Axios Local's Holly Moore on Newsletters, Networks, AI and the “Whole Buffalo”

In the fifth episode of the State of Local News Podcast, host Tim Franklin—Professor, John M. Mutz Chair in Local News, and founding director of the Medill Local News Initiative—speaks with Holly Moore, Executive Editor of Axios Local.

Moore joins Tim Franklin on the State of Local News Podcast to discuss Axios Local’s evolution from a single acquired newsletter in Charlotte to a rapidly expanding local news network serving 37 markets across the United States, with plans to reach 43 by the end of the year. She explains the company’s newsletter-first strategy, its efforts to build sustainable local news businesses in both metropolitan and suburban communities and the advantages of operating as a network organization with centralized technology, audience development and business support.

The conversation also explores Axios Local’s editorial philosophy of “smart brevity,” the importance of community connection and reporter autonomy, the growing role of newsletters in local journalism, and how AI can help journalists spend less time on production and administrative tasks and more time reporting, engaging audiences and serving their communities.

This Q&A transcript captures their conversation about local news innovation, newsletter strategies, newsroom growth, AI and the future of sustainable local journalism. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.

• 

  Hello everyone, and welcome to the Medill State of Local News podcast. And for a number of you, I hope it's welcome back to the Medill State of Local News podcast. My name's Tim Franklin. I'm the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at the Medill School at Northwestern University, home of the Local News Initiative. So for those of you who've joined us before, you know that we've mostly talked to CEOs and leaders of legacy news organizations. But for this episode, we're switching it up. We're talking to the top editor at one of the nation's fastest-growing digital local news networks and one with a novel business model. Holly Moore, Executive Editor of Axios Local, welcome to the podcast.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Thanks, Tim. I'm super happy to be here.

  Holly Moore

• 

  Well, we're super happy to have you. Thank you for making the time. So I have a lot of questions for you, Holly, and I know there's going to be a lot of curiosity about what you're up to at Axios Local. Before we get to that, though, I just want to take a few minutes to give our listeners your background as well as a little bit of background about Axios Local. So while you're leading a digital news network now, Holly, you actually grew up in a legacy newspaper household, correct? Your dad worked on the business side of a newspaper. You've been in legacy newsrooms for much of your career, but you kind of fell into digital news in your first job at the Tallahassee Democrat. You were working on the sports desk at night in the late 2000s and teaching English full-time. You were the youngest person on the sports staff.

  And so by default you ended up interneting as you've said before. Tell us a little bit about your journey and how you ended up in this place.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Yeah, no, I think that's what you just said is exactly right. I kind of fell into the job because my dad worked at the paper. So when I was growing up, I'd sit at the breakfast table, eat my Cheerios, and he'd hand me a print copy of the paper and I'd sit there and read it. And so after I graduated, he was like, ‘Oh, there's a copy editor job open. You should apply for it.’ And I was thinking, ‘Yeah, sure. I can do grammar really well. I know that.’ And I took the test and I'd never done AP style, and I failed it miserably.

  Holly Moore

• 

  And here you are!

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Here I am. They were like, ‘The copy desk is probably not the spot for you, but we have this job taking preps calls and doing the agate for the paper. So if you want to learn the ropes, this is a good spot for you.’ So I took that opportunity and that was right around the time that newspapers were trying to post their things to the web. So they had a web producer job open up and they said, ‘Who can do this job? You, youngin’ in the corner.’ I was like, ‘I don't know what a web producer does, but sure, I'll try it.’ And so my job was literally staying up until the paper was put to bed and copying and pasting the stories and putting them into the CMS so that the newspaper would be on the website in the morning.

  And funny enough, I think for a period of time, actually, our e-edition at that time was more popular than the website itself. And so another part of the role was like putting links in the e-edition to the website, which is hilarious just to think back at that time.

  Holly Moore

• 

  So you learned web production and AP style from scratch.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  What a time! Yeah, on-the-job training, there's nothing like it.

  Holly Moore

• 

  Absolutely.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  We also launched a bunch of Facebook pages and I trained the reporters how to use Twitter.

  Holly Moore

• 

  Axios Local just turned five years old. Happy anniversary, by the way.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Thank you.

  Holly Moore

• 

  Axios Local–most of our audience, I'm sure, is well aware, but for those who maybe aren't – is a network of email newsletters in 37 markets across the US that's expected to climb to 43 by the end of this year and maybe in the hundreds in the next few years. The newsletters include original local reporting, and are curated quick reads, or as you like to call it at Axios, “smart brevity,” covering local politics, events, trends, major happenings. They're typically delivered in the mornings. The business model is based on advertising in the newsletters, paid memberships and events. Axios Local started in North Carolina when the company acquired Charlotte Agenda back then. So, Holly, walk us through what the editorial philosophy of Axios Local was when you started five years ago and how it has evolved over time?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Yeah. So, Axios, the company that a lot of people are more familiar with, is a national brand that focuses a lot on topic-based reporting. So your politics, your policy, business, tech, a lot of AI. And so it's about to turn 10. I think we're no longer in the startup phase, but it still feels like very young and plucky. And the Charlotte Agenda was the first local newsletter that we acquired. And I wasn't at Axios at the time, but it was a major success, a very popular brand in the community, very strong on social. And our founders, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, saw that and said, "This is something that we could probably replicate in other cities." And so they acquired it and tried to do the Charlotte Agenda model in other cities. And it definitely works. Charlotte is still one of our strongest newsletters that we have, but I do think that we shifted a little bit away from their model. It was almost like a little bit like the legacy organizations do now.

  So they're doing like real-time news and we call it the “whole buffalo,” where you take a piece of content and you put it on multiple platforms, whereas we have shifted into more of a core newsletter. We know that diversification is super important and we are also on the web and we're launching social this year as well.

  The super interesting thing, I think, is that one of the things the Charlotte Agenda did really well, and we are replicating that in all of our cities, is that lifestyle coverage is as important to us as the ‘Capital J Journalism’ news. We want to shine a light on dark places. We want to make sure that we're opening people up to what's happening in their communities, but I think what they're doing on the weekends and how they're living their best lives in the community is just as important. So you can target a savvy professional audience that cares about the facts of what's going on, and they also want to know where the best sushi restaurant is.

  Holly Moore

• 

  Right. So you used the phrase “the whole buffalo.” I've been in newsrooms for decades. I've not heard “the whole buffalo.”

  Tim Franklin

• 

  I think that's a Charlotte Agenda thing. Definitely. The Charlotte team uses it all the time. It's like you're taking the news and slice and dice it for the web, you're going to make sure that you've got a version of it for social.

  Holly Moore

• 

  That's great. I'm going to borrow that, with full credit, of course, to our friends in Charlotte. So you're now in 37 markets. How did Axios Local pick the markets? And just a note about that. So it seems like you started off with a big city strategy here in Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, San Francisco, et cetera. And recently you've been moving into some smaller markets – Colorado Springs, Boulder and Scottsdale. Can you talk about how you pick the markets? And are you now shifting to more of a suburban strategy?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  So the inside joke in the newsroom is that anytime you hear one of the founders talk, they're going to say they're going to add a number, a zero, to the end of the number of cities we're going to be in eventually. So when I first started, the goal was we're going to get to a hundred cities and then it's a thousand cities. We have heard the 10,000 number at one point. But the thing about that is if you're going to be in a thousand cities, you're going to be in some small places. So you're right, we did start off with a large-city model. So when they acquired Charlotte Agenda, it was basically we wrote a list of all the major metros and said, "All right, let's get in all of them. We're not in New York and we're not in LA, but for the most part, the next 25 largest markets we’re there." But again, trying to figure out, ‘So now we've made it this far, we're in 37 markets, how do we get to a hundred?

  That's our next step. You're going to have to get into some smaller places. And so we're super intentionally picking places where we can learn things about how to be in smaller places. Shout out to the (Medill) Local News Initiative. I do look at that map all the time.

  Holly Moore

• 

  Great! Thank you.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Yeah, thank you. So I'm constantly thinking about how as news is declining in a lot of places, where is the need the greatest? And a lot of the places I see there are suburbs. So outside of these major metros, you've got giant population centers that are in need of news. And so is there a sustainable business in these places? That's the No. 1 question. I don't think it's ever that there's not a need or an interest in news. It is, can we sustain a business? And so we have been intentionally playing with smaller locations.

  Last year, we launched Boulder and Huntsville. Those were our first one-person reporter markets. So can one reporter cover an entire community? That was one of the questions we were looking at. Huntsville is the only place that we've gone so far that doesn't have a daily paper. And so, can we go to a place that doesn't already have news? So it's a pretty large community, and it's growing. It's the fastest-growing city in Alabama. We don't have any other markets in Alabama. So that was another thing we were looking at there is, can we do this? I'm not necessarily going to call it a news desert, but it's a ‘news light’ area. Can we go into a news light area that is a fast-growing community where we don't have existing support around it in terms of our own infrastructure? And the answer is the audience loves it.

  I think that the product is really strong. Our reporter there seems to be doing a great job. And then in Boulder, we were doing something similar, going to a similar-sized market with one reporter, but we do have Denver, which is nearby. And so obviously it's easier to do it when you're nearby. So we actually had a moment last year. The first vacation that the reporter decided to take, he's from Hawaii.

  Holly Moore

• 

  The gall!

  Tim Franklin

• 

  I know. I know. How dare he? He's from Hawaii and so he went to visit his family. So he was nowhere near. I could not call him and be like, "Hey, I know you're on vacation, but could you come back and do this thing?" There was a terrorist attack in Boulder. But luckily, our Denver reporters were able to hop up there and do the coverage. So lesson No. 1, yes, it's much easier when you're already around the area because you have that support built in.

  And so we launched Colorado Springs earlier this year with the same idea. We're doubling down in Colorado. We also just launched Douglas and Arapahoe County outside of Denver. So that's again, our first suburban area, and we have one reporter that's actually going to cover both of those counties. And so that is another intentional test. Can one reporter cover such a large swath of geo? Luckily, we hired a really smart, very excited person ... His energy level on a scale of one to 10 is probably a 12. I think that Robert is going to do a great job there. And one of the other things we've learned along the way, which is maybe obvious if you think about it, but it is best to hire somebody who is of the community. So he's from Arapahoe County, and he lives in Douglas County. And so he's got deep roots.

  He knows all the people and all the places and all the things that are important to that community.

  Holly Moore

• 

  Well, first, thank you for mentioning our map, and you also raised a good point in doing that. Understandably, there's a lot of focus on news deserts in rural areas, and it's a serious problem in rural areas. But one of the less reported facts that we've come across in our research is that in Illinois, for example, half of all the newspapers that have closed have been in the suburbs outside Chicago because of consolidation. But this is a serious problem, and there are serious voids in suburban areas and, of course, within cities themselves as well. I don't want to minimize that. But I think it's interesting that you're looking at the suburbs and filling some of the void that exists, and actually growing in suburban areas. That's really interesting.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Yeah. Well, I don't know if you can tell I live in the suburbs. This is where I'm at home right now and so it's definitely near and dear to my heart that I'm in Northern Virginia, outside of D.C., and I read our D.C. newsletter every day. But they're not going to cover the thing that's being built behind the Home Depot where I am right now, which is something I Google nearly daily.

  Holly Moore

• 

  Right, right. So let's talk a little bit more about your editorial strategy and philosophy. I've seen readership data that shows the growing popularity of the Axios Local newsletters, certainly in Chicago and in other markets. But how would you respond to criticism that Axios Local is “news lite”, that it's superficial, that it's aggregating news from others and is lacking in enterprise reporting? I'm sure you've heard these criticisms before. How do you respond to that?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  I mean, I would just say that anybody who thinks that should read the product because we sometimes can conflate short for shallow, and they're not at all the same thing. We're just very respectful of people's time. I mean, I'm sure that you're busy as well, Tim. I don't have time to sit down and read a 45-minute narrative every morning. I love it. I listen to podcasts on my way into work on the commute, but I want my news very quickly in smart brevity. So we are trying to respect the audience's time, and yes, it is interesting: you do see a lot of news orgs trying to do a little bit of smart brevity, but I think that there is a mix-up that it is about the actual physical style of it. There are some bolded words, we call them axioms, at the front and bullet points and it makes it very easy to get through the story quickly, but it's actually a lot less about the physical style and more about why it matters.

  And so the goal is to get why somebody should care to read something as high up as possible. With our newsletters, we definitely aggregate in them. We have a news aggregated card in every newsletter and that is less about leaning on what other people are doing and more about not trying to duplicate. If there's an important story that we think our audience should read, we are happy to point to it and want to. Think of it as like your guide to the city. We're going to give you the news that we think is important and if there's a story that we read that we're like, our audience should read that too, we're going to drop it in there.

  Holly Moore

• 

  Yeah, well, look, I religiously read the Chicago Axios Local every morning as part of my morning routine. And I also like the fact that in addition to being a quick read and bringing me up to date on what's happening in the area, it also feels personal. It feels like I know the authors. That seems to be part of the strategy here, too, as well.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Yeah, that is super intentional, and in Chicago they have a lot of personality. I don't think I could stop it from coming out even if I tried. But it is absolutely something that we want to be a part of how we cover the news. I think having somebody that is, again, your guide to the city. I encourage them to put their faces in there as much as they are comfortable doing so. I want them to talk about it. They are living their lives in their towns alongside our readers, and so they should know that. Part of our value proposition is that we are there in the city with you.

  They're very personality driven. When I think about the core pillars of what we're doing, community connection is really important to that. I don't want it to be some anonymous talking head on the other side of your email. I want it to be somebody that you can grow a relationship with and trust. And actually, there is this piece of newslettering that is really compelling to me because it is a direct line of communication, too. So it's almost like there is a reciprocal relationship there. If you respond to your Chicago email, even though it looks like it's going to chicago@axios.com, it's going directly to the inboxes of the people that are writing it. And so you can get a response from them. And so there is definitely a relationship building as part of our model.

  Holly Moore

• 

  Yeah, that's great. They may be getting more emails now as a result of your pointing that out! So let's talk a little bit about the newsletter strategy at Axios Local and at other news organizations as well. Are newsletters the best vessel to reach news consumers these days? In the direct-to-consumer relationship, there's a convenience of reading that comes with newsletters. There's also this sense of completion. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end because you can't read the entire internet. Talk a little bit about the whole newsletter strategy, which is really at the center of everything you do.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Yeah. I mean, I think that's right. There's a direct relationship. We're in your inbox every day. Once you get that subscriber signed up, it's a pretty passive relationship. They don't have to actively go seek it out. It's going to be there. Our target audience is professional, so they're probably in their inbox every morning. Maybe I'm embarrassed to say that I am checking mine in bed every day. That's the first thing I do. And you're right, there is a sense of completion. We've delivered what we think you need to know today and then you're done with it and you don't feel like you've missed out. So I do think that newsletters are a very strong, if not the best, direct distribution channel. I definitely think that we need to be diversified on all the platforms, newsletters, websites and social media as well. But I think that newsletters are really important, especially in this moment where AI is becoming a thing.

  Holly Moore

• 

  For sure. Absolutely. We follow audience data here at the Local News Initiative and we've seen the huge impact that people going straight to AI platforms is having on digital traffic to news sites. And so the question then becomes how do news organizations reach their audience if, in fact, their numbers are declining. And so it seems to me that newsletters at the moment may be one of the best ways to reach news consumers.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Yeah. I mean, I think we're definitely deep in the funnel with the newsletter. That's not to say that there isn't risk in newsletters because emails are some ... Like your inbox is going to summarize your emails as well. And so you just have to make sure that you're focusing on the right metrics, which are engagement metrics. Are people opening them every day? Are there links that they're clicking on to show that this is an active, interesting email? Yeah, what a time. If your business is based around programmatic advertising, you're going to have to shift some thinking, I think.

  Holly Moore

• 

  Yeah, it's tough. So we've been talking about newsletters, but Axios Local recently launched on Instagram in all your markets. What's the goal with that?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Yeah. We want to be where the audience is. As I mentioned earlier, the Charlotte Agenda was on social to begin with. It actually had a lot of followers, and I think that there was something about that particular time period where everyone was growing on Instagram and we've seen a lot of success. They monetize that channel and so we would love to monetize all of them. We did an experiment where we launched Instagram in a few markets and focused on an influencer-led strategy. The truth is, unfortunately, with our small staffing, we can't put an Instagram person in every market. And so we waited to launch everywhere until we could find the right technology that would allow us to do that in an easier way. And so we did find a tool that will automate our social posting. And so we post our stories that run in the newsletter and run on web.

  It goes into this tool we're using more. We can opt to either pull the top three paragraphs of the story, or it will summarize it and it generates the image using the photo that's on the story. It puts the headline on it for us and it gives us a version of the story. So it makes posting much easier, which we can ask the reporters to do. It took down the timing for each individual post went from 45 minutes to five minutes,

  Which makes it much more doable at the scale that we're trying to do it. And we know there's an additional audience. It's almost like in this year, 2026, if you're not on Instagram, do you even exist? We actually had some folks on our sales team who were telling us that when they would make a pitch, if they weren't familiar with Axios as a brand, they would go to Instagram first and be like, ‘Well, I don't see you. Are you even real?’

  Holly Moore

• 

  Interesting. So we've talked about newsletters. Let's talk about the other part of your business model that I think is interesting. So in our State of Local News

  Report last year we saw that networks are the fastest growing segment of an otherwise shrinking local news ecosystem in most places. And in addition to Axios Local, we also detailed the growth of local news networks like Patch and TAPinto. With your network model, you can centralize technology, you can centralize the back office, you can share resources. Do you think that networks could be one of the solutions to the local news crisis across the country?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  I mean, yeah, I think “one of” is the keyword there. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all. And I think depending on the audience you're going after, you just have to be aware of that. But we think that there is an absolute opportunity in economies of scale. So we have a product and tech team that's centralized, that allows us to do really sophisticated things on the tech side. We actually have a proprietary CMS now. As I mentioned, we looked at the social tools. So we now have one tool that we are able to put all 36 accounts into and we will launch on other platforms later this year. We have a marketing team that's centralized. We have a people team that's centralized. So all of the stuff that isn't the journalism that's required to be on the streets to do, we can take advantage of having a centralized team doing that.

  Holly Moore

• 

  And so, Holly, you spent 17 years or so of your career at Gannett, now USA Today Company. About a decade of that was at USA Today itself, and then the other seven years at Gannett. So what's the difference, do you think, between the Gannett network model and yours? Gannett is famous for centralization, not just of the business side, but also in its newsrooms across various parts of the country. What are the key differences between a network like, say, Gannett and your network?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  So I think a couple of things. One, just the size of the company is vastly different. A lot of the Gannett markets were their own autonomous entities before they became part of Gannett, whether they were part of Knight Ridder before or other places. And so they have, even though they are also taking advantage of this scale, they also have a lot in each individual market that allows them ... So, like maybe the Detroit paper had its own sales staff. It had its own people locally. And so they've kind of taken that and teased it out through the years. So they're still much larger in each individual market. And then from the editorial perspective, there definitely is a bit of a difference. My job, actually, when I was at USA Today, was to coordinate the network coverage. And anytime there was a big major news event happening in one of the local markets, I would call the reporters on the ground or the editors there and we'd all get on a call and coordinate coverage in that way.

  And at Axios, it's very different. We almost don't try to do that. So we want the local markets to do what they think is ideal locally. And if it bubbles up to national, we might put a national person on it, where we might pick up exactly what they're doing, but there's no coordinated effort to have an anchored story. And that's really intentional because we want them to have the local folks to have autonomy over the story that they're creating.

  Holly Moore

• 

  So local journalists do have autonomy in your network?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  For sure. They absolutely do. We want it to be smart brevity. We want it to be a well-rounded newsletter, but our editors aren't even centrally located, and so our editors aren't assigning the reporters, either. So the reporters are saying, ‘This is what I'm covering today.’ And if it sounds a little weird, then the editor might be like, ‘Well, let's talk through that.’ But we trust the reporters wholly to know what's going on on the ground. I could not tell you what Chicago should lead with tomorrow. I can tell you if I see it and it looks weird, I'll go, ‘Hmm, is that right, Justin, Monica?’ But 10 times out of 10, they're going to be like, ‘Holly, we know what's going on.’ And I'll be like, ‘Oh, okay.’

  Holly Moore

• 

  Well, and I think they do. can't believe how quickly this has gone. We're about at time, but before we go, I did want to ask you about AI and how you're using AI. Where do you see your use of AI going? This is something being debated and discussed in a lot of newsrooms across the country right now.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  I think that we are a pretty AI offensive organization in that we see opportunity with AI. We're very much in the sandbox playing with it. I'm encouraging my reporters every day. We have an enterprise ChatGPT. We have a partnership actually, with OpenAI. They funded some of our launches, though I will just note that there's no requirement that we use AI in the reporting as part of that partnership. I do want them to look and see what this technology is capable of. We want to know how we should be using it in the future. We're doing some really interesting things that maybe this time next year we can get on the podcast again and talk about it. We know that what journalists can only do is be creative and be on the ground.

  And honestly, that's great. That's what I want them to do. What I don't want them to do is commodity news, spend a lot of time formatting stuff, sweating over headlines. We've seen some really interesting innovations that have actually bubbled up from the reporting teams themselves. I've got one reporter in Boston who has built what he calls a “finisher” using Gemini. It reads his emails and it says, ‘You used this image as your News Roundup image the last five days in a row. So here's what I recommend you use this time." And it's just like there is this mental load that happens at the very end of a day for our reporters, where they're just having to go through and like, ‘Did I do the headlines right? Did I do the metadata right? Do I have all the images? Can I have it read and edited this really quickly?’ And so the name of the game for us and using AI is like, how can it take some of the burden of the formatting of assembly just the production pieces off of their plates and allow them to focus on what they do best, which is the journalism on the ground.

  Holly Moore

• 

  Do you foresee using AI as published writing in your newsletters at some point?

  Tim Franklin

• 

  I will say that we will always have a human journalist doing the load of the work. I'm not going to say never say never, because I can already see uses where it could do the news roundup that we were talking about, the aggregated stories and write a one-sentence summary of what the story is. Or could it pull a list of events that we can put into the right order and read through and edit? But the ideas for the stories should come from the brains of the humans that we're employing.

  Holly Moore

• 

  Yeah. Humans in the loop.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Favorite words.

  Holly Moore

• 

  Right. And buffaloes, too, in some places.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Humans in loop. Write them down.

  Holly Moore

• 

  Holly Moore, thank you so much for taking the time to join us for the podcast. We're really grateful for your time and we should have you back on to talk about AI and what else is happening, maybe next year.

  Also thanks to our audience for joining us today. As always, you can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and the Medill Local News Initiative website. I'd like to take a minute to thank our supporters of the Medill Local News Initiative and this podcast, especially the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation and the Joyce Foundation.

  Thank you again and we'll see you next time.

  Tim Franklin

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