This platform is powering over 180 local newsrooms

Speaker A: And so give me a sense of Indiegraph's growth over the last several years, both in terms of publishers within the caliber of publishers regions that you've moved into. Like what's your growth trajectory been?

Speaker B: Sure. So we started in Canada and very quickly met our goal of having 10 publishers that we were working with in 2020. That was our goal for year one and we like exceeded it within months with a little help from the pandemic. And then that's when New Media Ventures approached us to fund us, uh, to launch in the United States and most of businesses now in the US we have 180 local communities that are currently using our tools and about uh, a third of them are in Spanish language. So we've built out our customer support and our products to be bilingual so that we can support organizations that are serving Latino and immigrant communities, which we've seen as a great opportunity.

Speaker A: Hello, I'm Simon Owens and this is the Business of Content, the show about how publishers create, distribute and monetize their digital content. For more than a decade, Erin Miller has been trying to answer a question that has plagued the journalism. What should replace the local newspaper model after it collapses? Her first attempt came with the Discourse, a Canadian media company that experimented with new approaches to community driven reporting before eventually evolving into a network of local news outlets. But along the way, Miller realized that the biggest opportunity wasn't necessarily building another media chain. It was creating the infrastructure that could help hundreds of independent publishers thrive. That insight led to the launch of Indiegraph, a software and services company that now supports 180 local communities across North America and beyond. In a recent interview, Miller explained why she believes the future of local news will be built around networks rather than traditional chains. How Indiegraph helps publishers generate revenue, and why consolidation may actually strengthen independent media. If you want to listen to an audio version of this show, subscribe to the Business of Content wherever you get your podcast. And if you're watching this on YouTube, gently tap on that subscribe button so you can watch more interviews with the world's most successful media entrepreneurs. Okay, let's jump into the interview. Hey Aaron, thanks for joining us.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: So super excited to talk to you. I think you and I spoke like a few years ago about uh, a new startup that you're running called the Discourse. And I think even back then you were talking about the spinoff tech company uh, that you launched called Indie, uh, Graph, but that back then it was still in kind of its nascent stages. Now it's a much More mature platform. So I want to like get into all of that I guess just to like, I don't want to spend too much time talking about the discourse but just to get people up the street since that, since Indie Graph spun off from that. I'd love to just start there and just kind of. Can you, can you give us a refresher of when it was founded and like what the, the basic idea of that media company was?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So my background is a journalist. I'm a journalist turned entrepreneur. Um and I reported specifically on education. Um and I was just finding that there I was working for a national newspaper in Canada where I'm based and I was just finding that there was very few um, opportunities for me to do the kind of in depth reporting um, that would actually have an impact on communities. Because usually that happens at the local or um, regional level when it comes to education. But all of these newspapers were closing and um, um there was fewer and fewer beat reporters. So that was kind of the reason for me getting involved with a couple of other journalists who were also beat recorders and starting our own publishing company. We founded um the discourse in 2014 um and experimented with a number of different models. Um and where it ended up, um, uh today it is a chain of six local news uh outlets that are doing in depth reporting. Um, and we're specifically interested in like in developing a model that worked for the communities where the traditional newspaper business model was failing. So um, focusing on rural, smaller communities, um, indigenous communities, um and uh, just you know focus on making a business model. So it's membership first, um, sponsorship second, um, diverse revenue streams and like very focused on engaging the community and being really um, solutions oriented in the reporting.

Speaker A: Yeah. And so from what I remember, and correct me if I'm wrong, like it started like you said, it went through several iterations. I think in the first iteration it was like funding store, like, like investigative journalism or something and then that would be licensed out to local newspapers or something like that. Was that like the first iteration?

Speaker B: Yeah, the first iteration was collaborative with other organizations rather than you know being its own outlet serving um those local communities. So we've always maximized around impact and wanted to distribute content um, through different newspapers. So like for example, um, one of the topics in British Columbia where I'm based that we um, really wanted to cover was we um have a lot of mining companies here. It's a big part of our local economy. They do a lot of their work overseas and we knew that there was um, some new Mining activity happening in um, South Africa. So on that it was a very local story in British Columbia, but we would never have had the resources to cover that as a local newspaper. Right. And so we partnered with the Daily Maverick to um, to be able to report stor that work for both organizations. Um, so that was just an example of how collaboration has always been a part of our practice at Discourse and has continued in with Indie Graph as well. But the idea being, considering we're so resource constrained in the journalism field, how can we reorganize how we use those resources to have the most impact possible?

Speaker A: And then the way that it morphed was that eventually the business model that you figured out how to get to work is like you basically just started launching Discourse sites in different like cities, towns, like all around Canada. And it became kind of like a loose kind of federation almost of, of sites where you would, I think it was primarily the main revenue generator was like memberships and stuff like that. And you would have like a journalist, like a, a journalist or sometimes maybe multiple journalists and then maybe like a business person in each, in each like location. Right?

Speaker B: That's right. And we experimented in a lot of different um, communities, some of which were like closely connected to ourselves in British Columbia and some of which we weren't. So we did experiments in the Prairies, we did experiments in northern British Columbia, um, in Scarborough, which is a suburb, really underserved suburb of uh, Toronto. So a large media market. And one of the things that we learned from that was that um, really inspired indie graphics, um was that uh, having that incentive of a local journalist working, serving their own community was like really important. And so that brought us to really believe in um, a different ownership model which was um, not just creating another centrally owned chain of uh, news organizations but instead finding ways to um, support a decentralized um, ownership model. And so I think that the timing of all this, of course um, you'll be very familiar with it, with the coverage that you do. But um, the timing of this is happening when there was like a lot of independent news organizations launching and everything from solopreneurs, you know, that are doing it all one um, person shop to um, you know, new media organizations that um, might be started by a couple of founders, then grow into a full newsroom. So we sort of like rode that wave I would say, um, with Indiegraph, um, but the goal was always to think about what could a local news chain look like if instead of it being centrally owned, it was community owned and accountable or you know or journalist owned and accountable. Um, but we could benefit from some of those economies of scales of, you know, shared marketing resources, technology, um, and learning. Right. Like R and D design. Like some of those things that we wouldn't be able to as individual organizations, like have departments dedicated to those things.

Speaker A: Yeah. So like kind of what you're saying is like under like the like maybe newspaper chain model where they've centralized a lot of services. Um, your kind of insight was the editorial really needs to be locally driven by people in the community and the centralization really needs to be minimal to um, a few core areas that aren't really editorial that are things around tech and um, monetization and stuff like that.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. That business piece. And I think at the editorial piece is so important. Like, um, where we get into trouble is, is I think centralized editorial control. There's lots of examples of why. So I don't need to, I don't need to underline that. But, um, uh, but also just the incentives. Right. Like it never made sense to me that, you know, here in Canada, um, one of our largest local news chains is headquartered in Canada or headquartered in Toronto. It owns outlets that are in my city. Um, and those editors are accountable to a boss in Toronto who's accountable to, um, shareholders that are at a private equity firm in New Jersey. They have nothing to do with, they don't have any interests that are aligned with the actual community needs for information in my city. Um, and so that never made sense to me. And um, Indie Graph and Discourse were part of our response to that.

Speaker A: So what was kind of like the core tool set that you started to develop at the Discourse that, you know, you start to, you start. And what was, what was the kind of thought process, when did it start reaching a point where like this could be its own separate company?

Speaker B: Yeah, so, um, I guess it actually started with, um, just not wanting to spend more money on this is like the less glamorous origin story. But, um, having spent too much money on individual like WordPress developers. And you know, this was in 20, between 2014 and 2020, it was a lot more expensive to like launch a news organization and figure out all the integrations of, you know, your CRM and your email service provider and how's the data going to speak to each other and how are you going to collect membership, uh, fees? All of that was super expensive. And so we were spending tens of thousands of dollars on contractors and services. And then, you know, we had all this tech debt from WordPress sites that were, you know, Needed updating and nobody wants to touch the code because the one developer got a job somewhere. So anyways, this became the problem, like the immediate technology problem that we were solving for, um, was um, can we do this much more efficiently? Um, and uh, so, um, our initial technology product is very much like content management system with integrations that enabled this business model. The more interesting part of it, you know, from my perspective as a journalist, um, was about how can we create a tech, um, stack that's really optimized around this journalistic practice that we were innovating at. Ah, um, uh, Discourse, which was, you know, and this stuff back then felt like we were coming up with something completely new. Now this is much more standard. But the idea of engagement journalism, that was not fully, um, understood, that was, was not part of the mainstream practice at that point. Um, so how do we involve, um, how do we involve the audience in our content? How do we make sure that we're responding to community need? Um, a lot of this is like design centered thinking, um, work too, but that hadn't really been applied to journalism. So those are the sorts of features that we've built into this tool set. And we started there and then also offered fractional services, um, ah, specifically around building membership programs. Um, again like membership programs as a business model was still relatively new. And applying that to smaller, um, independent organizations, um, was uh, an opportunity. You know, we had seen it be very successful at the Guardian, which has, you know, a whole large department that's undedicated to that. But how do we. Right. Size that for smaller markets? So we developed some fractional services around that and that was our initial offer.

Speaker A: Yeah, because the Discourse, like it never really put anything behind a paywall. It was like completely membership based. Right.

Speaker B: Still is. Yep.

Speaker A: When did you, what year did you launch the discourse?

Speaker B: 2014. While the brand itself. We launched. The company launched in 2014. The brand launched in 20, um, 17. Um, and then we launched Indie Graph in 2020.

Speaker A: 2020. Okay. So right in the, you know, the heart of the Pandemic basically started building out this company. This like sister company, basically.

Speaker B: Yeah, like we had done a call for other independent media organizations that wanted to collaborate with the Discourse to, you know, pool our resources to build this tech piece. And we got so much response from it that we were like, okay, there's something more here. So we were kicking around the idea for Indie Graph, um, in late 2019, early 2020. And then the Pandemic really lit a fire under our butts because it was an existential um, crisis uh, for local news here, um, in Canada we lost 50 community newspapers in six weeks which was crazy um because these are all small businesses that don't have a lot of Runway and you know lost some major advertisers and that was enough to put them on hia. Thankfully we did see some of those reopen once the economy stabilized. But um, at the time it looked like holy, like we need to launch new outlets super quickly in markets where they don't have access to reliable information at a point where that's literally a matter of life and death. So we just started launching outlets. We um, secured some initial funding to get Indiegraph going and we launched 10 um, digital outlets that were a combination of new startups and um, print to digital transformations. Um, within a matter of yeah we did 10 in a matter of about six months.

Speaker A: And like you mentioned the funding like you've, you've taken on like a few million dollars of grants and stuff like that over the years.

Speaker B: Yeah, um, so we are uh, we are a mission driven for profit company majority owned by impact investors and uh, employees. Um so we do have uh, investment that's part of our backing. Uh we're backed by Micro Capital Coralys uh which is a gender lens investor here in Canada, uh New Media Ventures which is Democracy, uh Venture Capital Fund, um based in California. Um and the Knight foundation recently made an investment in Indigraph um to scale our model and and um, we have also had some grants but most of us, most of this is in the form of business impact investment.

Speaker A: And then the way that you charge it's basically like a SaaS based system. It's not taking a percentage of sales or anything like that. It's uh, straight like it costs this much a month to license the platform.

Speaker B: Yeah we're a SaaS business model. We do have a couple of special partnerships with organizations um that want it some revenue share which allows us to invest more services and things into more than they would be able to pay up front. So that's been um, our model but for the most part our off the shelf pricing model is just a pure SaaS model that's um, tied to the number of email subscribers which we use as a proxy to understand the size and the maturity of the business.

Speaker A: And uh, so when you launched in 2020 was sounded like there were some new startups that were launching on this software. Were you going to any legacy news organizations or was it purely working with like new partners and like brand new entities and stuff like that?

Speaker B: Yeah, we've definitely from day one we have also we've worked um, with legacy newspapers, um, community newspapers. Like this is the, you know that the largest source of original local news reporting still in the market comes from newspapers. So we think they're really important. Um, so we've always done um like transformations from print to digital businesses. A lot of these organizations are like primarily uh supported by print advertising and so there's an opportunity there to open up new digital revenue sources, launch membership programs and a lot of them have you know have the trust of their um, of their communities. Right. So you know I always. We love launching startups like it's so much fun. That's like definitely where my DNA is um as an entrepreneur. Um and so that'll always be part of what we do is launch digital new startups. But um, we also like love it's kind of similar to actually develop a digital news outlet from a print brand. Um the work is quite similar. It really is like a new business. Um and it's really fun to work in these places that have deep histories with their newsrooms. So we've enjoyed that work a lot.

Speaker A: And what was the initial kind of core feature set for Indiegraph in 2020 when those initial partners were coming on? Like what, what did you specifically offer?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it started with a content management system, um that and then we added um, we added Indie Graph Pay later which is like built right in payment um system so folks weren't having to go to external like people were using Patreon, you know they're using everything right and losing quite a lot, leaving a lot of money on the table for that reason or sending, sending potential um supporters off site. Um and so we built a system right in um then we added uh email. So Indie Email is part of our feature set um which is uh, uh email service provider. We did that for a few reasons. Um, uh rather than working with a more generic solution like mailchimp, um I should say we integrate with everything. Um but we do offer this complete set that is pre integrated and works really well and is more cost effective. Um but we were able to build automations and um, all sorts of different features uh for email that is just specific for independent journalism use case rather than a generic email service provider. Um and so that was the opportunity we responded to there. Um and then we also launched Indie Ad Manager. Um so this is an important part of the business model that we see works um and that's automating as much as possible of the local ad sales um, process and market. We Know, folks don't have a lot of capacity to do that. But um, there are a lot of ways to unlock um, more revenue to support these organizations. Um, and then also the Indie Ad Manager taps into higher CPMs for um, programmatic, um, ish type things. So we work with an organization for example called Empower Local that is selling into local media specifically. So it's not like AdSense programmatic, it's higher value. So we want to make all those kind of opportunities available to the organizations that work with Indie Graph.

Speaker A: Was there at some point that Indiegraph had like an actual sales team that would try to like sell local ads at individual news organizations? Or am I hallucinating that?

Speaker B: No, we do, we um, we do have. We don't have a sales team. We have a uh, powerful sales woman who's Ramona Wildman who's been with us for a long time. And yeah, she works across a number of our organizations and she comes out of um, print newspapers and is a really experienced um, ah, ad salesperson. And so um, you know we're not, we don't have the capacity to offer that service to all of our publishers. But it was really important that to us that we're doing some of the sales on the ground. So that, that's really informing our understanding of uh, the business model, um, how to sell m. The feature set that we need to make it easier for folks. So um, yeah, so Ramona is still on the team and we love her.

Speaker A: So she's, she's someone depending. I'm guessing there's maybe some threshold that the, you know, the publisher has to be so, so large to be able to utilize her. But she will actually like cold call or email local businesses in a newspapers like city and will sell ads for them.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And um, yeah there's, and I should say like she's built up some of the organizations like Palm Springs Post is a good example. Like she's built up that advertising business up from the ground up. Like it started with us. Palm Spring Post came to us when it had like less than 500 subscribers on Substack. And it's now um, you know, launched into other markets. Um, it's profitable, it supports a team. Um, I don't know what its revenue would be right now. But um, but yeah like she built that up from um, like the advertising side of that business from like square one. So it's now reaching like 10% of the market that they're serving. So it's pretty cool story.

Speaker A: Yeah. And so, but like you built, you built an actual ads manager. So is this, uh, so let's talk about just on the publisher side before we talk about the programmatic. But is this like a dashboard where a newspaper or local news outlet like, they're, they're selling ads and it's like a dashboard where they can like easily go in and, and put in the creative and, and do all that kind of stuff?

Speaker B: Yeah. So what we tried, what we were finding when we studied what folks were doing was that you know, they might get an ad, particularly an email. Like email is like the highest CPM opportunity that you have to sell directly. And yet, um, you know, they would be selling an ad. They're juggling a million things because they're also the publisher, because they're also the head of community engagement and they're also doing journalism. Right. Um, they, uh, they, they're getting sent to them. Whatever uh, the asset is, they're downloading it, they're manually putting it into the email. There's tons of opportunity for like human error. Um, and then they're forgetting to follow back up, ah, an invoice and then, oh, they're remembering the invoice a month later and then they're not sending the data, um, just because they're overwhelmed with too much to do. And so we were like, clearly we're losing a lot of revenue just from um, just the operational barrier. Um, and so the Indie Ad Manager automates a lot of that process. So the idea being, um, it creates like a sign in for the advertiser. They can just automatically upload their assets into the back end. You can get their data, um, it does all the fulfillment. So um, uh, you just put it into the system as a dashboard, um, and say I want this to go in email, I want this to be scheduled for here, I want this to go um, on my web platform for folks that have an app, they can manage everything from one dashboard, um, and then it automates getting that data to them and following up and the invoicing and everything. So just trying to make it as easy as possible so that the folks on the ground um, can spend as much time doing the hard work that you can't automate, which is building relationships and closing. Right. Um, so ah, that's where we focus and we're actually about to launch some pretty exciting new AI supported features that uh, will do everything from research and ads, um, identify uh, potential um, leads that are coming in through email and through other sources like research their business and what they've done advertising before. Develop a first draft of a proposal. So then the person doing the sales can just come in and look at this draft of the proposal, have all that information there. So it just like speeds up their ability to do that research. And of course the human still needs to do the work of like, you know, making sure the proposal makes sense and getting it out and talking to the lead about it. But we're just trying to take as much as possible. We see that's where we really see the opportunity around AI for these business models. M. And so we're trying to um, offer those features to those that want to, want to look at them.

Speaker A: Is it 100% self service? Like in the sense that if I'm a local plumber and I'm reading this, this local news outlet, I can click on some link and without interacting with the human at all, can click my whatever targeting, upload my creative, find out the price, pay that, all that without interacting with the human at all. Or is there need to be a human in the loop at some point?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean they, you could do that. It never happens. Like, just to be totally honest, there's always a human in the loop at some point to like move it along. We will soon. We're also like another sort of feature that is coming, um, is we will soon have opportunities to actually buy across groups of indie graph publishers as well. So if you're like I'm interested in California, uh, and supporting independent journalism there, you'll be able to like aggregate all of that together. And that's totally self serve. Again we're anticipating that um, there will be humans involved in um, the sales process. Um, however, hopefully we can vastly increase their volume. Like that's, that's the goal.

Speaker A: And so, and then there's also like some kind of programmatic play here. So can you, can you explain that, like how you know, it benefits a publisher to be part of the indie graph like advertising network versus just some kind of generic programmatic display ad network or something like that?

Speaker B: Yeah. And uh, with the disclaimer that I am far from an ad tech expert here.

Speaker A: Same here.

Speaker B: Bear with me. Okay, yeah, so this is the, the layman's version. Um, but, but the goal is that you know, we should be making programmatic, um, available for the layman, um, publisher. Like I was with the discourse. Um, but yeah, no, the goal. So a lot of the better programmatic, I mean anybody can access like the cheapest programmatic opportunities. Right. Um, but they have for our publishers, particularly those that are in smaller markets that are like lower volume in terms of their um audiences. Um the trade off between user experience is just like not worth what that revenue is. And so we advise against folks tapping into some of those opportunities. Um, but there is much um better programmatic um opportunities out there if you can access them. The challenge is that a lot of the programmatic sources that are higher quality um, where you're getting higher CPMs, um, you have to be verified to get access to them and you have to be a certain size um and most of our publishers just aren't big enough to do that. And so one of the um, benefits of Indiegraph is that um we can because we're working as a ah, network of independent publishers we have opportunities where we can negotiate um, together and um, uh access some of those programmatic sources that are going to give you higher quality ads but also higher cpm. So that's the play. And uh, we're really excited about our partnership with Empower Local in particular. We do have several programmatic sources that we work with but this partner in particular, um, yeah, I mean they would be a wonderful interview for you actually Simon. Like really their heart is in local publishing and they come out, they have a similar story to us um, based in Nashville and um, they are selling across local like across the US Um so what they're doing is really interesting and just really trying to create a um marketplace where we can move some of that um ad um the share of ad spend from Google and Facebook towards actual quality news publishing. So that's their mission and they're doing a great job so we love partnering with them and making those opportunities available.

Speaker A: And I know that like the discourse doesn't have paywall but have you built in paywall technology?

Speaker B: For Indie Graph we don't have paywall technology ourselves but we do have a couple of um, uh premium or like preferred technology partnerships. So when we do need to build in paywalls we're able to and we just do that as an add on and integrate. So we work a lot with Pelcro, um we've got folks working with Flippay. Um sometimes these are print organizations that want to um, want uh to be able to have sort of a centralized way of, of managing um, their print subscription businesses and membership businesses. So there's um, you know some complexities to that. Um, but yeah we haven't had. We only build what we need to build. If there's a really good product that's doing it that we can integrate with and build a strong partnership with. We'll do that. Um, and so that's been our approach on paywalls.

Speaker A: And so give me a sense of like Indie Graph's growth over the last like several years both in terms of publishers with the, and the caliber of publishers regions that you've moved into. Like what's kind of your growth trajectory been.

Speaker B: Sure. So we started as I mentioned in Canada and very quickly uh met our goal of uh, having 10 publishers that we're working with um, in 2020. That was our goal for year one and we exceeded it within months with a little help from the pandemic. Um and um, uh then that's when New Media Ventures approached us to fund us to launch in the United States. And so we actually have a subsidiary in the States and most of our business is now in the US we have 180 local communities that are currently using our tools. Um, uh and about a third of them are in the Spanish are in Spanish language. So we've built out our customer support and our products to be bilingual so that we can support um, organizations that are serving um, Latino and immigrant communities which we've seen as a, as a great opportunity. And then last year we also began expanding into Latin America in Mexico, Colombia, um, uh, and a few other, we've got a few other clients. Um, there's some complexities to that. So we're moving slowly and intentionally. But our intention is to be um, you know, the largest local news network in the Americas, uh including uh, north, south and Central, um within our three year target. Uh you also asked about the kind of type of publishers, the caliber of publishers that we're serving. So we really started with our hearts with startups and really small folks. Um and we'll continue to serve them and continue to be important to us. As our product has matured we have been bringing on larger and more mature organizations. So um, we are working and we also built our product to work really well for networks. There's a lot of collaboration features built in so like selling ads across a group or um, you know creating membership campaign automations. Um, if you are a group of local news organizations and you're the membership manager supporting all of them, you want to be able to like experiment in one market and then easily apply that across other markets. So we have a number of. Part of our business is like is chains and large organizations like the National Trust for Local News is a key partner of ours. Um, uh and um, we have a few others that are like groups of 1920 publishers that are all using the system. So we really love that part of our work as well. Um and we've also just launched a uh, version of our operating system for radio. Um and so we're working with public media organizations that are needing to open up new revenue streams and um, find efficiencies in their expenses to respond to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding disappearing. So yeah, that's where we're really seeing uh the opportunity in terms of growth.

Speaker A: And I know that Indiegraph's uh acquired a few companies over the years. What kind of acquisitions have you made?

Speaker B: Yeah we just actually started. We just acquired our first two companies this year. And um, that's part of like a specific strategy that we have right now. Um, what we're really interested in is looking at companies that um uh have built like promising solutions that do support like kind of the three pillars of our, of our product strategy right now. So uh, we look for technology companies that have uh, that have a SaaS business model and um, either fit into um, driving audience engagement. So we um, purchased Harken which is a 10 year old uh engagement management system that was actually built at WWE Ubez um and spun out led by the amazing entrepreneur Jen Brandel who really is a pioneer of like engagement journalism practice. This is somebody that we followed and admired at Discourse years ago. And so um, having Harken come to Indie Graph and being built into our operating system is really exciting M and we're able to serve um, some really exciting um, uh clients as well through that. Like KQED for example which is just like a really innovative public media station. So yeah, so that's been an awesome experience. Um, we also just pause uh

Speaker A: can you explain like what engagement management that is?

Speaker B: Sure, yeah. Um, um I'd be happy to just send you a little diagram too because they've got some really great graphics on this one. But the idea is um, it just the system itself builds in opportunities for the audience to give you feedback. Um, so tell you what questions they um have, provide uh comments, uh, vote on what topics you're considering, um, covering just like all of these, um, all of these pretty basic ways and then to get, invite your audience into your practice and then it takes all that data and it helps automate that and make it easier to build into the ah, editorial workflow. Um the research shows that when you develop content out of a direct engagement um with your audience that's higher likelihood to convert to paying, um, you get more loyal audiences. It becomes ah a flywheel in terms of growth too because folks are like hey, they responded to My question. Or they took that feedback and they share that. Um, and so it's a really successful strategy from both an impact perspective, but also from a business perspective. And so the engagement journalism practice was um, always kind of this side thing over here, um, and Indie Graph or Discourse, sorry, and Harkin were both sort of experimenting with it back in the year. We see the opportunity right now to bring that really into the mainstream journalistic practice through building right into the CMS and to the operating system and your, you know, the, and your email system, et cetera. Because this is the kind of content that we believe is really going to shine in the area of AI, um, when there's just so much sloth out there too. If you're directly responding to and being in relationship with your audience, that's going to make you. That's your defensibility strategy. That's how we think about it. So that was our rationale for buying Harken.

Speaker A: Okay, what other acquisitions did you make?

Speaker B: Uh, we purchased Stylebot, um, which is an editing assistant, um, which is now in beta, um, uh, as Indie editor. So it feels like an AI tool, but it's not exactly an AI tool in the sense it's based on all. It's all human written rules. Um, but, um, as you're editing in the background, it jumps in and gives you recommendations around how to align your copy with your style guide. Um, uh, its pre default is the Annenberg Style Guide, which was developed at the University of Southern California. Um, and it also has a whole bunch of recommendations that have been developed by a research project called Trusting News. Um, and so, um, that has been researching for about a decade about like, what are the kinds of, um, things that we can do as journalists to build more trust with audiences. Um, so it fits in within our um, hypothesis very clearly, um, that we need to be building relationships and trust right now. Um, so for example, uh, if I'm editing something or I'm writing something in the back end, it can pop up and say, oh, like this particular word has been found by research to be polarizing. Consider these other words. Or you made the statement of fact without backing it up. Like, consider adding some verification. So, and all of those things. Obviously humans need to be in the loop to make the editorial decisions, but it becomes a bit of a helper along the way, um, to um, yeah, to be able to edit the style faster, um, but also to be able to increase the trustworthiness of the work.

Speaker A: Were there any other acquisitions?

Speaker B: Um, we currently have one that is not officially, um, Announced yet that we are just waiting for attorney ah general approval from California. California because we're buying this from a nonprofit um but we are also buying Revengen, which is a membership ah payment tool that has generated about 175 million for independent um, nonprofit news in the last um like since it was built in the last couple uh of years. And so um, that's really exciting for us um and we're buying that from News Revenue Hub um which is a nonprofit that has worked with a lot of um the top nonprofit newsrooms um in the US to build their membership businesses. So that allows us to really bring this like industry leading technology and practice to the smaller newsrooms across our network.

Speaker A: And that's what some kind of like payments or some kind of system that allows people to donate very easily or something like that?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a contribution management system. So it's um, uh it manages all payments, it plugs into Stripe so you still always own your stripe, UM account etc. But it also can uh, integrate really well with Salesforce with your email um and allows folks to do much more sophisticated segmentation and understanding where um, their membership, their members are coming from. This is the system that the Onion uses um, which is really fun. So that's going to be our newest ah client soon um that it built like a very successful membership business with it. So we're excited to work with them and yeah, um, and then also just optimizes a lot of the payment pages and flow and like you know all that nerdy stuff that really can make the difference between folks converting to paying or not.

Speaker A: Is that going to like replace Indiegrass current like payment system or is it just something that'll be somehow different in some way?

Speaker B: Yeah, no, we will be eventually um, sunsetting uh Indiegraph Pay which is our current system. Um they do have quite a few things that are duplicated between them but um, Revengin is the stronger product um and we're also excited to welcome their technology team to Indiegraph. So the team that built Revengin um is joining um and Indiegraph will um, well already because he's already joined um is excited to have a new CTO from this um transaction too. So it's also a bit of an aqua hire. Um and Daniel Craigmile who was um, the CTO at Texas um Tribune before News Revenue Hub will be joining Indie Graph and just accelerating our ability to build tools that are really for this sector.

Speaker A: So like as kind of like a thought leader and uh, on kind of the entire kind of local news space. Like what do you uh. Do you create like any kind of way for like cross pollination of learnings for these like publishers to communicate with each other? I think I saw something about like a Slack channel or something like that. Do you host events? Like what kind of stuff do you try to like kind of strengthen the community of publishers?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean we do a lot. Um, we see like one of the, one of the points has always been to try to get to a large enough network of folks that we can really start to tap into some, some really interesting network effects. And one of those is learning. So we support um that uh currently through a weekly newsletter where we're you know servicing case studies and folks are sharing links to funding opportunities or to you know, what they learned, um, or content. Um, so that's one area that we do it in. We have a series of webinar. We do have a Slack community. It's not the most active Slack community. So I wouldn't say that's our number one perk by any means. Um, but the webinars are really well attended. Um, different sorts of opportunities to share. We're also um, on our roadmap. Currently is an opportunity to start sharing content more um, fluidly. So um, we're really excited about that and being able to kind of track the audience. So for our nonprofit news organizations in particular like they want to be um, they want to just be having the largest reach they can. Um and so that's an opportunity for them to maximize where there is content that is relevant across multiple market. So we've got those features currently um in beta with a couple of our uh, larger clients that have networks themselves. But our intention is to roll that out across the whole network so that folks can start sharing content. Um and then of course I already told you about um, about how we'll soon be allowing advertisers to buy across the group. So that's like another collaboration opportunity where it's like okay, I'd never be able to pitch All State as one small organization but I can, I can be uh tap into this campaign because I'm part of this group. So those are some of the ways that we're doing this. Of course all of these are totally opt in. Um but for those we really do believe that um, that we're more resilient if we can be networked together. So we're, we're building the toolset to do that and infrastructure to do that

Speaker A: for the sharing content. Is that like a recommendation widget that like shows up at the end of article where instead of only recommending your own articles, it's also recommending other articles from elsewhere the network. And then you're kind of cross pollinating audiences that way or how does that work?

Speaker B: No, it's actually because I think there

Speaker A: is like a huge opportunity there possibly like to build like in these like networking effects for these sites.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I agree. Um, that's not what this is particularly. This is actually more like a newswire where it shows up in the back end. You can actually republish articles and you could localize them. Um, and so one of the key features here is like attribution, um, directions and controls. Right. So we want to make, we want like you know, you for example, if you had an article that was relevant to, I don't know, Indie Publisher, our, um, our industry newsletter, you. We may benefit from sharing content but we also want to be clear about like it's okay if you edit this but not that. And this is how you need to credit us and this is what you need to link to. Um, so we're trying to build in those controls so that publishers can make their content available on their own terms. But the recommendation stuff too is really interesting. Um, and I'm not aware of it being on our roadmap immediately, but it will certainly be something. It's very much within the strategy. I'm sure our product team is thinking about those things for sure.

Speaker A: So how many employees does Indiegraph have now and how is the company structured?

Speaker B: Sure. Um, we are 28. We are going to be just under 30 when we close the revenge deal. Um, and um, in terms of structure, ah, do you mean like corporate or like where are we based?

Speaker A: No, like just like what's the skill set? Like how many of those are tech people? Like, like do you have like any editorial people at the top there somehow giving guy. Like what are, what's kind of the, the what are those 30 roles basically? Kind of like how are they allocated?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. Um, uh, so our largest team is our product team, um, which are, ah, you know, combination of engineers, product designers, um, mostly engineers and product managers who are like, you know, in conversation with our publishers all the time, figuring out what they need, what we want to do, designing new features, getting them out, building them, all of that. Um, and in terms of the people on that team, um, I mean the thing, the through line for everybody on our team, whether they're a journalist or not a journalist is um, being really mission driven. Um, it's funny, I Like uploaded some surveys from a recent, recent employee survey we did about AI use into AI to help me analyze it. Of course. Very, um, very silly. But. And it said, it came back saying your team is very principled and slightly neurotic. And I was like, yep, that's like it for sure. Like these are folks who are really motivated by the mission around journalism, um, and uh, and are really principled and all of that. So that's kind of the through line I would say. A lot of people come from a journalism background, um, even on our development team. Um, um, so that's pretty cool. Um, and then the other departments are. So, yeah, our product team is our largest team. We have a growth and impact team, which is what we call our sort of sales and marketing team. Um, because their um, mandate is not only to just get more people to use Indigraph, but also to ensure that we're reaching out to communities that need our work most. Um, we have an uh, explicit commitment about ensuring that um, we're reaching underserved communities with our journal or with our um, uh, product. And we've got a subsidy program there in place to support organizations, um, that are serving communities that have historically not had equitable access to journalism. So that's impact piece is really important to our work. Um, and then our um, and then the rest of our team members and I, and will be definitely, if not our largest, if not our largest, our second largest, um, will be our implementation and support team. So these are the folks that are working with the publishers every day to make them successful, um, in English and Spanish. And so one of the things that we try to do is we never want to be a technology company that you can't reach. Dealing with some problem that happens with a Facebook ad is hell basically in terms of trying to get some support. We never want to be that. We pride ourselves on building a customer support team where you can get a response within an hour. Um, there's somebody watching things. So if your website goes down on the weekend, in the middle of the night, somebody is on it. So, um, a lot of our team, um, are devoted to that kind of work.

Speaker A: And what's your ambition with the Discourse now? Is that basically just kind of like a testing ground for some of these things or do you still want to grow that network?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I stepped back from the discourse myself individually, um, a few years ago. Now Brandi Shire is the CEO who was one of our, ah, publisher, um, who was one of our initial partners at Indiegraph. Um, and um, they're still growing in terms of like, their audience, but it's a mature organization. It's been around for a decade. We do have a research and development partnership with them between Indie Graph and Discourse. And so we are experimenting. Um, we're doing things there that you might not want to do, um, with a client, um, that, you know, you have a less, um, family relationship. I'm still on the board. I'm still an owner. So, um, but we're definitely not pushing to like, grow it aggressively. And yeah, we're actually really thinking about its future right now. Um, so we'll see what comes next for the organization. Um, just because I haven't, um, been as active as I'd like to be just with how busy we've been on the indiegraph side. So I want to ensure that there's a strong steward there to support Brandy and the team moving forward.

Speaker A: So this next question is kind of broad, but like, what do you think about the potential for local news? Um, you know, obviously you talk to different people. Some people have a very pessimistic view that there's something like, fundamentally broken about the business model of local, uh, news and that there's no easy fix. There are other people who are much more optimistic and saying just like, no, it's actually the legacy business models are broken, but there's still a lot of room for re, uh, expansion and a lot of these like, news deserts to be reclaimed or like, you know, even. Or even cities that aren't technically news deserts for them to have a much stronger local news ecosystem. What, what is your kind of view for the. The kind of potential there? Like obviously, obviously you operate or Indie Graph operates at this assumption that there needs to be a more direct, um, connection with the audience. There needs to be a somewhat leaner approach, but you could still build robust coverage and journalism going forward. What's your view on the trajectory of the industry right now?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that it's a really hard time for the industry, honestly. Um, we went through a bit of a listening tour and did some market analysis late last year. Um, when we started to see some like, concerning new data coming out of our network, um, we were going like, oh, things seem like they're harder and. And they are. Um, there is like, you know, some of the big funding that comes from, um, philanthropy and press forward, um, in the States, um, was front loaded. M. You know, Google News initiative and Facebook Journalism Project used to put a lot of money into the field. Um, and Facebook Journalism Project is totally, you know, pulled out. Google is moving away, um, as well, is pulling back. So um, there's less funding and there's a lot of organizations that launch during this incredible period of independent media, um, you know, launching these communities as the, as the um, uh, the uh, traditional legacy business models were you know, um, starting to really crumble. Um, and so I think what we have now is this incredible ecosystem of really promising organizations that are quite fragile. Um, because um, I completely like the previous business model, like the legacy business model that was like totally weighed down by tons of debt and print costs and all of that kind of stuff with these big chains and then was getting gobbled up by vulture capitalism like that. I feel like we're kind of through that. Like when you look at the merger and acquisition activity that happens in the market now, it's really between smaller groups putting together things, um, and um, we have a much more fragmented system. But that's not super efficient either. Consolidation is more efficient. There's a reason that it happens. And so we're seeing more and more consolidation between all these independent organizations. I think that is necessary. Um, people are really scared of it, um, for very good reasons because we've seen so many layoffs, so many, you know, bad consolidations. So Indie Graph is really, um, you know, we're really trying to participate in a conversation that asks like if consolidation is necessary to make this ecosystem more sustainable and robust long term, how can we actually take a leadership role in that and do that in the public interest rather than that just be driven by pure commercial, um, uh, like pure commercial interests or at worst like political capture interests. Right. Like that is very much at risk at this moment to. So uh, I see the ecosystem as being fragile. I think consolidation is necessary. I think we can do it in the public interest. What I am very bullish on is um, the opportunity around local news. People really need it. They continue looking for it. The demand is there. And I do believe that with so much AI swap out there right now, that there is a real, that local news organizations are so well positioned to produce content that is like truly trustworthy and in relationship with audiences in a way that national organizations will struggle. Um, so I think there's a huge opportunity right now. But like getting the business models from this phase of like fragmented fragile to like more sustainable is going to be tough. Um, so that's where I'm at. Sorry if I rambled for a bit too long there.

Speaker A: But so 10 years from now, do you think there will be fewer people practicing local journalism or more people practicing local journalism?

Speaker B: More people, fewer organizations.

Speaker A: Really. You ah, don't think it'll, there will be like an explosion of like lots of small independent organizations that are kind of like you know like using like indie graph and stuff like that where it's like a one or two person team covering like a town or something where the newspaper died off but it's, it's like these like small little outlets.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean I think that's what we've been seeing for the last five years. Like if you look at like lion membership line publishers um, they grew 10% a year their membership for year after year after year it slowed down. There are fewer startups launching. Um I think they will, I think the conditions are really tough with like the funding conditions, the political conditions um and AI just creates so much uncertainty that like it may be like a slowdown and then it speeds up again. Um once some of those things stabilize a little bit um, I think that there will continue to be lots of independent organizations launching um, but that those who thrive and survive will look to um, merging and consolidating with other organizations as they reach the 45 year mark. Um, founder Runway is a thing. I um, mean I'm curious to ask you this question Simon. Like you've been doing your thing um, um and you choose to continue doing this as ah, as like a one man operations show. Right. But like as an entrepreneur like it's pretty exhausting and I think some organizations can build robust revenue streams, others need more help. Like they can't do that alone. And I think the founder, the journalist founder who can do both is pretty rare. And then that's going to lead um, organizations to finding their fellow travelers to merge with and maybe these will be small organizations like Discourse. Like Discourse is six organizations. It's like under a million dollars in revenue. Right. Like this is not a huge organization um, but it's stronger because it's not Revelstoke Mountaineer on its own and you know the Couch and Valley discourse on um, its own they're working together.

Speaker A: I mean I guess I kind of hope that maybe it mirrors like the music industry where there was the Napster era and then obviously precipitous decline and then you know the, then like the invention of like modern, modern day streaming and ever, ever since the you know introduction of Spotify, the music industry has posted larger and larger revenue gains. So maybe it's not as high as the, the peak you know of the CD era but it's still, it's you know it the line is going up, you know, continuously year after year. And so I guess I hope that like at some point the local news industry would bottom out with like the, the death of like a lot of Lego legacy newspapers that were, that had an outdated model but like from the kind of carcasses of, of those, like all those news deserts, like there would be basically new foliage that is able to kind of sprout and, and start kind of flourishing and uh, you know, networks like Indie Graph, uh, you know, help, you know, helping them kind of work together and kind of the industry lifting up. But I don't know, I don't have any data on it.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. I actually um, I did a talk on, I'm just like looking up the data. I did a talk on um, the music industry and what we can learn about it and looked at the Napster numbers and I don't remember the number exactly but um, but it was really interesting. But if you look at the number of journal of musicians that were um, able to make a living from being a professional musician like before the Napster and the, and the Spotify disruptions and after, like it's like huge difference. Like it's like a tenfold increase. And the reality is that a lot of those music, my brother's a professional musician, so talk to him about this a lot. Um, and a lot of those musicians are like very marginal, like how much money they're actually making. Like the system is not always supporting them in the way that they should of course. Um, but there are a lot of middle, there's like this middle class uh, of musicians that are making it work and there's way more people making music for way more people. Right? Like where you don't just have to go and like have the means to buy a whole album. Right. Like you can access music in so many different ways. So I love that, I love that um, uh, that narrative and that vision and very aligned with where I'd like to see it and like the whole market in terms of how much money is spent on music now on recorded music is way bigger than it was before, even at its peak. So we're above, um, I hope that that's where we get to. But I think we're going to have uh, some rocky years between now and then.

Speaker A: Okay Aaron, those were all the questions I had for you. Where can people find you online?

Speaker B: Yeah, indiegraph.com um, and uh, I can be reached@aarondiegraph.com so I'm pretty easy and on LinkedIn and I try to stay away from the other, uh, social media platforms, because who has time?

Speaker A: Awesome. Well, it's a lot of fun. Thanks for joining me.

Speaker B: Yeah, thanks so much, Simon.