Nieman Foundation at Harvard
The outlets stepping into the breach of the United States’ local news crisis come in many shapes, sizes, and models. You have startup nonprofits; worker-owned newsrooms; for-profits, including legacy chains (for-profits still make up the majority of local news outlets today); and publications originally established with narrower coverage mandates expanding to other areas to meet their communities’ changing needs.
CityView, in Fayetteville, NC, falls into that last camp. Founded in 2006 as a lifestyle magazine, and purchased by ex-mayor Tony Chavonne about 13 years later, the publication responded to its community’s growing need for timely hard news in 2022 by creating CityView Today, a free, online newsletter covering local government news. The newsletter has become a community success, reaching tens of thousands of residents. To expand its hard news reporting, CityView brought on a health care reporter through Report for America this year.
But community reach and readership don’t guarantee financial sustainability. And in June, with that reality in mind, Chavonne announced a decision that, he wrote, “represents the best option for a sustainable news operation in Fayetteville”: CityView Media recently signed a letter of intent to transfer ownership to The Assembly, a statewide digital news magazine.
The ownership transfer is the continuation of a partnership that began last summer. It isn’t The Assembly’s first local partnership; since launching in February 2021 as a for-profit publication, it has created a similar partnership on the path to ownership of Indy Week in the Triangle. In Wilmington, the publication has teamed up with WHQR on a weekly newsletter since last spring. This June, it established a Greensboro weekly newsletter with support from a local community journalism fund and Report for America.
The Assembly isn’t currently profitable, but that hasn’t stopped it from taking big swings in both the editorial and business senses. With a mission of publishing “deep reporting about power and place in North Carolina,” the publication has an ambitious vision of curiosity-driven reporting that holds power to account. It’s structured as an attempt to answer the question “What does a state-level Atlantic [Magazine] look like?” founder and editor-in-chief Kyle Villemain told me, and takes inspiration from other statewide magazines like California Sunday1 and Texas Monthly.
By moving toward purchasing Indy and CityView, and partnering with other outlets like WHQR, The Assembly, less than five years old itself, is already taking action to build the foundation of a statewide local news network. Should it succeed in reaching sustainability, it could lift other, smaller publications’ boats with its tide.
In a letter from the editor published last week, Indy editor-in-chief Jane Porter wrote that the outlet “is in a stronger position than it has been in a long time after it began working with The Assembly.”
Since the Indy’s partnership with The Assembly was announced last spring, “we’ve received an infusion of resources — new staff positions, greater editorial support, opportunities for collaboration, not to mention a path to financial sustainability — all while being able to preserve the Indy’s unique mission and voice,” Porter told me in an email.
“The Assembly is, as we are, committed to keeping the Indy free and accessible,” she said. “That’s not an easy task in this day and age, but our partnership helps facilitate that.”
Indy owner Richard Meeker “had been looking for the right person or group to buy the Indy for several years,” Porter added. The ownership transition to The Assembly will likely be finalized in the next year or so.
Villemain didn’t begin his career as a journalist (although, depending on how you define when a career begins, perhaps he did — he wrote for his high school newspaper in Chapel Hill, The Proconian). After college, he entered politics, and spent years as a speechwriter for top leadership in the University of North Carolina system.
That experience gave him access to a lot of conversations among powerful people happening behind closed doors. And, as Villemain tells it, he didn’t see closed-door power being covered adequately by existing journalistic outlets.
He noticed a “disconnect between what I was seeing behind the scenes, in richness and complexity of story, and what I was consistently reading in accessible publications,” he told me. The desire to “bridge that gap” propelled him to create The Assembly. The summer of 2020 gave him time to begin the outreach that would form the foundation of the project.
From the beginning, Villemain was focused on finding a financial model that could support the kind of local journalism he didn’t see being reported.
“I was fixated on trying to build a place that could pay good writers good money to spend more time than normal on big stories,” he said. That required “a financial model that rewards quality over quantity and allows us to do lower volume but higher-quality work.”
A primary focus on advertising, Villemain thought, would contradict that model. And to protect its independence for accountability journalism, Villemain was wary of being too reliant on statewide philanthropy; with the kind of reporting he wanted The Assembly do, “at some point, we will burn some bridges.”
That has led The Assembly to “a subscriber-first setup” and prioritizing diversified revenue streams. Readers can access one article for free per month, and can sign up for the publication’s free, thrice-weekly statewide newsletter. Otherwise, the site is paywalled ($6 a month, or $60 a year, with a premium membership option for $150 a year.). Currently, just over 5,000 people “pay for news across our company,” including statewide and regional products, Villemain said. Around 30,000 readers receive The Assembly’s statewide newsletter, while the outlet has about 100,000 newsletter subscribers across “regional and industry newsletters.” The Assembly is averaging 245,000 pageviews per month this year, and 530,000 pageviews per month across the network.
Villemain eventually wants subscriptions and memberships to support about 50% of The Assembly’s total budget. “Five years from now, we want to be a heavily subscriber-supported outlet,” he said. For now, subscriptions make up “a significant and growing percent” of their revenue mix. (Villemain declined to give specific percentages.)
While The Assembly is a for-profit company, Villemain did not rule out philanthropy entirely. For its Greensboro and Wilmington operations, for instance, The Assembly has raised money through its nonprofit partners. “Those are places that we wouldn’t have built a team without philanthropic dollars,” he said.
A subscriber-first model isn’t built overnight. To get off the ground, The Assembly still needed capital. In Villemain’s mind, separate from the risk to independence of relying too much on statewide philanthropy, a competitive national landscape of high-powered journalism nonprofits would make it almost impossible to receive any significant funding pre-launch. “We needed to prove ourselves before we could even approach those foundations,” Villemain said.
So to start, Villemain pitched investors. That pitch was, essentially, “We believe that there’s a good path for a digital subscription-based outlet that’s doing really high-quality work, and getting people to subscribe to that same level of national quality, but about their state” that would “fill a different niche” than existing local media.
The Assembly built up seed funding from approx. 15 angel investors across North Carolina, with most gifts in the $5,000-$10,000 range, and $25,000 checks constituting the biggest individual investments in The Assembly’s first year. Villemain raised $50,000 pre-launch, and The Assembly team raised $200,000 in its first year. Since launch, the organization has done more financing rounds and is currently raising some money “that’s going to give us enough runway to go into what we think will be break-even in the coming years,” Villemain said.
A majority of Assembly stock is owned by full-time staffers, though not all staff own stock, and not all who do own the same stake. Members of the management team own the most, Villemain said; early employees have some stock; and “we have a pretty healthy stock option package for some key employees,” he said. (Just over 40 angel investors own the rest of the stock. All Assembly investors are individuals — none are institutional or venture capitalists, Villemain noted.)
All told, The Assembly’s revenue mix (excluding investors) comprises subscriptions, philanthropy, and advertising, with regional advertising more “robust” than statewide. (Total combined ad sales for Fayetteville’s CityView and the Triangle’s Indy “exceed $1,000,000 a year,” Villemain specified. Because of the regional teams, “we’re more advertising-heavy than we thought we would be,” he said.)
From the beginning, “long form was a kind of organizing principle for us” at The Assembly, Villemain said. “How do we build good narrative stories that tell readers something new and make them walk away feeling smarter than when they started?”
The Assembly publishes between 20 to 25 stories a month on its main website, which are typically “2,000 to 4,000 word deep dives.” Regional teams, meanwhile, publish more, typically shorter stories, on a more daily frequency.
The outlet has 17 (soon to be 18) full-time staff members across editorial and business divisions of its statewide team. Additionally, through its management service agreements with its two regional partners, it provides back-end and editing support to those partners. Counting the teams at Indy and CityView, the organization has almost 40 full-time staffers.
The publication also relies heavily on freelancers (Emily Cataneo, for instance — the reporter behind the widely read stingray story — is listed as a “contributing writer” and classified as a freelancer.)
“Freelancers are a really important part of how we punch above our weight,” Villemain told me. “If all freelancers went away, we’d probably lose 40% of our story output.”
Of The Assembly’s statewide staff, about a quarter are members of its Growth and Operations team, while the rest work on the editorial side. But the growth of the former team is a recent development; for most of The Assembly’s early life, just one person, Paige Ladisic, oversaw “tech stacks, our data systems, our membership, our subscription funnel at each step — even our sales operation from our mild advertising.”
“We’ve got a kind of complicated product to sell, from the sponsorship side of things, and we’re kind of working out how best to do that,” Villemain added.
Local partnerships weren’t always the plan, Villemain explained. They were “unexpected, but really became pretty vital to us.”
About a year or 18 months into The Assembly’s operation, when the outlet was producing two to three big stories a week, “we decided that we were doing good stuff that was touching people’s lives, but we weren’t in people’s lives enough,” Villemain said. “The stories that really connect with you were probably not enough to make you make a habit.”
That meant “we decided we needed to get closer to people’s lives and not just be at the statewide level.” They’ve taken an “ad-hoc approach” to building out local teams and finding local partnerships that could be mutually beneficial.
In Wilmington, for instance, The Assembly established a one-person team partnering with the public radio station on a weekly newsletter including The Assembly’s reporting and WHQR reporting. In Greensboro, The Assembly set up a standalone two-person local operation. The partnership-to-acquisitions of CityView and Indy Week, meanwhile, allow those outlets to focus on their local reporting while strengthening The Assembly’s relationship to those communities, and give the smaller outlets access to valuable back-end and reporting support. (Porter, of the Indy, shared examples of reporting collaboration with The Assembly, and “big-swing features” supported by Assembly editors.)
In 2023, The Assembly found its first partner in The Food Section, a Southern outlet focused on food reporting. Editor and publisher Hanna Raskin edits and commissions some Assembly food stories, and runs some of her work in The Assembly.
“It’s been a really nice way to get a very smart food editor and reporter to elevate our coverage while also not messing with either business model,” Villemain said.
That partnership also led to some of The Assembly’s first events. The organization co-hosted one in Durham with Raskin, modeled off an event Raskin does in Charleston, called Spirited Brunch, collaborating with faith organizations to highlight food heritage.
Events could become a bigger part of The Assembly’s brand and revenue in the future. “We’re learning how to do events right now and we plan to lean into them next year,” Villemain told me. The organization has done some virtual live events centered around stories as an audience engagement measure. With the same goal, through the fall, The Assembly will experiment with “a series of dinner conversations and small group events.” This spring, The Assembly was part of a five-month cohort in the American Press Institute’s live events sprint program, which led to “some regional launch events” that introduced the outlet’s new teams to communities, especially in Greensboro.
From The Assembly’s work with its partners, Villemain has learned that to make partnerships work best, you “need to be ready to shift and pivot.” For instance, with Raskin and The Food Section, the two organizations had initially planned to do more regional and city-level collaboration, but found in practice that this was too heavy a lift.
“My biggest partnership lesson,” he added, “has been, when you are partnering with someone new, don’t try to learn a new muscle.”
Villemain always envisioned The Assembly as a digital magazine. But the company experimented with a five-issue print run in 2023 and this year, before discontinuing it following this summer’s issue.
The issues were “meant to be a quarterly ‘best-of our work’ for subscribers and a marketing or leave-behind tool,” Villemain said. While it looked beautiful, “it took way more staff time to put together and do quality control than we thought (even with design outsourced) and it just didn’t have enough ROI to justify it, either from a subscriber benefit or advertising revenue, or brand awareness.”
“We’d love to restart at some point when we have more capacity,” Villemain added. “But it’ll always be secondary to our digital presence.”
Meanwhile, one of The Assembly’s, and Villemain’s, biggest early headaches: tech. He did not mince words: Tech “has been a nightmare since Day 1.”
“We struggled to find a subscription software that was easy for folks to use — that kept folks signed in, or let them reset passwords easily, or even let them sign up and pay us without lots of things misfiring,” he explained. For the first year to 18 months, the subscription system “really didn’t work consistently,” so the outlet moved to its current setup, Piano, in 2023, which has helped. “Things have been more stable recently, and our subscription growth has reflected that.”
“The core issue is that each part of your tech stack is made by different organizations, and they don’t always integrate well,” Villemain said. In The Assembly’s first year, they launched as cheaply as they could, “with a custom build site that did just what we asked it to do, but nothing more.” Sign-ups, payments, and cancellations all worked — but in a slightly more complex scenario, like someone wanting to re-subscribe, the system wouldn’t work. And when the team started adding to the site, “things started breaking.”
“There’s nothing more frustrating than feeling like you have a good product, but folks can’t access it,” Villemain said. “If I were to do this again, I’d raise $100,000 or $200,000, which is a huge amount of money to us, and have someone build us everything we need from Day 1, rather than cobble together and troubleshoot as we went.”
The Assembly currently averages 150 to 200 net new paid subscribers per month, and Villemain aims to raise that to 300 net new per month.
“Sustainable has two meanings to me,” Villemain told me. The first, and more obvious, is cash flow. “But also, are we building a thing that’s going to meet reader needs, and be medium-term sustainable and long-term sustainable, and not get crowded out or [hidden] by whatever is going to happen over the next few years digitally?”
The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel has argued for the necessity of a theory of attention in media criticism. Media criticism aside, Villemain’s journalistic theory of earning reader attention, and support, drives The Assembly’s organizational structure and approach to all stories. His theory boils down to this: Reporters given time to follow their curiosity will write the most compelling, unique stories, which will inspire subscribers to spend time with and pay for their work even in an incredibly competitive attention economy.
“I’m a big believer that if you ask people to fill every hour of their time with output, then they’re not going to have the time to be curious,” Villemain said. “At the end of the day, the most important thing we’ve got is to be and stay curious about the state, and then let our reporting reflect that…Are we adding something new to the ecosystem?”
Subscribers to The Assembly, Villemain said, usually pay for one or two other news subscriptions as well. “We don’t pretend to be and probably are not, for almost anyone, that primary source of daily or weekly news,” Villemain said.
“I think that we’ve got a couple of years here where local outlets can establish brand and establish trust. And it’s going to be a lot harder to do that after search dies, after social dies,” Villemain said. “Local outlets who are growing and have big ambitions to be a trusted source really need to sprint as hard as they can right now. I think being a small outlet, in three years, is going to be really, really hard from a discovery standpoint.”
