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Let’s jump into it…

Quick hits

Tyler Perry has become one of the most successful media moguls of the 21st century. [Bloomberg]

This sports newsletter leveraged Substack's chat feature to build a vibrant community for its paid subscribers. [Substack]

Social media is playing a larger and larger role in shaping travel itinerary. A few viral videos of a specific beach can send hoards of tourists to the destination. [Kyle Chayka]

Brands are increasingly commissioning content from creators in such a way that the content is meant to live on the brand's channel, not the creator's. [Digiday]

Whenever programmatic advertising appears, massive amounts of audience fraud soon follows. [Semafor]

Do you live in New Orleans? I’ll be there from October 18 - 22 to attend FinCon. Definitely reach out if you want to get together for a meal or drinks.

This local news outlet carved out a lucrative niche by targeting Indianapolis women

Leslie Bailey’s decision to launch her own local news outlet in 2019 was rooted in one key observation she’d made while working in journalism: “Women were always shoved to the lifestyle section.”

By then, Bailey had spent nearly a decade writing and editing for Indianapolis outlets ranging from The Indianapolis Star to Indianapolis Monthly, and she constantly observed that prominent women in the city weren’t receiving the same kind of coverage as their male counterparts. “I just remember thinking, ‘isn't this more of a business story? Shouldn't this be on the front page?’ And it was never making it there … It just felt like we were neglecting 50% of the population.” She’d seen studies showing that women have disproportionate influence on household purchases, and yet news outlets never seemed to produce content that would interest them. At one point, The Indianapolis Star put her in charge of a new editorial vertical aimed at ameliorating this problem, but executives shelved the project before it even launched.

So in early 2019, Bailey and a former coworker named Amanda Kingsbury launched Indy Maven, a weekly newsletter that published news about and for Indianapolis women. From the very beginning, it was monetized through memberships and sponsorships, and in its first year it managed to hit six figures in revenue. Over the next few years, it not only began hosting live events throughout the city, but also launched a women-centered coworking space in the heart of Indianapolis. 

In a recent interview, Bailey walked me through Indy Maven’s origin story and explained how, step by step, her team built a highly engaged community of women and then monetized it.

Let’s jump into my findings… 

Learning the beat

Much of Indy Maven’s success can be traced to Bailey’s deep understanding of the Indianapolis community — an understanding that came from her years of reporting on the area.

Bailey fell into the local journalism scene pretty much by accident; in the late 2000s, she’d launched a personal blog and used it mainly to write about her life as a 20-something living in the city. It didn’t have a huge audience, but it began to pick up some local readers. “People were coming up to me at social events and being like, ‘Hey, where's the next post? We've been waiting for it to come along.’ And that sort of was when I started to realize like, oh, there's something to this.”...