10 things we learned at Local News Camp

Hey Boosters! It’s David here.

There were so many awesome ideas at Local News Camp.

Today, we’ll give you 10 we think you can put into action in 2027.

That’s not all.

We asked our speakers to send us their best ideas for 2027. Reply to this email and we’ll send you the deck. 

Next, we'll be posting tons of Camp video and other content on LinkedIn in the coming weeks. Follow Blue Engine on LinkedIn so you don't miss it.

Finally, our friends at Beehiiv sent across two reports you might find interesting:

Cancel every meeting, check-in and stand-up, then add back only the ones people miss. Axios does it every January, Mike Allen told Campers, because complexity piles up on its own and you have to cut it on purpose.

On the other hand, Allen said, don't expect AI to simplify things for you. It's "a great complexity-generating machine," Allen said. 

You have to fight the urge to make things more complicated. One practical suggestion is to make sure you include something like the following in your one-on-one meetings: “What's the one thing on your plate you'd most like to stop doing?” Then, find a way to end that task.

A small, devoted audience can be a great business and deeply meaningful work. One DNNR client with 500,000 Instagram followers got 11 people to a dinner. Another, with 4,500 followers and no email list, ran 41 dinners and made $30,000 in a year. 

"I'm just so not impressed by follower counts anymore. You can buy them," said DNNR's Rae Lambert. Chasing scale, she said, is "a bucket of crabs trying to get a global audience."

One person can build something remarkable on that intensity. A yes/no newsletter poll at Catskill Crew, a staff of one with about 42,000 subscribers, turned into Catskillopoly, a local Monopoly board that sold $60,000 in about 12 days.

"All I care about is making friends with my neighbors," said founder Michael Kauffman. "The loneliness epidemic is getting worse by the day, and the people in this room are the ones who can solve it."

Even big organizations win by going small. A broadcast signal that covers half of North Carolina isn't an audience strategy, said WUNC's Wilson Sayre. Instead, she’s helping move her team toward focusing digitally on smaller, engaged, community-centered audiences.

At Axios, the best-performing section of every Axios Local newsletter is the outro, where the writer shares their weekend plans. We heard it again and again at Camp: Being human with your audience is good business.

Micah Gelman of Local News International welcomed the room to "the fifth pivot to video” to some knowing laughs. "The money is not coming from the platforms. You and your news organizations have to do the work to sell," he said.

Start where advertisers are comfortable. YouTube sells out about 40% of news inventory vs. 90% of sports, so lead with food, culture and community, turn your podcast into video and call whomever is advertising on local TV, Gelman said.

Video works best when the whole organization is behind it. Handing video to one social coordinator in a corner is the worst move you can make, said Sky Dylan-Robbins of the Video Consortium. Make room for YouTube, put video in the middle of Monday's meeting and budget a year or more of runway to give video a chance to make real revenue in 2027, Gelman and Dylan-Robbins advised.

"They’re capturing your future subscribers. Why not you?" That's Google's Suzanne Perron on creators: 77% of Gen Z relied on online creators for 2026 election information, and 75% of news creators have no journalism background. But there’s a real opportunity in both directions, between individual creators and established news organizations. Creators get an 8% trust boost when they're tied to a news brand, her research found.

Creator posts are already bringing in donations. "I heard someone say you can't make money on Meta. That's not true. You just have to ask for it," said Ra-Jah Kelly of the Washington Informer, where a single Black History Month creator post raised more than $11,000. His creators sit on both the editorial and sales teams, and they earn commission on what they bring in.

In-house creators are winning back ad dollars that disappeared years ago. At Georges Media (NOLA.com and The Advocate), a digital sales manager turned on-camera creator built a private school video guide that earned $150,000 across three publications. "Money that walked away from us twenty years ago, and suddenly it's back," said their VP of digital sales, Robert Young.

The ads that perform best don't look like ads. Platforms reward content that feels organic, said Nathan May of The Feed Media, which is why even polished brands like AG1 win with creators and moms in sweatpants at Costco. Simple, even ugly, beats glossy.

The moment someone signs up is the most valuable interaction you'll ever have with them, and most publishers waste it. May says his clients earn 50 cents to $3 per new subscriber on Day One by showing relevant local offers after signup. 

We also noticed only a couple of hands went up when asked if anyone does any sort of offer after signup. That’s a big opportunity that’s not yet widely utilized.

"Brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room, and brand is the reason to choose." 

That's the Philadelphia Inquirer's Darya Ushakova, and she sees it as the one thing AI can't copy. "In the era of AI slop, there's one thing no one can take from you: your personality, your identity, your brand," she said. Her Apple test: strip away every office, phone and warehouse, and what's left is still worth billions, and that value is the brand.

Start with three questions: Who are you? What do you do? Why does it matter? Almost everyone can answer the first two. Five years ago, nobody inside the nearly 200-year-old Inquirer could answer the third. "If you think it's obvious, it's not," Ushakova said.

Assume readers don't know what you do. When the Inquirer gave people a week of free access, the most common reaction was "I had no idea." That study cost about $150,000, but Ushakova stressed it scales to almost any budget. The cheap version could include giving a handful of non-readers a free week and asking what surprised them.

Brand also lives well outside the marketing department. It's how you treat employees, how your leaders talk and how your product is built. "If you don't have a brand, if you don't have a personality. You basically have nothing."

We can learn a lot from local institutions outside news. The Durham Bulls, one of the more successful minor league baseball teams in the country, is an example. "Make it easy to be a Bulls fan" is repeated in meetings and literally printed on its office walls.

That left an impression on Brittany Schock of Delaware Source. "Show up. Keep showing up," she wrote in a note to her Delaware County, Ohio readers afterward. She sent readers a "slightly unhinged list of ideas" (trivia night, a dinner club for strangers, newsroom concerts, a pitch-your-single-friends night) and asked them to vote. "We're not just trying to build a news organization that serves this community. We're trying to build one that belongs to it," Schock wrote.

How can you make it easier to be a fan of your news organization? What are the “slightly unhinged” things you’re holding back that would really make a difference next year?

What do you think of the word “used”?

That’s what The Scrap Exchange’s Executive Director, Mitchell Sava, asked Campers visiting his organization to consider. Sava explained he is curious how to change the negative perceptions associated with the word, sounding eerily similar to questions our industry has around, “What is news?” 

It turns out, local news challenges vary in degree, not in kind, from many of our friends in mission-driven organizations. 

Sava’s outlook on the world of creative reuse hit home, outlining tensions local news businesses feel every day. From the tension inherent in “mission vs. margin” to “reaching people who “get us” vs. reaching people who don’t [yet],” he said: “What I’ve noticed is that none of these tensions are easily solved, nor solved forever.” 

So what are we as mission-driven organizations to do? Keep learning.

Keep pushing towards making people care and engaging both the people who already do and the people who don’t know you yet, but should. Keep asking questions and centering growing and deepening relationships.  

“If I had a reporter for 72 hours on Day One I’d have them follow a donation from curb to customer,” said Sava. “On Day Two I’d have them ask 100 customers why they came in. And on Day Three I’d have them interview people who never walk in and find out how we can make them care (about used).”

Several speakers said the best sales pitch starts with a question, such as "How can I help?" Kenny Katzgrau of Broadstreet and Red Bank Green asks clients what the next three years look like if everything goes right, because people buy on emotion and justify it later. 

Then pick up the phone. "Start making phone calls" was the one 2027 move from Allison Taylor Levine, who built Spotlight Delaware to about 20 staff in two and a half years knowing philanthropy alone wouldn't cover it. ("If I hear the words 'catalytic funding' one more time from a philanthropist, I'm going to explode.") 

And when a prospect says no? "No just means they haven't said yes yet," said the Sacramento Observer’s Larry Lee.

Still hungry for more?

We asked our speakers to send us investable ideas. Email us at [email protected] we’ll send you the deck. 

We'll be posting tons of Camp video and other content on LinkedIn in the coming weeks. Follow Blue Engine on LinkedIn so you don't miss it.