“We want to be there first,” he said.
In December 2020, Axios bought The Charlotte Agenda, a profitable newsletter, for close to $5 million. Using that as a model, Axios has introduced the newsletter format in 14 cities, including Atlanta; Charlotte, N.C.; Nashville; and Philadelphia. It plans to expand to 11 more by summer.
Two local reporters were hired in each city to helm a daily newsletter that is a mix of original reporting and an aggregation of articles from other outlets, said Sara Kehaulani Goo, the editor in chief of Axios. (The company recently hired Jamie Stockwell, a New York Times deputy national editor, to oversee Axios Local.)
“Even sooner than we expected we saw that was successful from a journalism standpoint — we saw high open rates,” Ms. Goo said.
As advertising revenue from the local sites grows, some cities are getting a third reporter. Axios Local generated nearly $5 million in revenue last year and has 700,000 subscribers across the 14 cities, a spokeswoman said.
Evan Smith, the chief executive of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit in Austin founded in 2009, said he was an early subscriber to Axios Austin and reads it every day. “I’m pulling for them,” he said, but added: “Can you sufficiently cover the largest cities in America — which Texas has more of than any other state — with two or three reporters?”
Mr. VandeHei said Axios was first ensuring that its model for local coverage was sustainable and could work on a larger scale.
March 7, 2022, 11:03 a.m. ET
“We’re trying to think about how we can do this in every community in America,” Mr. VandeHei said.
Between the Lines
The company kept hearing from readers who wanted to use its newsletter format at their workplaces to get more people to read internal emails, said Jordan Zaslav, the general manager of Axios HQ.
