Automated local newsletter makes $500k/year

Hi all – I'm an economist studying and building automations for media operators.

I just did an analysis of a local newsletter in Salina, Kansas with fully automated content on track for $500k revenue in 2025.

I think especially with the death of standard niche sites – this will be an interesting case study to get you guys thinking of new possibilities.

Basic Details

• The newsletter is Salina311, a local newsletter in Salina, Kansas.
• Did $400k in 2024, on track for $500k in 2025
• 27k free subscribers, 2.5k paid subscribers
• Started by Matt Moody, a serial AI/ML entrepreneur, in 2021
• All the content is automated by various AI agent/workflows (described below)

Revenue Streams

• Advertising: $180k
• Subscriptions: $220k (digital & print)
• Events: $12k (I'll describe this below)
• Legal notices: $95k (this too)

Content Automation

The content in Salina311 is all automated by specialized agents. Some examples:

• Public Meeting Agent: Transcribes public meetings on YouTube with OpenAI Whisper, identifies key points, turns key points into headlines, writes articles and sends to Ghost by API, sends Matt a text message to review (by Twilio)
• Interview Agent: Uses Gmail API to conduct back and forth async interviews with public figures. Once interview is finished, drafts article, sends to Ghost by API, and sends Matt a text message to review:

There are also other less agentic content automations, for example:

• Scraping crime statistics and local crimes committed into a weekly crime newsletter
• Scraping obituaries posted elsewhere and parsing those submitted by forms into a weekly obituaries section

Ad Sales

Since all the content is automated, Salina311 both gets a ton of ad slots, and Matt can devote energy to selling out ads.

In August 2025, the top slot in the daily newsletter was sold out on all days except one.

In 2025, he's on track for $180k from ad sales.

Subscriptions

Salina311 has 2500 paid subscribers. While most of the paid subscribers are digital subscribers, most of the revenue comes from the print subscribers.

However, supporting about ~1k print subscribers has significant up front and variable costs which aren't the case for digital subscribers.

What makes the print edition actually worth it to Matt is the public and legal notices revenue.

Legal Notices

Many jurisdictions (cities/counties) around the United States require that public notices be printed in some local newspaper.

The designated newspaper is called the Newspaper of Record.

Many weekly newspapers in small US communities are ghost newspapers which have almost no real content other than public and legal notices.

Salina311 is locally owned, and despite being fully automated, produces real content meeting community needs. For these reasons, Matt was able to win in 2023 the rights to be the Newspaper of Record for Saline County, Kansas over a non-locally owned incumbent.

Between a fixed fee coming from Saline County and variable fees for legal notices (e.g. LLC formation) from the community, Salina311 collects $95k in legal and public notices revenue.

Boosted Events

The content automations also free up Matt to experiment with new revenue streams.

In June, Matt launched an events calendar where community members can submit events and pay for them to be featured on the site and in the newsletter.

The events calendar is bringing in about $1k/month.

Additional Details

I'm going to interview Matt soon for my YouTube channel/site, so LMK if you have any questions you'd like me to ask him!