What is local journalism’s value to audiences — and how can we grow it?

A lot can happen in 12 years.

That’s how long it’s been since I first left the newsroom for the “business side” of local journalism.

I was an assistant managing editor at The Seattle Times in early 2013 when the paper announced it would start charging people for the news they’d been getting online for free. This was a big step for the organization and for me — perhaps the first time in my career I ever considered: How much is this product worth paying for? The search for an answer to that question led me away from daily journalism and into a succession of roles building and evolving local digital news products. (I wrote about what I learned in the transition from news to product at the time.)

In the years that followed, the digital landscape has been a blur of changes — with shifts to mobile and social, pivots to video and audio, the death and rebirth of the homepage, the (re)discovery of newsletters as a driver of loyalty, and now the emergence of generative AI. One constant has remained: the need to build direct, personal connections with our users.

There’s an increasingly urgent economic argument, too, for prioritizing those audience ties: As platforms continue to monopolize digital ad spend, government support for public media evaporates and institutional philanthropy resists funding ongoing operations, our audiences remain our most reliable financial backers.

But what do they actually get from us in exchange for that support? I believe local journalism has two distinct types of value: the social good we all agree on, and the personal value that actually motivates a user to pay. Publishers have appealed ad nauseam to people’s sense of civic responsibility, but try as we might to win them over with the social good argument, research shows that is not what moves most people who pay for news.

Instead, the primary motivator is (and has always been) self interest. It is only when paying audiences feel they are getting their money’s worth that their self interest can fuel our long-term sustainability and the wider societal benefits that come with a healthy local press. That’s why I’m focused on the question of how publishers define, measure and demonstrate their value to the folks we call “members” and “subscribers”.

For the last two and a half years, I led the product team at The Baltimore Banner, a digital-only startup that, just three years into its existence, is already Maryland’s largest news organization, with 72,000 paid subscribers, a Pulitzer Prize and a brand-new edition in the D.C. suburbs.

The Banner has made big strides in proving that a user-supported digital business model can deliver local journalism at a scale and quality on par with that of major metropolitan newspapers of days past. A key part of that success rests on The Banner’s value proposition — what a subscriber gets in exchange for their money. By organizing our roadmap around goals such as being “obsessively useful”, we were able to produce a compelling bundle of subscriber benefits that go beyond the core journalism, including commenting and the ability to listen to articles in the app.

Despite this progress, there’s a lot we still don’t know about what makes up a valuable local news offering. In my year as a 2026 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, I am eager to take learnings from The Banner and other innovative local publishers — combine them with insights from Silicon Valley and the broader business world — and contribute to the emerging playbook for success in user-centered local news.

Among the questions I’m looking to answer:

• How should we measure the audience value of particular acts and forms of journalism and incentivize those that create the most value?
• How might we build tighter audience feedback loops to improve both editorial and business decision-making? (And how can AI tools help us make better sense of qualitative feedback in its various forms?)
• What audience behaviors correlate with loyalty, and how can our products encourage such behaviors?
• Can AI tools help us quantify what we put out into the world so we can better understand the return on investment of our journalism?

If these are questions you have, too, or you are simply looking for ways to demonstrate greater value to audiences, I’d love to hear from you. Please take this short survey to let me know what is important to you. This will help me understand where I can be most useful.

I plan to post an update on what I’m learning in early 2026, and I hope you’ll stay tuned for that. Meanwhile, feel free to reach out directly at ulken@stanford.edu.