multi week campaign where they're constantly seeing these things and seeing the progression of this going.

And that's why I say my experience in like nonprofit and charity fundraising has been very useful because that stuff really applies nicely to trying to get people to actually do something and move them from just being, you know, an engaged reader to someone who's willing to become a member.

So yeah. So your initial outreach, are you guys doing Facebook ads to kind of get them in free subs?

And then they get a certain amount of issues and eventually it's like, you know, you just gotta, you gotta pay to read this.

Yeah. So just how that works technically, like I would say 95% of our audience comes from social media ads.

I think kudos to the people that have solved the referrals and stuff like that. We haven't had a lot of success, success with it and just frankly it's a lot of paid ads.

But we know that they're incredibly engaged audience beehives, you know, very useful for that from a audience engagement standpoint. And so they're just acquired, they go through an onboarding journey. But a lot of it is like the content they're getting each week. Right.

And so eventually get a newsletter that's like, you know, they'll get the first couple of paragraphs and then now you gotta pay.

So the way, the way that works and we're experimenting with the model and that's sort of still what we're figuring out. But basically they get three free newsletters a week. There's content in there that is sometimes paywalled.

So if we're re upping old stories that are paywalled, we'll include that. But each sort of two to three times a week we'll do a really long form story that is partially paywalled.

So about 75% of it is free and then the last 25% is paywalled. And so to get the whole story, to get it later, you have to become a member.

But a lot of it is like, oh, I, you know, these people are doing really important work, therefore I'm going to contribute. I think when we first started out we had this idea that like, hey, people will pay for restaurant reviews.

They'll pay for, you know, extra of the same content. And that is a big mistake I think, is that one, the lifestyle stuff doesn't convert well on members.

Like we found that from even like in depth restaurant reviews. And then two, yeah, lifestyle content is tough to convert on. So having the longer content is really, is really useful.

How would that apply for like a local newsletter that's just doing events and other things? I don't know, maybe it's like a deep dive on history or something like that. If you're a decent writer, there's, there's other ways to do it.

But yeah, it's, I would say about 90, 85% of the content is free and then about 10 to 15% is paywall. That's going to change over time as we bring on more reporters and do more paywalled stuff. But for right now, yeah, a lot of it is free.

Yeah, you mentioned sort of like who's cracked recommendations and I mean it certainly seems like everyone in local who's trying to build a local audience use Facebook, it's where the local people are. And the zip code targeting is obviously really good.

I think some of the tools that exist for newsletters now, Sparkloop, Beehive, Boost, these things, they can be good, but they don't really work on the local level because they only work because you can tap into an ecosystem of hundreds of thousands, millions of people across the network on these platforms. But that doesn't really apply to local.

And it's hard to get, you know, it doesn't make sense to refer someone to a, from a local to a very general newsletter. And it's almost impossible to have another newsletter that has enough people in your area where it makes sense for them to refer to you.

And it's a tough nut to crack.

And it's a good point. Like the tools of growth that are really advancing on the newsletter side are not great for local.

But I would Say the monetization tools are quite good. So like you're almost dealing with a one sided marketplace in the sense that you're not acquiring from people, but you can send them out.

So I use Sparkloop, I'll use Beehive Boost to send people.

The thing that's really interesting is like the local audience you're acquiring is very engaged and so you can send them to the Sparkloop referral widget and get, you know, some revenue from there. We get a decent amount from that on the post signup process just because it's more engaged.

And the really nice thing is you're not competing with other people.

So if you're an AI newsletter and you're running Sparkloop stuff and you're sending people to other AI newsletters, like that's a, that's a brutal process to try to stay the top, you know, newsletter and product in that space. But if you're just a local newsletter, you're not going to be competing against other Sparkloop local newsletters in your space. Right.

So it's a great monetization tool without, potentially without some of the downsides that come from. And there are downsides to those sort of recommendation engines.

Yeah, no, no, agreed.

A lot of, I think local newspaper or local newsletter operators and I've heard them talk about it, I've heard, I think Ryan Heaphy did a webinar with Beehive and I love what they built and I think it's super interesting guy, but he said specifically he's like, we don't want to kind of poke the bear on these more important topics and you know, look, you could build a, it's, it's the old, I put a tweet about referencing this yesterday, but it's the old inch deep mile wide vs inch wide mile deep thing. And you can go much wider with the lifestyle stuff, the light and breezy stuff.

You can get a big audience and if you're good at ads, you're good at events, you can actually build a pretty scalable business. Difficult, but it definitely can be done. 6am Cities, a good example.

But on the flip side, our biggest local newsletter, we have one in Ocean City, New Jersey, Walking the Boards. Kind of our, you know, flagship model we use for, for the rest of our network.

And I put out an end of year survey and we got about 18,000 subs and it's been going out for almost two years. So there's a lot of, you know, it's pretty well established audience. And I said, which sections do you enjoy the most?

And we got pretty, you know, heavy response from people who've been reading a long time. And Hard News was like far and away number one. And I was surprised because I see interaction.

I see a ton of interaction and link clicks on events, like a ton. The real estate stuff is interesting, new restaurant stuff always gets shared. But everyone was like, hard news, hard news, hard news. And it's.

And sure enough, we're in a town that doesn't have really the only other coverage is our sister site. So there's not a lot of coverage news. And when stuff happens, it's kind of a sleepy town.

So when stuff does happen, people want to know about it and they want to know about it and they can't go anywhere. And I was surprised to see that. So I do think to your point, over time, that does help kind of build a moat.

Because if you're bringing people quality reporting, you seem to take it a step further, though. From the few articles I read through, you guys seem to interject some opinion there, some analysis, some commentary, which I love.

I can't write anything on the Internet without letting my opinion come through. But a lot of news publications are not only afraid to touch this stuff, they're afraid to put any sort of opinion.

You guys do that and I'm guessing, build up a lot of influence and talent, talk about that aspect of it.

Yeah.

So the one thing I do just before I jump into that, I do want to say one thing that's really been on my mind a lot is that I do think there is a tendency for places to go 100% on what the audience says they want. A lot of times it's like, we want events, we want this, we want that.

I've seen a few places make pivots from doing journalism stuff to doing only events. And they've lost, lost members and they've lost engagement.

And there's something to be said for you as a founder or a person running a media publication, to take your own ideas and editorial approach irregardless of necessarily what the audience says they want.

Because the audience will a lot of times say they want more events, they want more restaurant openings, but for us, that doesn't turn into paying members. Right.

So as a person who's running a local newsletter, the most valuable thing you can trust sometimes is, is your intuition and your belief and what you're bringing into the newsletter rather than just what your audience says. So I would say, like, be aware of that. In our case, everyone always says they want More events.

But if we only did events or mostly the events, we would not have 2,500 paying members or almost 100,000 email subscribers. We just wouldn't.

And you have to have taste when you build an audience. You typically build an audience because you have some taste. You're able to interest them in some way.

And you gotta, you got to assume that out of all the people reading there is some wisdom in the crowd.

But like you're, you are the expert at this and like you know, go with your instincts sometimes you probably often know better than sum total of the comments to put it nicely.

And we'll get, we'll get back to that opinion analysis. But just a point on that. I do think the taste in and of itself is a differentiator.

Especially in this world of AI where you know, you can produce so much of this stuff if you've got a unique view viewpoint.

And I think that'll tie into the opinion analysis stuff that we're talking about and a unique sort of taste and appreciation for things that comes through in the content. That is going to be the easiest way to beat back a lot of the AI stuff that we're finding.

You know that's going to be tough if you're just a local newsletter that just does a summary of events when I can go on chat GPT and get the next 15 events. Right. So thinking about that's really important. But you know, to your point about editor has his.

Do you have photos in the there right? You guys have your photos almost like column style which I love. Ryan Sneddon does that too. I like that.

It's a great hack. We actually like started doing it in the last four months and the number of people coming up to our team is just much bigger.

So your point on opinion and analysis is a really important one because I think not to get too high minded but I think one of the biggest problems with journalism is lack of trust. And you build trust through good journalism, but you also build trust through people. Right?

There's this whole discussion about brands versus substack people versus how you do that. I think the combination of all of them is what works best. And so with the opinion analysis like we.

One interesting thing is you do say opinion but most of our audience doesn't think of what or even note that a lot of it and almost none of it is opinion.

But it's interesting that you noted that it seems like opinion because what it in fact what it actually is is just an attitude or a sort of like I think the better word is personality. The personality comes through and that's what builds the trust beyond just the good news and content that you're doing.

So if you're just doing local events, how do you add personality to that? How do you add sort of. That's a way to break down some of that and build that trust. Right.

So, but what I would say is that like with Lookout, what we tried to do is bring that analysis and sort of like journalistic thought and sort of thinking about what the future holds and trying to bridge that gap with like, what, you know, like an Axios is doing or what a Puck news is doing, where it's beyond just here's the issue. It's what this issue means to you.

Because that sort of analysis and insight is harder to get from just someone writing a, you know, a traffic summary story. Right. And that helps us differentiate between what we're doing, doing. And it's totally hard for some journalists to do that, like, totally get it.

Like, they've operated in a certain way, but that sort of an analysis, and especially in the introduction piece too. And like, you know, at the end of these stories, we do.

It's a way to build a connection with readers and build that trust because they know who you are, they know who you're coming from. Rather than just a faceless journalist writing a story. Maybe it's a good story, but a faceless journalist writing a story at a faceless branch. Right.

So I think your point about opinion and analysis is really spot on.

It's taking it beyond the story and building that personal connection through insights that you can't really find anywhere else or these other places won't do because they just, you know, that's how they've operated for a long time.

Yeah, yeah. And I've come across, you know, journalists, good ones, who I like and work with, but, you know, they're very rigid on.

It's not necessarily both sides. Ism. Some people try to get exactly 50, 50, which I. It can be good and bad. Right. There are sometimes issues that deserve a 9 to 10. Right.

And you can pick your examples. But if you look back, people always want to hearken back to the good old days of journalism. They'll cite on tv, like Cronkite or Marrow. Right.

But those guys, they would, I don't want to say they had their own. They would interject their opinion, but they would, I would say, charitably contextualize the news.

And I think certainly in a world of AI, which I actually do think local newsletter Local media is a little bit Teflon for that for a little while, because AI needs source material and a story about the president or the White House or the stock market, there's going to be enough source material for AI to do a really good factual job. Both local news, especially the type you guys are doing where you're actually doing hard reporting. The AI today can't show up with a notebook.

It might be able to listen to a city council meeting live, but it's never going to do that good of a job. But then you guys are going the extra mile and kind of contextualizing it.

And I think the average person doesn't even have that strong of an opinion on some local news matters. And they're actually looking to someone who's like, well, darn, you're covering this. You must be an expert.

So what do you think the context this needs is?

Do you guys find that people actually appreciate the fact that, all right, you guys probably know more about it than they do, so help me contextualize this so how I should understand it and how it may or may not impact me?

Yeah, People are screaming to help to understand what this stuff means. Right. People are busy. They've got family to take care of, they've got jobs they have to go to.

And it can be wonky. Like, very wonky.

Yeah, Like, I don't know, some of our stuff goes really deep on this stuff, but because it's a consistent product, it takes five to seven minutes to read. Some of our longer stuff's a little bit longer, but it's sort of consistent that way. The trust is built up there.

They appreciate and see that sort of like analysis and rigor that's taken to these things and is just different than what others do it.

And I think to your point on AI too, just, I mean, AI and other stuff is not going to tell you how good a meal was at a restaurant and the type of ingredients that they did. They're not going to be able to tell you that the local.

Not yet.

Not yet. That's true. Not yet. They're not going to be able to tell you. Like, was that local opera actually that I visited recently?

Was that actually really good? Maybe we'll get there eventually.

But I think what, what helps with that and ties into the analysis and that type of stuff is that there's a person there and there's a person that's trust has been built up through this habit that they're. That they're experiencing. And so I think that the person is the way to break down that sort of, like, you know, stuff that might come from AI. Right.

And so, yeah, I mean, lots you could talk about that. But I do think your point on the. On the. On the traditional journalism stuff is it's tough.

And that's why I think a lot of these bigger publications are really struggling, because, one, they can't pivot to doing some of this stuff. They've just done, you know, the traditional things.

Two, they don't have the team or the younger people who are in positions of authority to be able to say, hey, like, this is what actually people want. And the other thing is like, they just never really had to care what an audience thought.

Again, to my point, you shouldn't follow 100% what your audience wants. But the product that we're delivering is much better than just a newsletter full of links. Right? Just what most of these places are doing.

Yeah. All right, so we talked a lot about the content. Dig a little harder on the business side. So why don't you talk about.

Listen, I'll take as many numbers as you want to give. I think would be great and helpful for people. But, you know, feel free to stop yourself where you want to.

But what do you guys charge monthly, yearly, and then what's kind of the breakdown of monthly to annual subscriptions? And maybe start there?

I think it's like 85% annual. So the annual is the best way to do it.

There's been lots of stuff on this, but you see from some of these, like Jacob Donnelly, Simon Owens, some of these other people are reporting on this. Annual stuff is a lot better from a churn perspective than monthly.

Every month you're seeing $9 on your card, and you have basically 28 days to prove every single time that this is worth the value. And that's really hard. Annual is really great for that. We charge different pricing per city. It's about $125 a year at Ottawa. It's $99 in Vancouver.

And that's just because the local media markets there are very different Ottawa. There's a lot less independent news, a lot more competition in Vancouver. So our ability to sort of like charge higher is less.

And we've just seen that from running it for a couple. Couple years in terms of, you know, the nice thing about having a network of local news sites. And by network, I mean two.

Right now, though, we're hoping to expand. We're planning, lots of planning to expand more. You can see the differences in each city.

So what the churn rate Is there how long people are staying, audience engagement, how do they compare? So you can make those decisions in each city about how much you should charge or shouldn't charge. We do a lot of discount discounting.

Not too much in the sense like I've never done a $1 a year subscription or $1 every six months, whatever. I would like to try that at some point.

But we don't produce enough paywalled content, I think to warrant that based on the places that have seen success with it. What we do is like, you know, 10%, 20% end of year we'll do a bigger discount. A lot of our revenue.

I say this in a lot of our fundraising emails, about 25% of our revenue comes in December because we're running our year end membership drive then and we again, going back to what I talked about before, you're framing that around sort of a mission of hiring another journalist or the plans for the new year. And so everyone's primed to make donations then. It's a big. For charities and nonprofits, it's the biggest time of the year.

So yeah, we'll do discounts.

Churn rate is like quite a bit higher than what I want and that's more of a function of just, you know, figuring out what's going to make people stay and having changed the model a little bit. So, you know, our churn is kind of between like 10 to 20% per.

Sorry, no, like 15 to 15 to 20% per year in terms of members churning, which to me is too high, but is pretty standard for the industry, it seems like based on what I've read.

So, yeah, I mean, we're growing pretty consistently, but there's more that needs to be done on that front in terms of keeping people, keeping people subscribed.

Have you guys thought about. I've seen some people talk about lifetime subscriptions.

The longer, you know, the longer you can get people, the less chance, to your point, they have to cancel annual is the best way. But if you thought about lifetime or any idea what you would charge, it's a. I don't.

So I think that is a good opportunity to do it. I think the challenge is I don't think we're producing enough exclusive stuff to make it valuable yet.

I've got a very like long, long term view about these things. And so like to be totally transparent, like, you know, we don't have any investors, like no outside funding. We just did it off the side of our desk.

So we can grow as quickly or as slowly as we want. So there's not an impetus to try to get as many, get as much revenue, get as many, turn as many members as possible within a certain amount of time.

Obviously we, we've got a lot of planning, but it means that we can be a bit more slow about what we do and build that up so that when we get to, you know, we're producing like maybe an exclusive story every single day that changes the dynamic a little bit about what we could charge and you know how we might add it. So no, like roundabout way. We haven't done lifetime subscriptions yet and I don't think I would until we have more content there to warrant it.

Okay, so all right, so you guys.

Are well, 93, 94,000 email subscribers between the two of them.

So you guys are well, well in the six, six figures with the paid.

Yes. Yeah.

And then so you said that's majority of the revenue, maybe 25%. 20, 25% is other things ad supported. So talk about the rest of that mix. I know it's smaller. Obviously you would like to grow all revenue over time.

Do you think about trying to balance those mix? You have the food vertical which feels like maybe it's a little bit more leans into the ad side. So maybe talk about that side of it.

The more lifestyle stuff versus the in depth premium stuff.

Yeah, we don't do any outbound ad sales and that's just a function of we just don't have a person.

And my time is spent generating membership revenue which in the long term is a consistent, you know, if we're losing 20% a year, that's a great spot to be in for recurring revenue. Right. So 25% is ads about, I don't know, 30, 40% of that is like Sparkloop, beehive ads, referrals, things like that.

The rest is just inbound organizations asking to run ads basically. And so I would be the first to admit that there's more we can do on the ad side. I think in the long term I'd love to.

Not that I want to flip it to 75% ads, but you know, the way I think about it is like the memberships and again, this is just unique to us in this local newsletter space. You know, the memberships are what Pay all the bills and keep the lights on and allow us to be sustainable.

Whereas ads is sort of the icing on the cake and would be the big growth lever to drive the organization forward to like real, like really, really big revenue. That stuff you're seeing in some of these other places. So you know, we're in the process of hiring an ads person.

Our hope is that that's going to be sort of a main driver in the future. But I would never, just because of the way we work, all of that is sort of. Yeah. Icing on the cake versus where membership is very consistent.

I know how many. We need things like that and we can maintain the structure that way. So ads are a big one in the future for sure.

Yeah, yeah. It's like the opposite of the 80, 80, 20 rule.

I mean your editorial effort gives you 80% of your revenue and you probably going to spend a lot of effort. I mean we have some salespeople in Philly and I will tell you it is a.

For the type of advertisers that make sense for a newsletter of these sizes and yours is quite a bit bigger. You know, there's a, there's a level of education that's required.

I would conclude small and medium sized local or even regional businesses are slower on the uptake on trends and I think they, their brains break a little on like the content newsletter.

You know, they're just kind of coming around the social and things like that and it's like, hey, here's a newsletter, here's why you should pay me five grand a month. And it's a, it's a very hard sell. It's a, you got to get very creative.

We've thought a lot about partnerships, referrals, but then there's tracking those referrals and there's value to be had there. I think the service businesses are perfect. The realtors, the insurance agents, the lawyers where a single customer could pay for their ad.

But again, there's education required.

It's a really good point. The local newsletter space is probably one of the most unsophisticated. And I don't mean unsophisticated as in like people are dumb.

I mean unsophisticated in terms of the different types of ads you're doing and media buying and stuff like that. So sometimes when I see people posting online being like, oh yeah, I'm going to do this much revenue this year.

Local ad sales are going to totally unlock it. It is some of the hardest ad sales to do in the business.

I would say based on my experience selling stuff, because I'm the one selling the ads, based on my discussions with people, based on just how difficult, like there's a reason local news is struggling. Like it's not because they're not creating an event list and running it and not selling ads right. It is just difficult.

And then you tack on the newsletter space, which is totally foreign to a lot of these people, obviously a million times better in terms of audience engagement. And once you, once you get people in, like it's pretty clear. But it is hard to sell.

And anyone who says it's, it's maybe they've got a really good team and it's different. But if you're just starting out, it's a challenge for sure and good on the people that have, that have figured it out, please contact me.

Yeah, I mean it would definitely work.

I feel like education is the biggest part and you got to stay away from CPMs because CPMs will be outrageously high compared to what people are used to. But the results with the good ad in a highly engaged newsletter, the results will be also off the charts. So I think they have to keep that in mind.

And I have a little bit of a. You kind of mentioned people talking about how easy it is. Here's the Playbook. And I don't want to poke anybody here.

I have a little bit of a bone to pick with the way it's been marketed to kind of startupy type people, entrepreneurial type people online.

I think the growth folks in the newsletter space and they're very good and I'm not going to name anybody name because I all think they're super, I think they're all super talented and you need growth. You know, you got to start with growth. Right? So. And Beehive is happy to amplify those people. And again, I love Beehive.

I think it's an amazing platform. There's so much good. But you know, it is also in their interest to get people to sign up and use the service. Of course, yeah, there's.

And again, it's an excellent service. However, there's a lot of stuff out there about, hey, here's what you do, here's the playbook, here's how you get to 10, 15, 20,000 people.

And you know, you're not the first person I've spoken to that has that many people and we have them as well. And it is, it can be done, but it is hard and they kind of a lot of the messaging online is it's here's the playbook. Here's how you get the people.

Excellent ideas. And like it does, it gets the wheels going. And a lot of these would absolutely work, but it kind of ends with a single bullet point. Is the here much?

Here's how much you could charge for ads. And you have a $250,000 business and it's like, no, no, you forget that.

It'S 10 hours a day hustling.

The hardest part, that is six to 12 months of cultivating the audience and, you know, not jumping off a bridge because it's not working. And then you gotta. You gotta monetize it again. Can be done, but harder. Easier said than done.

I think we've moved into a new world on the email newsletter space and even, you know, in the media space, too. I'd say maybe more on the newsletter side, where we solved the growth problem. The growth problem is pretty easy to build your audience.

Like, the tools are out there. If you have any little bit of capital to invest, you can acquire an audience. There's. There's people talking about it, there's people doing it.

It's very easy to do. The next step is the challenging part.

And I mean, that is sort of like every five years or seven years, there's like a new trend where, you know, people are trying to sell something. And I totally get it. Like, there's great businesses being built off this. But yes, it is a absolute slog.

And I think the challenge on the local newsletter side, if we're just focusing on that, is it's going to take a long time. Time.

The revenue is not going to be these, you know, for some of these smaller newsletters in these smaller cities, you're looking at, like, maybe max, like 150, $300,000 a year that you could probably do if you're just doing a local newsletter. Like, is that enough for some of these people and what they want? I'm not convinced. I think that it's a slog. Like, it takes a long time.

Like, we've been doing this for three years and it's only been the last, I would say six months, where I. Where I feel very, very confident about sort of the future of what we're doing and stuff like that.

Not that I didn't feel good about it before, but we're in that position now where we can do more. But it. It took a long time. And so, especially with the local newsletter stuff like, you got to be in it for the long haul here.

Like this sort of quick churn and burn is not going to work. And frankly, like, it's a great little life, like you said, great business to be in, of community connections.

And if you're planning on living in your city forever. Oh, hell, yeah, I would absolutely start a local newsletter. It's great. But if you're trying to become a millionaire off it, I would not.

Unless you're gonna do like a network of local newsletters and that type of thing and you're in a city that's big enough and other pieces there. It's tough, for sure. No doubt about it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like the continuum kind of on one end is. Yeah, you want to.

I think, I think Ryan Sneddon in Annapolis, just seeing him, I think he loves being the Annapolis guy. And there's probably a path for him. There's to, you know, I mean, listen, this is a great lifestyle.

He can maybe pocket half a million dollars a year in the long run, consistently own his audience control. His every hour in his day is not owned by anybody else. And he can, I think he said it, you know, become the most popular guy in town. Right.

That's a fantastic lifestyle. Right.

I think a lot of people who were kind of in the kind of Internet marketing content game, you know, have grander ambitions or, you know, they see, hey, I want to build the next hustle or I want to have the next $30 million hustle sale or something like that. And it's like, that's tough with local. Unless you're piecing it together or you're. You're going vertical.

And I do think there's an opportunity I've talked about sporting to if you want to own a business or really, like, think about the business side, these things are excellent lead gen. But you are now in another business which is not sitting behind your computer.

You, you know, even if you're not operating that business, you're still spending time working on it.

I did not. Yeah. Not to get too deep into it, too, but I do think there is a. Like, a lot of people are entrepreneurs.

Like, I'm an entrepreneur, that type of thing. Moving from an online business to running an H VAC business or running a, you know, one of these cleaning companies or things like that.

Like, there's a reason that, like, small business people are so stressed out and they're so busy all the time. Like, these are hard businesses, right?

And like, just because you solve the audience problem doesn't mean you're going to be able to solve that other piece.

I actually think the better path in the long run is just partnering with someone who has that expertise where you're getting a benefit of that business without having to, oh, this person didn't show up at the cleaning place, so I got to go clean it up. There's an element there of staying.

And I think this is the problem that I myself have run into and a lot of other people, which is that you kind of want to do everything. The sky's the limit. There's so many things do. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's like saying no to certain things is really valuable.

And so I, you know, I look at some of these people that are planning on launching businesses off the side of their newsletter stuff, and that's awesome. Like, all the power to you. But thinking about the time that it takes to do this stuff and, you know, it's not easy and again, it does take work.

Right. I think there is a huge opportunity for that vertical stuff, but thinking about it in a structured way is really important.

And just to the point about Ryan too, you know, when he first started out, he was talking a lot about wanting to expand to other cities and things like that. Right.

And I, I actually think he's made the right call, which is like staying focused on that one city, maybe doing the consulting on the side, running your own business there, like, that's awesome.

Doing, like I will say, expanding to other cities and growing stuff is, is a real challenge and you have to have processes in place and things like that. And running a media business is not easy, but if you can, you know, add the verticals stuff, absolutely.

He's in a perfect size city for it too. And to your point, I think it's 10 no's for every. Yes is good in lots of things. You know, you want to try a lot of things, but focus usually works.

You know, I was in local media with sports for a decade and it literally took me eight years of a lifestyle business before it kind of turned into something scalable. But it was eight years of content. I mean, literally six days a week, usually seven, but you know, sometimes six. Right.

And you know, you gotta be willing to kind of like live in the weeds for a while. Media can be very good business because these are very low overhead businesses.

And you do it long enough and you build up a good enough audience, you can get an excellent lifestyle business or you can bolt something on, you have enough influence to bolt something really impressive on. And I think maybe we've kind of circled our way around kind of the two avenues that these could go.

I think you're on one side, you're going super premium. We're going to make people pay, right?

Like traditional media model, we're going to sell some ads, but we're going to rely on supporters and subscriptions and we're going to be a really good media company. And then the other end of this is a little bit more surface level, maybe go a little bit wider events, lifestyle stuff. And, you know, the content.

The thing that's nice about that is obviously the content is quite a bit easier. Those are the ones that I think are the most ripe for a business. Not only to buy a business, but again, the other way around.

If someone's savvy enough at a business, they can start one of these. You know, if I am the, you know, the local lawyer, you know, like a professional, the mortgage broker, right?

You could do these in three hours a week of work, right? You can invest $10,000, have 15,000 subscribers, three hours a week of work. And you just, you know, you just bring them events.

And you don't need to be a great media business. You just need every single time to remind them that, hey, this is brought to you by your friendly neighborhood mortgage broker.

And, you know, you'll vacuum up a lot of leads that way. And that's a, you know, I think that's where that side of the continuum may have some success long term.

I think so too. And that's like the great spot about building your personality around it too and infusing it within that.

Because then you become a trusted person in a scalable way. That's just impossible with any other, you know, maybe you run a TikTok account or something like that locally.

But like that is the true way to sort of scale yourself and into, you know, people knowing who you are and leveraging that in other businesses. So I think if you're going that route, that's a great way to do it. It's just more a matter of managing all of it right and doing that.

But I think, yeah, there's. I'd say that that's a good way to look at it, the two ways to go about it. I'm going one way, but I think there's a lot of opportunity that other way.

It's just again, not thinking that it's going to make You a millionaire and in one day. Right. It's. It's a, it's a little bit different than running an Inc. Internet business. For sure. Yeah.

What do you think about. You got a couple more minutes?

Yeah, yeah, I got, I got. I can go for another 30, so. Good.

Okay. What do you think about. I was looking through your LinkedIn.

You've kind of, it seems like tinkered with some other newsletter types over the last few years. I know you've been in the media space and the nonprofit space for a bit. What do you think about some of the newsletter space in general?

And then niching, you know, niching down. Like you guys have kind of niched down into food, you know, in one way, in both from a general newsletter perspective.

And also can local newsletters niche down even further into local real estate? I'm bullish on that. It's a different, different game you'd be playing. But what do you think about just.

Yeah, I would say the limitation is not the opportunities. The limitation is capacity. I think the niche down ability of local newsletters is massive. Food stuff. We're quickly in Ottawa.

We're quickly becoming the number one place to find trusted review. We are the number one place to find trusted reviews for food in the city.

You know, housing content is our most popular content in the newsletter by far. Not. Not even close. So there's a huge opportunity around that for us. It's just managing it properly.

I've had opportunities come along but to do it well and right, it's really hard. So growing slowly is an important one for us without taking on, you know, too much. I've seen a lot of places fail because of that.

But the ability to niche down I think is a huge opportunity for local news because you're already in a niche down product that are, you know, newsletter that is going to get huge engagement numbers already. And if you can find any ancillary piece that ties into the local aspect of living in your city, there's no, there's no reason you can't.

You can't focus on that. So real estate, you know, maybe some.

If you're live near like a mountain or nature, maybe it's like you know, a nature newsletter related to going hiking or skiing or things like that. Housing stuff obviously even like a sub event newsletter might make sense. There's a lot of different avenues to go.

So I think like the one nice thing about local newsletters is there's no, there's so many different things that you can do. It's just picking the Right. One that makes sense with what you're doing. So I see, yeah, huge potential to niche down.

It's more a matter of like, can you create something that people are going to want to engage with? And it's not, frankly, it's not just selling something because that's not obviously doesn't work.

Funny, I've been big on communities and as you're kind of describing like maybe the local hiking club or a fishing club or something like that.

Like eventually you are so down your community, like your newsletter might have 90 people, but they're 90 people who show up and go running at the same place every day. And you know, now you're, you're not a newsletter, you're a community. You're sending your community an email.

But it's a, you know, again, it's of all ends up in the same space having an engaged group of people doing something.

And just to that point too like creating a community too from nothing. So like for example, our food guy writes a lot about wine and those like wine reviews and stuff. And so those are really popular.

So we're thinking about spinning out like a wine newsletter that works with both cities and all the other cities that we're operating in. Right. So you can almost, in some ways you can almost create your own if you do it right.

You can take topics that might not necessarily make sense by itself launching, but niche down into that because you have the trust of the community. And you've been pushing that from an editorial strategy.

Like the thinking about your editorial stuff is really important because it can drive a lot of downstream benefits that you might not even think about currently.

And you get centralized. That's the big one.

And I've kind of worked on some of these models and we're currently working on where you can centralize a little bit of the content which as you grow horizontally. We have about 15 hyperlocal sites and fewer newsletters in and around Philly.

But the one thing that's relevant to everybody is sports in a big sports city. So we have our sports brand. Well, the sports brand's content gets tentacled out into all the locals.

Now it doesn't build the whole newsletter obviously, but it gives us something to pull from. And then all the stuff that surrounds the central content can always push towards it and it helps to prop it up to too.

And that could work with wine or frankly any topic that isn't necessarily geographically limited.

Totally. Yeah, we've been thinking a lot about that too.

And one thing we try not to do though Is we've tried experimenting with that where it's like, oh, some sort of city building thing that might apply to all places. And sometimes it works, but then it's also like, is that getting too far away from the local side of stuff?

There's definitely ways to do it, but it's just, you do see a lot of times going to these big news sites where it's like, why is there stuff about the national government here? When it's just, I want to know what the traffic is today, like what we're trying to stay away from. But a lot of places do that, so.

But there is opportunities for that specific topic stuff, I think. For sure.

Yeah, yeah. They're grabbing the AP feed and filling up, filling up space. A lot of it.

A lot of things in media, I find will come back to needing to fill a certain amount of space in a newspaper or fill eight minutes of tv. And what's nice about the Internet is obviously you're outside of that paradigm, but so many things from that paradigm still trickle down.

If you look at mainstream, even websites, they're, they're still in that mindset. Well, we could fill the homepage with AP stuff about, you know, what happened in Washington this week.

They need, they need to drive an extra 2,500 page views so they post an AP thing. Like, I mean, that's the great thing about newsletters, right?

Like, I could not tell you how many page views we're getting on our website right now because I don't care. Like, it doesn't impact our business at all. Maybe one day we'll do display ads, but like, it doesn't matter to us. We don't, we don't care.

We're focused on that other stuff. And that is a really nice thing about having a newsletter based business. You don't have to worry about some of that ancillary stuff.

Yeah. All right, listen, I appreciate your time. This was a really good conversation because I think what you guys are doing is so interesting.

It's different than what a lot of people are doing. The content is really good. I love I, again, opinion is the wrong word and I don't want to use that.

But the context, the way you guys frame what can, what can be.

I didn't mean your content was wonky, by the way, but like wonky local content, the way you guys frame it and present it is in a very modern and approachable way. And that is, that is a skill and an art to do that.

So I, I think everybody should go check out, you know, should they go Ottawa Lookouts at probably the best example of what you guys do.

Ottawalookout.com is the best way.

And I just, you know, for readers, I think, like, you know, thinking about the stuff that you're writing in your newsletter, trying to reframe it in a way that's interesting or different, can just go a long way to help. Like you talked about building that moat that might sometimes not exist, but with a personality, with sort of like a unique content structure.

Like, a lot of our stuff is, we're just taking links from other places and showcasing it, but doing it in a different way. Right. So there's an element there of just being creative with what you're doing that can go a long way.

I always like to ask people this, what's one tool that you guys use in your workflow? You know, not a beehive, not an obvious one, not Google Analytics.

You know, something like, what's a workflow thing you guys love to use, can't live without or would recommend to people?

You know, we probably use a lot less tool. Maybe I'll go a different route and just be contrarian here and say be careful of trying to take.

Take on too many tools and trying to add too many things, because if your organization's growing, that's just another thing that everyone has to learn. I think the mistake we've made has been trying to tack on too many things and it just can add a lot more cumbersomeness to an organization. But I'll.

I guess I'll close by saying we use notion a lot. It's. It's a nice internal wiki for managing things.

No, that's perfect. That's perfect.

And I agree, you get lots of logins and then you ever come to sell it, and then somebody's got to pick up these 17 bespoke processes you guys have built by all your zaps, connecting X, Y and Z. All right, Tell people where they can find you. Personally.

Yeah, I mean, I don't publish myself a lot, but jeffsharp on Twitter, I.

Think Sharp with an E, Sharp with.

An E, Sharp with an E and Jeff with a G. I think I have a personal website, but I honestly haven't checked in a while.

You can reach me on Twitter, though, or on LinkedIn and if you want to check out the stuff, ottawa, lookout.com and yeah, feel free to message me. I'm always interested in chatting about this stuff.

Jeff, thanks for your time.

Yeah, thank you.

All right, so that was my interview with Jeff Sharp of Lookout Media. So I found a lot there.

He is certainly going about this in a way that is much different than I think most of the people building in the Beehive ecosystem, if that's the right way to phrase it. He is going super deep on news rather than that sort of digest or lifestyle format that so many people building on beehive approach with.

And I think, and I mentioned the show, this really does kind of help you build. I hate to keep using the word moat but I think it's a good one. It really just helps build a brand is probably the better word to use.

You know, when you put out digest style content, you know, a that could very easily be disrupted by AI if not now, very soon. But also it doesn't make you memorable to people.

If you think about some of the most, I want to say successful media people currently or over the last five to 10 years, some names that come to mind and you know, I mean some people may like love or hate these people but they're, they're popular and they've done well. You look at Dave Portnoy at Barstool Sports, you look at Joe Rogan, you look at the all in podcast, you look at my first million.

All of these folks you look at call her daddy and things like that. All of these folks have gone about things differently and they have a very unique style and tone to their content and they stand out.

The more you do something that could be easily co opted by either AI or a ghostwriter or by somebody else and no one would even know the difference, the less kind of a media brand that you have.

So I think what they are doing in Ottawa and what frankly what we try to do at Access, particularly with our brand walking the boards down in Ocean City is I, you know, I put my face a little bit in that I try to put a spin on some of the news stories and sometimes we'll even give a my take section which is generally done well as long as you try not to inflame too many people. So I think people building local shouldn't necessarily steer away from hard news.

Yes, it can actually be more work to create and cover hard news because you have to be a reporter. And I understand a lot of people kind of building in this space don't necessarily want to be reporters and I get that.

However, the more unique information, the more context, observations, spin, personality and even humor you can bring to any content product, the better you want to stand out. You don't need to be ridiculous. You don't need to do things that are crazy the way, you know, maybe barstool sports does and places like that.

But anything to be unique and different makes you memorable and it makes you harder to replace. And, and in the case of Jeff, it makes people willing to pay for your content. And that is certainly a business model worth pursuing.

It's probably the hardest one to crack, but he has hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual recurring revenue now, and as long as he's able to make up the churn, at the very least he's built a nice lifestyle business for himself and he has a base to start from, to grow out from. Great. I really enjoy talking to him, going about things a different way.

And you should definitely check out all the brands@lookoutmediaco.com Ottawa Lookout is their main one. It's really good. Be sure to follow him. Check him out on Twitter and social media. If you like what you hear from this show, make sure you follow me.

I'm Kyle Scott L All one word on X. You can also look for me on LinkedIn. You can type Kyle Scott Laskowski my full name. I'll come up and then leave a review and five stars.

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