For much of its 130-year existence, State House News operated as a standard newswire service. Its journalists covered the Massachusetts state government, and it then syndicated their content to regional and national newspapers. 

But in the late 90s, owner Craig Sandler realized that internet distribution would allow him to sell direct digital subscriptions and vastly expand his customer base. Today, the service charges $4,000 a year to any company or organization whose business is directly influenced by the state’s government.

In a recent interview, Craig discussed how he built the direct subscription business, why he decided to sell a majority stake in the company, and whether State House News is shielded from the whims of large tech platforms and AI chatbots.

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Transcript

Hey, Craig, thanks for joining us. 

Oh, it is my pleasure. 

So you run something that is called State House News. It's in Massachusetts. What's the kind of elevator pitch for what it is and what kind of news it provides and who its customers are?

Sure thing. You know, at first a disclaimer and then the elevator pitch. The disclaimer is that I don't run it. I just have great employees. You know, I just have a fabulous team. They run it. But it is true that I bought it, many years ago, 27 years ago, and have found the wonderful people who make it happen. Okay. The elevator pitch is that we are is the Associated Press on steroids – for Massachusetts state government. The government affairs professionals who absolutely live and die on high quality, unbiased, in-depth information about the state government, live and die by the Statehouse News Service.

Yeah. So it's been around for a long time, like all the way since the 1800s. You purchased it.

Very much so. Now, I didn't purchase it in the 1800s. Let us be clear. But it was founded in 1894 by a reporter from Massachusetts who would take notes on proceedings and sell them to the other reporters who weren’t there, and so they would fill in the stuff they missed by following his notes, and that's still the core function. We run around and cover everything we can in terms of the life of the state house and proceedings in its rooms, and we shoot it out there for the world to consume, because the world can't be everywhere. And we have six or seven people who collectively get to almost everything that's important that happens.

And you called it an AP on steroids. I would phrase it differently. I would say it's a hybrid between an AP and a Politico Pro in the sense that you are focused on a hyper, very specific niche and kind of owning that niche. And it's going to a clientele that is beyond the kind of casual news consumer, or someone – as part of their job  – has a very special interest in understanding the very nuanced minutia of what's going on in the state government of Massachusetts.

Very much so. That's why I use the phrase government affairs professionals, that the average citizen is not a government affairs professional, nor does the average citizen necessarily care that much about the Pension Reserve Management Board. And we are for the people who care about the Pension Reserve Management Board.

And we cost thousands of dollars a year, as does a wire service. We're a true wire service. I would take exception to Politico Pro only in that we have, in the not too distant past, acquired is... perhaps not quite the right word, but I'm now a minority owner and our majority owners are, called State Affairs, which is a rapidly burgeoning network of these state government news sources. And State Affairs is overlaying all of the new sources, the new services, including ours, with the most amazing technology in terms of bill tracking, keyword alerts for these state government obsessives.

So we're really part of a network now that is in competition with Politico Pro and excitingly so. So anyway, I just want to make that part of it clear that State Affairs is out there.

So State Affairs is a separate company that licenses news from state houses all across the country and you have a minority stake in that separate company?

Sort of, but the other way around. They buy new services and they bought ours, but I continue to be a minority owner. 

The important part of it is the technology. I am constantly saying that State Affairs is a federal republic of news services because they let the locals do the local coverage because it's foolhardy in the extreme for someone from on high to dictate what should be covered at the state level. But State Affairs is rapidly building out quite the amazing suite of technology to, again, help people who really need to understand and know what's going on, do that to the very best of their ability.

And when did State Affairs buy a majority stake in your company?

In late June. I might be off by a few weeks, but this summer.

Oh, okay. So since the last time that we talked. 

Fundamentally what they own this majority stake in is affiliated news services in Boston. We run the Statehouse News Service. And so not very much about the nature of the business or the enterprise has changed, except that we're aligned with these programs. technical wizards who can build tools that take the copy we're producing and slice it and dice it in ways that are just fantastic.

Are they in all 50 states?

No not at all, 12. 

So you bought the company in 1996 or something like that?

That's right. Well, I had worked at a chain of weeklies, suburban weeklies in the Boston area. And I asked the owners of this chain if they'd be willing to put up most of the capital to buy the news service from my mentor. Helen Woodman. She started covering news for the State House in 1962 and one of her mentors asked her if she wanted to buy it in 1979. This is not an accurate figure. We've only had 11 owners, could be nine over since from 1894 to 1996. Anyway, I bought it from Helen in 1996 with the capital infused by the publishers of this chain of weeklies. When I started, we put the copy out on Mimeograph, which is a long, obsolete technology none of my reporters have ever seen, but Primitive offset press used to be used a lot in school. It was great. We would print up mimeograph masters on computer printers, print out 85 copies, and place them by hand in boxes at the front of the news service. But it so happened that it was 1997. I'd been obsessed with computers since 1982, and I had some coding skills, and they're easily portable into the skills of the new burgeoning Internet Web servers, email automated automation of all these things. Microsoft Office automation coding. I could do all that. And so I won't say slowly, reasonably rapidly. I wrote all the code to process the copy, get it out to the subscribers by email...