Charleston CEO P.J. Browning is Investing and Growing the Post & Courier While Many Other Local News Outlets Retrench

In the seventh 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 P.J. Browning, CEO of Evening Post Publishing and president and publisher of The Post and Courier.

Browning joins Tim Franklin to discuss how The Post and Courier has become one of the country’s most innovative local news organizations by expanding to nine newsrooms across South Carolina while many news companies have downsized. She explains the organization’s strategy for building sustainable local journalism through community-focused reporting, philanthropic support, audience growth and public engagement.

The conversation explores how the family-owned company has raised more than $8 million in philanthropic funding, launched its statewide investigative journalism project “Uncovered,” to highlight local corruption and official misconduct, created Charleston Porch Talks to deepen community engagement and developed a newsroom model centred on serving local communities with local journalists. Browning also shares her leadership philosophy, discusses how artificial intelligence is improving newsroom efficiency and explains why ownership structure, innovation and execution have been central to the organization’s success.

This Q&A transcript captures their conversation about local news expansion, philanthropy, community engagement, newsroom sustainability and the role of artificial intelligence in the future of local journalism. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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  Hello everyone and welcome to episode seven of the Medill State of Local News Podcast, where we discuss the business of local news with the nation’s top news executives, entrepreneurs and thought leaders. I’m your host, Tim Franklin, the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, home of the Local News Initiative. I’m absolutely delighted to welcome our very special guest today, P.J. Browning, the CEO of Evening Post Publishing and president and publisher of The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. P.J., welcome to the podcast. Great to have you.

  Tim Franklin

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  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

  P.J. Browning

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  You bet. I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation because I know that our audience is going to be as inspired as I am by the story of your entrepreneurship and success in Charleston. I think many of your ideas may be replicable in other parts of the country. So I’m hoping people walk away with some ideas. I think they will.

  Before we get to the questions, P.J., I’d like to briefly introduce you to the audience. Let me say upfront that I consider P.J. to be one of the top news executives in America, but don’t just take my word for it. P.J.’s been named both the International Media Executive of the Year by The Inter American Press Association and the National Publisher of the Year by Editor & Publisher. P.J., I imagine it’s a pretty short list of folks who’ve won both those honors. So congratulations. Before taking the helm of The Post and Courier in 2013, P.J. was the publisher of several newspapers, including those in Myrtle Beach (The Sun News), Macon (The Telegraph) and Carlisle, Pennsylvania (The Sentinel). Under her leadership, The Post and Courier won its first Pulitzer Prize in nearly a century in 2015. It’s been a Pulitzer finalist multiple times since.

  In addition to producing prize-winning journalism, The Post and Courier under her direction is one of the most innovative local news organizations in the nation. It’s the only two-time designee as a Medill local news “Bright Spot” in our annual State of Local News Report. At a time when many in the industry are retrenching, P.J.’s Post and Courier, which is the oldest newspaper in the South dating back to 1803, is actually expanding. It now has nine newsrooms across the Palmetto State (South Carolina). The for-profit, family-owned Post and Courier has raised seven-figure philanthropic dollars to support its journalism. It’s hiring more staff. It’s launched a membership program. It’s doing community events. It’s such an industry standout that The Post and Courier was featured on the CBS Sunday Morning show just a couple of years ago.

  So P.J., first I just want to say – wow! Second, one of the things I admire about you also is your leadership style. When I was thinking about how to describe your style to our audience, I was thinking about a certain college football coach. I graduated from Indiana University, which two years ago hired a relatively unknown mid-major coach, Curt Cignetti. Just in his second year, his team won the national championship and went undefeated. Cignetti is not some flashy, self-promoting, performative leader. He’s intensely focused on the fundamentals, on execution and on game strategy. In other words, he just gets results. So P.J., what I’m saying is - I think of you as the Curt Cignetti of local news. You just get results. So how would you describe your leadership style?

  Tim Franklin

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  Wow. I can tell I like that guy already! So we have a lot of ideas, but ultimately if you said, what’s that one word? It is execution. Now we also have a lot of strategy, but at the end of the day, it’s about executing on the strategy. If you don’t do that, you’re just going to fall flat. That’s a perfect word for me.

  P.J. Browning

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  Well, that’s where it all starts. So let’s go into some of the specifics. First, let’s talk about your statewide expansion. You now have nine newsrooms across South Carolina, including Columbia, Greenville, Spartanburg and Myrtle Beach, among others. Now, how is it that you’re actually growing while many in the industry are retreating? How do you make that work?

  Tim Franklin

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  Well, Tim, when we came out of COVID, it was all about audience. That was a time when there was high readership. A lot of people wanted information, but that combined with news deserts that were starting to form (during the time), made us decide to really grow on the audience side. You mentioned, I’m in this business because of the content that we produce and that content: it’s king.

  So we really went out to these individual markets and said, how can we produce really good local content where we saw others starting to retreat and do more regional content? Today we have 114 journalists throughout the state of South Carolina and we will continue to add journalists, which I’m sure we’ll get into, but we’ve added some through just funding as well.

  P.J. Browning

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  Talking about funding, how do you make the math work on these statewide expansions that you have?

  Tim Franklin

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  For our statewide expansions, we had a formula going in. We said, okay, what will work? We knew we wanted to grow audience revenue. In almost all of those, we started out with a local editor, and then we had two reporters. Then we had an ad director/publisher that really just served as that face of the community. And we supported that.

  Then in Charleston, we supported it with our statewide business coverage, statewide political coverage and our investigative and public service journalism team. So it really made for nice round teams in each one, but it was important for us to have local people on the ground covering local news. I think another big part of that is just doing the listening tours within those communities. It was almost sad in some situations where they had a newspaper that they loved, but that newspaper walked away from the content that they really wanted and that made a difference in their lives.

  P.J. Browning

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  Yeah, it’s pretty fundamental. Local news means covering local communities. It really does work, doesn’t it?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah, I know. Yeah. They don’t want regional news.

  P.J. Browning

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  Absolutely. In addition to this expansion, you’ve also raised philanthropic dollars to support your “Uncovered” project, which is an investigative reporting collaboration with 17 other local news outlets across the state highlighting local corruption and official misconduct. As a for-profit news organization, how were you able to raise money for that project and others from philanthropies and how is that going?

  Tim Franklin

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  Today I’m very proud to say we’ve raised $8.1 million.

  P.J. Browning

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  Wow.

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah, I know it’s a big number since 2021. And you know what? We learned from the best. I loved what they were doing out in Spokane. Rob Curley (executive editor of The Spokesman-Review) started talking to me about, “Hey, we have these funded reporters,” and I, of course, zoned right in on that. What was so interesting about working through the community foundations is learning people want public service and investigative journalism. They want you to be successful. They want you to succeed. So it was really important that we set it up through the community foundation because that’s our accountability side. All of our reporting goes through them. Today we’ve been able to feed the public service investigative team. We started multiple labs – The Post and Courier Education Lab across South Carolina, which has been great, really trying to help educational reporting and coverage so we can improve the education in South Carolina for kids. We have an Arts & Culture Lab, we have a Rising Waters Lab, and we have a fully grown-out plan around building out interns throughout South Carolina. We work with seven universities and have over 30 interns this semester. So just a lot of that philanthropic support: really taking South Carolina, putting a big hug around it, and assessing what we can do to really improve reporting, grow that next generation, target those areas that people are passionate about. If people are passionate, they’re going to support those efforts. They want us to succeed.

  P.J. Browning

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  First of all, congratulations on this. You’re filling a void that exists in local news and at the same time doing public service journalism that has a real value to communities and to the broader state. Is this something that you think other regional news organizations could replicate? What do you think about that?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah, absolutely. I’m really proud of the team and the work we’ve done here. Obviously Seattle does some great work around labs. I mentioned Rob in Spokane and some of the work that they’ve done, but we’ve been able to get on a Zoom call and share out what works, what doesn’t work. That’s been really rewarding, really rewarding. So I know it’s replicable. It takes hard work. We do things differently. The day’s full, but it’s fun and it’s a part of... It’s the mission. This is such a mission-driven business that we’re in today.

  P.J. Browning

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  An important lesson to remember. What kind of reception did you get with these 17 collaborators? Did they say, “Oh no, here are the big city folks from Charleston coming in to tell us what to do or how to cover things,” or was it actually very collaborative? How did that go?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah, I think maybe this is a little bit our culture. We’re family-owned. You mentioned we’ve been around 223 years plus. So maybe a little bit of it is just culture, but we approached those newspapers – at a time when everybody’s hurting – and said, what is the story you could tell if you had the resources to tell it? I mean, we’re about “let’s help ourselves, let’s help our state, let’s help our communities”. I think that approach was great.

  P.J. Browning

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  You produced some amazing journalism and exposed some corruption that existed in some of those places. So the work’s been very impressive. In addition to that, let’s talk about Charleston Porch Talks. It’s a community engagement and speaker program that you started. You launched it just a little less than two years ago, and then I believe all the proceeds from those events, you plow back into your public service and investigative fund. Is that correct? So this is an opportunity for community engagement, to get out there in the community and be real people, not just people in pixels or on print. Talk about that program and the inspiration for it and how it’s going.

  Tim Franklin

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  So the inspiration for it was Northwest Passage. Again, just listening to what’s going on. We tweaked ours, did a little bit different, but what we loved about that program is we constantly have to feed that top of the funnel. No matter what we’re looking at, we always look at the funnel and the outcome is how do we monetize things? So when we looked at Charleston Porch Talks, it’s about bringing people in to listen to these New York Times bestselling authors. They may or may not be subscribers. In many cases, maybe they aren’t a subscriber, but it’s that chance for us to bring something in that they really enjoy and they’re passionate about. We have the opportunity at those meetings to talk about our journalism. Off of that, we’ll get leads. People will either write a check or they’ll say, “You know what? I want to learn more about being in the Journalism Preservation Society.” And that’s a bigger gift that they give to the journalism fund than just a subscription.

  I think a lot of times we just have been guilty of not asking. So I love it because the opportunity to tell our story and the importance of it, people get it. It’s been rewarding.

  P.J. Browning

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  I’m a big fan of events like that as a way to build community engagement. I’ve heard some people say, “Well, Franklin, it’s a lot of work. They’re labor-intensive. The income that you get really isn’t worth all the effort.” What do you say to that?

  Tim Franklin

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  So I agree that they are a lot of work, but I would say we need to be all about engagement. I look at that engagement as feeding the funnel. I really need you to feel like I’m important in your life as a newspaper. So I need to bring you in. What I love about Charleston Porch Talks is that it’s a fun event. You’re going to get your picture with the author who you’ve read on the summer beach.” So it’s a fun event, a fun way to bring you in to what we do for a living, all the way to the serious forums that we have. At every turn, we always make money. It may be that we’re making $3,000 or $5,000 on these events and you think, wow, that’s a lot of work. But it’s the number of people. Did you engage 600 people? And of those 600 people, 400 were new people that you never touched before. So I think it’s absolutely necessary in today’s environment.

  P.J. Browning

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  Absolutely. I mean, we see AI siphoning traffic away from news sites across the country. So that one-on-one relationship is more important than ever. Not to get too nerdy, but when you think about the customer lifetime value of the folks that you may sign up at a Charleston Porch Talks who then become subscribers, maybe over a lengthy period of time, I mean you have to look at this as a long-tail investment.

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah, it is. It’s the value, it’s the relationship that you need to have with that reader, the support. So I think it’s invaluable, but I know it’s a lot of work, but I think that’s a part of our environment today.

  P.J. Browning

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  Yeah. How often do you do them? Are they monthly, quarterly, every couple months?

  Tim Franklin

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  For the Charleston Porch Talks, we will do four to six of those a year. But events, feel like we do two to three a month.

  P.J. Browning

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  Okay. Wow, that’s a lot.

  Tim Franklin

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  It’s a lot of events. Especially think about across the state, whether we’re doing education forums, Rising Waters forums, we’ll do one on any of the big projects that we do. We try to do a forum to bring people in, which is great.

  P.J. Browning

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  Yeah. It’s kind of another form of public service journalism by bringing the community in and getting them involved in the important work you’re doing. Given all these actions, the Charleston Porch Talks, the collaboration, the statewide expansions that you’re doing, how would you assess the current situation at The Post and Courier? Would you say it’s financially sustainable? Are you still growing? What’s happening there?

  Tim Franklin

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  So out of all of our expansion markets as a part of our plan, we wanted all of them to be profitable by year three. So we definitely had a plan, put our investment in to make sure that that worked. I’ve got one market that isn’t profitable, but I expect it to be profitable by next year. I always say I love a good upward trend line. It’s one of my favorite charts because it couldn’t be more beautiful with that upward trend line. And that’s what we wanted it to be and we’ve just put the work and effort in there and good journalism to get there.

  P.J. Browning

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  Well, unfortunately we live in a time when there aren’t a lot of upward trend lines in the industry. Are you looking at further expansions now? Are you thinking about adding more newsrooms, or are you kind of where you’d like to be?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah, I honestly think we are where we would like to be. If there were another smaller opportunity within South Carolina that we just felt like there was a news desert that we could step into.

  The other thing we’ve done, Tim, is through our internship program. We really target students that live within South Carolina. We say, if you want to go back home and you want to make a difference, it doesn’t matter where you are in South Carolina; you can report for us and we can help bring news to that community through our bigger organization. So it’s going to be a little different model as we move forward and develop our internship program.

  P.J. Browning

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  Well, it’s great experience for the students. You’re also building the pipeline of the next generation of journalists, which is really important. So at a journalism school, we fully support internship programs to help local news.

  Tim Franklin

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  Then you will appreciate this. We actually had one of our donors come to us and had graduated from Wofford, loves public service and investigative journalism. He was willing to fund three years of fellowship on investigative journalism. So that will be a junior-senior program and we’ll be able to pick at least three students over the next three years to be able to fund that. I’m excited about

  P.J. Browning

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  That’s amazing. What a great opportunity. So just to say upfront, I’m not asking you to throw shade on other publishers around the country, but how is it that you’re growing when so many in the industry are retrenching? What’s your secret sauce?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah, I think a couple of things. For starters, I’ve had the opportunity in my career to work for publicly held and privately held organisations. I do think our ownership allows that flexibility and the ability to really truly pivot and try new things. When we say fail fast, I think that’s really true here. It’s not somebody’s pet project. So I think the ownership model has definitely made a difference. The other thing is the leadership team here. We do have a mentality: we don’t let grass grow under our feet. As soon as somebody has a good idea, we really listen and we say, “Is that something that we should be doing here?” So we always have to be innovating. I think the team here does a good job of keeping their eyes and ears open to that.

  P.J. Browning

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  Yeah, you do have to always be innovating as fast as things are changing. Is it a structural ownership issue at other places that prevents this kind of entrepreneurship? You are in a fast-growing market, which I’m sure is an advantage you have that maybe some don’t. But what do you think?

  Tim Franklin

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  I’ve always said this: it’s going to get a little harder on people, unfortunately, with AI, because you have to turn the ship. It’s always harder to take legacy and turn. I think that’s been a part of our struggle as an industry. It is what it is, but it’s so hard to turn off legacy. It’s fed us for so long that it’s finding the right balance of legacy.

  Then you’ve got to put your money into what the future is. It’s not an easy decision. So I think it’s just easier when you have an ownership structure that’s small enough and has a board that says, “Let’s make this happen.” We want to be sustainable. We want to get across the line. We’re close to the ground on this one. We have no other options. We have to sustain. We think journalism is way too important not to take this really, really serious. But it’s a shift.

  I remember in 2008 or 2013 at McClatchy, we were talking about sea change. Beautiful slide with a big wave. To take that seriously and really come up with a plan that’s going to get you through the other side – it’s just a lot of work.

  P.J. Browning

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  It is a lot of work and those seawaters are still churning, I think, even today. Maybe for those who aren’t familiar, could you talk about your owner a little bit. I saw him quoted on the CBS Sunday Morning show, and he was almost joking about how this is not a money-making business really. It’s not a business to get rich in. I think he might’ve said, to paraphrase. So talk about your owner a little bit.

  Tim Franklin

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  Sometimes we refer to Pierre as our secret sauce around here, but Pierre Manigault, he’s fantastic. He truly, truly believes in journalism. We like to say what he is enabling us to do with journalism in South Carolina is just something that we wish was happening more and more. I do think you have some pockets in some other states of people that understand the importance of it, but he’s enabled us to really make these changes and to invest where we needed to invest. At the same time, he has those expectations of us making a difference. So I think that the team is really uber focused on what we need to do. But yeah, he’s terrific.

  P.J. Browning

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  If you look at a lot of the innovation, whether it’s you, whether it’s the Minnesota Star Tribune or the Seattle Times, you mentioned before there are many others, that independent ownership right now seems to be in place in areas where the innovation is happening around the country. Is that what you see as well?

  Tim Franklin

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  I think that’s really fair. In publicly held companies, it’s just harder; you have those earnings reports and it’s harder to say, “I need to take this. I need to lose money here because I really have to invest to make a difference long-term.” You’re just saddled with those short-term decisions and that’s unfortunate for our business because I think we’re going to have to have some of those longer-term investments.

  P.J. Browning

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  There are a lot of talented journalists at those places and there’s a lot of good journalism being produced, but it’s just different and can be more challenging. So thank you for pointing that out. So you mentioned AI and I want to circle back to that. For obvious reasons, there’s a lot of interest in AI these days. I’ve asked almost all the guests on this program so far about how they’re using AI and where they see it going in their own news organizations. What say you?

  Tim Franklin

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  So right now we pull together a cross-divisional team. So we use AI pretty extensively as a tool for efficiency. Within the newsroom, we will do some first edits, but we tried to position it more as this helpful tool to reporters so that you can get your first edit, you can feel good about your story, and then you’re moving on to make that story even better; then you’re having those deeper discussions with your editor.

  But for efficiency purposes, business office system installs, we absolutely are using AI for efficiency. From the vendor level, one of the first things we did is we went through and said, “Okay, here’s all the vendors we use across the company. Who’s AI-friendly? What are they doing to innovate themselves?” Because we wanted to make sure that we were partnered with vendors that were innovating.

  I think you’ll see some changes in the industry just as that innovation progresses. We’re seeing some costs come down from vendors, which is fantastic. We need them to find efficiencies so that we see savings. So I think somebody said that AI is one of those things that’s going to basically change everything, like electricity changed how we do things. So we have to absolutely be in the game and understand everything that it can do for us.

  P.J. Browning

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  What are some of the back office functions that have been made more efficient by AI?

  Tim Franklin

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  So there’s a lot of automations that we do, whether it’s through reports. Today, one of the things for the newsroom that I think is really helpful is we’ll feed our Marfield data in and then you get this executive summary that says, “Okay, these stories are converting, these aren’t, what would you do differently? Maybe it’s a top-of-funnel story.” But we can just do that in minutes and have this beautiful report that then you can measure yourself against. Before, you pulled data from 28 different reports and maybe you got the dashboard a month later. So I love the reports that we’re getting out of the newsroom.

  Obviously, all the marketing things that we’re doing make a lot of sense. There’ll be efficiencies whenever we do system installs. AI has saved so much time on system installs. In commercial print, it had to be done by hand. We have found ways to automate that stuff and just make some of that backend office stuff so much easier.

  P.J. Browning

• 

  That also helps free up resources for reporters and for the newsroom, right?

  So we have just a little over a minute left, and I wanted to ask you a more personal question. I watched an interview that you did five years ago called “We The Women.” In it, you said that you hoped your legacy was to see the Post and Courier through to the other side of that metaphorical transformational tunnel. Do you feel like you’ve made it?

  Tim Franklin

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  Wow. Yes, that is a great question. So yes... we have Project 2028. I should say I’ll be 62 this year. So yes, I have a goal in mind to make sure that we get everything stable. We have a couple of things that we’ll work on. I didn’t know AI was going to interrupt us as much as it has, but I think that’s just added an exciting element that we’ll work through. But we’ve got that one market we’re going to get to profitability next year and then I will feel like we have arrived at the expansion. But, yes, thanks for asking that.

  P.J. Browning

• 

  Well, and I think if we surveyed the industry, there wouldn’t be a lot of folks who would say that they’ve made it to the other side of the tunnel yet. So congratulations on that journey.

  P.J., this went by really quickly. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your story with us.

  I’d also like to thank the supporters of the Medill Local News Initiative and this podcast: the MacArthur, Knight and Joyce Foundations. You can find a new episode of this podcast every month on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and the Medill Local News Initiative website.

  In just six months, we’ve built a very solid audience for this podcast. If you’re interested in the pod, please be sure to hit the like and subscribe buttons. We’d appreciate it. Thank you for being here. Please join us next month when our guest will be Eric Barnes, the CEO of one of the nation’s most successful local news digital startups, the Daily Memphian.

  We will see you then. P.J., thank you again for being here.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Thank you for having me.

  P.J. Browning

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