Veteran journalists tap overlooked stories to woo readers, funding support
Local news panel at Maple Heights branch of Cuyahoga County Public Library March 15, sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists. From left, Sam Allard, Axios Cleveland; Helen Maynard, Signal Cleveland; Troy Smith, Axios Cleveland; and Mark Naymik, Signal Cleveland.
The future of quality journalism lies in the niches, in developing loyal, engaged audiences. A growing trend is to launch media that focus on covering issues that matter to people in their local communities, in their neighborhoods.
Both for-profit and nonprofit media companies have been stepping forward. Two digital news startups in Cleveland are the latest examples — Signal Cleveland, a nonprofit, and Axios Cleveland, part of a for-profit chain.
Both launched in November and talked about their experiences and hopes in a panel discussion March 15 at the Maple Heights branch of Cuyahoga County Public Library. The event was sponsored by the Cleveland Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
The new players
Helen Maynard, left, editor of Signal
Signal Cleveland has a 17-person newsroom plus an army of 600 “documenters” who attend public meetings, take notes, and file reports that the editors use as tip sheets for stories.
- The newsroom leaders include Helen S. Maynard, editor, with a TV news background, and Mark Naymik, managing editor, with experience in TV, print, and digital news.
- Signal’s slogan is, “We’re here to make Cleveland work better for Clevelanders.” Naymik and Maynard said their aim is to tell the stories of people living in the neglected city center, “the hole in the doughnut”, surrounded by the suburbs.
- In its second full month of operation, the website had 21,000 total visitors, according to SimilarWeb.
Axios Cleveland, the other newcomer, is a Monday-through-Friday newsletter sent out at 6:30 a.m. (also a website).
Axios has two full-time reporters focused on politics, government, and culture — Sam Allard and Troy Smith, each of whom has a decade of experience in local news media. Allard did investigative and long-form journalism at Scene magazine. Smith covered entertainment for Cleveland.com.
Troy Smith, left, and Sam Allard, are the two reporters for Axios Cleveland.
- Axios Cleveland also launched at the end of 2022 and is the latest local market for the Axios chain, which now publishes in 25 cities with plans to expand to many more. It was started by two of the founders of Politico.com. Its slogan: “Axios gets you smarter, faster on what matters.”
- All the Axios newsletters follow a format trademarked as “Smart Brevity”, designed to be read quickly, with lots of subheadings, bullet points, boldface type, and links.
- The writing style is conversational, informal. It’s meant to be like a chat between a cabbie and a new arrival to the city: “What’s happening?” “Let me tellya.”
- Axios Cleveland had about 18,000 free subscribers as of February.
Why these startups matter. Like many metropolitan areas in the U.S., Cleveland has seen its traditional news media — print, TV, and radio — drastically reduce their reporting staffs and coverage of the local community.
The coverage that remains often focuses on news designed to stir emotion and grab attention, such as violent crime, sports, celebrities, traffic, and weather — lots and lots of weather. And much of the news coverage is of national or international topics rather than local ones.
The lone remaining metro daily in Cleveland, the Plain Dealer, had a newsroom of 340 people in 2000; that was down to 77 in 2020, with home delivery now only four days a week.
How the startups are funded
Signal Cleveland announced initial funding of $7.5 million, led by the American Journalism Project, a venture philanthropy organization backed by $128 million in pledges. It has has operations in three dozen communities so far.
- Signal Cleveland’s other major donors are the Cleveland Foundation and the Visible Voice Charitable Fund. It also has affiliations with a local community radio station and the Marshall Project.
- How long can it last? The financial viability of the publication will depend on its ability to keep raising money from foundations and individual donors. “It’s dependent on showing impact, on moving the needle,” Naymik said at the SPJ event.
Axios Cleveland’s financial future seems somewhat more secure. The parent company was just sold to Cox Enterprises in a cash deal valued at $525 million. Its main revenue source is high-end national advertisers and sponsors.
- The announcement of the deal emphasized Cox’s intention to expand Axios’s network of local publications from two dozen to several hundred.
- Cox chairman and CEO Alex Taylor said in announcing the deal, “A big part of this investment is to expand the number of local markets we serve. Local watchdog journalism is so important to the health of any community, and no one is more focused on building that out nationally than Axios.”
In their own words, from the SPJ event
Helen Maynard of Signal welcomes even more new media. “For whatever reason, there’s an appetite here for local news. If you want to open a nonprofit newsroom, come here and do it. If you have the money, come here. There’s a lot of room in this landscape to tell other stories. You guys [Axios] are telling different stories than we’re telling, than the Marshall Project is telling, than the next person who comes in is telling. There’s plenty of room, so pull up a chair .”
Troy Smith of Axios on the relationship with the audience: “What I’ve noticed in going from The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com [to Axios] is there’s a connection there with Axios because you’re in people’s e-mail boxes. They can respond to you and say, ‘hey Sam, hey Troy.’ That’s one thing I’ve noticed is just an intimate connection with the readers that we have because all they have to do is hit reply.”
Sam Allard of Axios on who subscribes: “For sure I think they’re civically engaged. I mean they want to know the news of the day. When we were at Scene.com, we said we’d like to write for the engaged citizen, people who were interested in civics but also engaged in social life, going out, and things like that. And I think there’s a similar element here [at Axios]: people who want to go out and experience the city and also want to be tapped into whatever, whether it’s politics or news.”
Mark Naymik, left, managing editor, Signal
Mark Naymik of Signal described how their coverage of “boring city budget meetings” led to a big story. “Our documenters offer an additional layer of reporting. Signal staff set up a war room, and we watched all 66 hours in real time, produced clips, and highlighted lots of little elements that were in there. In a hearing on community development, the director says, ‘You know what? I don’t think tax abatements [for developers] have been doing all that much. They haven’t raised the bar in Cleveland.’ She said they might need to be changed. That’s huge. No one knew it until we put it in the newsletter, and now I’ve seen multiple stories [by other media] come out of that.’’
Are those ‘documenters’ citizen journalists or what?
Naymik replied: “Our documenters are partners. Those are folks that go out and document meetings. They get paid by the hour. And that’s the thing that was sort of missing in local news; no one was going to the board of control, the zoning meeting, this hearing and that hearing. And that’s the thing that really makes the difference — grass-roots reporting.”
The two short videos below capture comments of Troy Smith and Mark Naymik at the March 15 roundtable.