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Axios Local’s Liz Alesse on shaping the business to crack sustainable local journalism at scale

5-year-old Axios Local has yet to turn a profit, but Vice President and General Manager Liz Alesse is “bullish” on their prospects for cracking the local news puzzle.

Axios Local is one of a growing number of start-ups trying to create a sustainable local news network. Since bringing Axios’ signature ‘Smart Brevity’ newsletter format to a handful of cities five years ago, they have now expanded the portfolio to 37 cities, with Douglas County and Arapahoe County newly live. 

Across the 37 free-to-read newsletters, they have amassed an audience of over two million subscribers. But as their expansion plans become more ambitious, and the need for revenue sustainability becomes more urgent, the publisher is evolving their approach.

“This year, we’re really thinking about as the foundational year,” Axios Local’s Vice President and General Manager Liz Alesse told us this week on The Publisher Podcast. “We’ve learned a lot over the last five years about what makes a strong editorial product at the local level. We’re building out the systems and the capabilities to take those lessons, and really accelerate and scale quickly going forward.”

Alesse joined the business at the start of 2026. She has been tasked with building and scaling Axios’ local journalism arm into a sustainable national platform; no small task given the brutal economies of local news in the digital age.

She believes the key to this lies in balancing the needs of individual markets with a strategy that can work across all, sharing learnings and being flexible where needed. 

Leading with talent

Each local newsletter, delivered every weekday morning, adheres to Axios’ ‘Smart Brevity’ style. They are readable in just a few minutes, with bullet points and short sentences designed to be easily scanned.

Despite this universal format across all newsletters, personalities are still important. “We encourage our newsletter writers in the local communities to emphasise their voice, and to find the stories and themes and features of a newsletter that are going to appeal to their readers,” Alesse illustrated. “We aren’t looking for a cookie cutter reporter and hoping to install them in every one of our cities.”

Because of this, hiring is a vital driver of where and how they expand. “The talent piece of this business is critical,” Alesse said, explaining that reporters need to reflect the communities they’re covering. “We want to find the strongest reports that are really tied to their hometown, and have deep roots and strong sources.” 

Anyone who replies to an Axios Local newsletter gets straight into the inbox of the reporter. Alesse said that reporters spend time reading and responding to those emails, which in turn builds a community relationship, and help guide the reporters on what’s resonating and what local people care about; somewhere a human touch is vital.

The organisation encourages the use of AI on manual tasks like transcribing, weather reports, and member birthdays, allowing reporters to focus on the parts of their work that are the most human-driven. “Freeing up the bandwidth of our reporters is first and foremost,” Alesse clarified. “But when it comes to AI, it will never replace reporting, and that human aspect of journalism that is so important.”

Flexibility in expansion

Up until now, Axios Local has placed between one and 3 reporters in an area. They currently have over 100 local reporters in total. Alesse said that they are still evaluating what the right complement of manpower is to support the journalism, acknowledging that this varies by area.

“We can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to how we expand,” she explained. “I know enough about local communities, and what makes them special is so different from one area to another. 

“What’s important to folks who live there, and what will drive them to determine where they’re going to get their news and how they’re going to make decisions in their life is going to be vastly different in a town where there’s massive industry versus a town where they’re struggling economically. So the storytelling has to be different, and how we build trust with that audience has to be different.”

The initial idea with Axios Local was to figure out a blueprint that worked, and roll it out across the country. But Alesse noted that the reality is more complicated. “If we try to apply the same principles across every single one of our markets and expect to see the same level of success, we’ll quickly find out that’s not a winning formula,” she said. “And if we try to have a bespoke strategy for even 35 markets…that will break the system as well.”

The team has to strike a balance of staffing and technological support, and create systems that can be flexible around these different cities. Alesse said that the whole business has to remain nimble, so that when something works (or doesn’t!), they can respond:

“We can still be thoughtful and deliberate and learn things along the way, and figure out where we can apply best practices to towns and cities and business models where it makes sense, and pivot and adjust and adapt for other locations where it doesn’t.”

Next phase: connector communities

Across Axios Local’s established markets, each newsletter publishes once a day, five days a week. But with the newer and pending launches, there is much more variability in the size of the community, so sending frequency is an area they are looking to experiment with.

The strategy from this point onwards is to hire one reporter to cover two communities, with each community getting two newsletters a week. This will test the area’s appetite for coverage, as well as easing reporting pressure on smaller communities where the news cycle is less robust.

“Can we provide high quality content to these communities where they are often underserved at a twice-weekly cadence? Can one reporter… confidently cover those communities in a way that is meaningful?” Alesse hypothesised.

Crucially, these new launches are being appended to cities where Axios Local already has a presence, rather than being outliers. For example, Denver is considered an ‘anchor city’ for coverage, with newly-launched Douglas County and Arapahoe County ‘connecting’.

“We’re trying to abut these communities to establish newsletters so that there develops a little team in a region that can support one another, and step in if there’s ever a huge story that breaks,” Alesse explained. 

A path to sustainability

Axios Local’s established markets are profitable, but as noted in A Media Operator, the overall operation is not yet profitable. 

“It’s not lost on us that people haven’t really cracked this code yet, and yet we feel really bullish that we’re going to be able to do it,” Alesse told us. “A big piece of that is not relying solely on one revenue stream to support this business.”

Axios Local’s largest revenue stream is advertising; something Alesse doesn’t see changing any time soon. But they are actively exploring finding solutions that work for ad buyers at all levels, not just the big nationals. 

“The way that you can successfully sell advertisers the national products is not necessarily going to work for a regional or mid-market buyer, let alone an even smaller potential advertiser at the hyperlocal level,” she pointed out. “We want to be able to figure out how we can create opportunities and solutions for those buyers as well.”

It also has a paid membership programme where readers can donate, which has recently ramped up following learnings from the membership programme on Axios’ other verticals. Members get birthday shout-outs in the newsletter, and depending on the market, some exclusive newsletters, but most content remains free. According to Press Gazette, it has grown from 7,000 paying supporters at the end of 2025 to 15,000 by May 2026.

Axios Local’s third revenue stream is partnerships, like the three-year partnership with OpenAI, announced last year. The funding from this was directly funnelled to support the launch of four new cities in 2025, and a further nine this year.

Events are on the table, but Alesse acknowledged it was difficult to scale events across local markets. Instead, they’re looking for opportunities to show up in communities. One example she cited was a launch event for their two new ‘connector community’ newsletters in Colorado, with the support of a sponsor. She is hoping that this will be a model for future opportunities.

For now, Alesse is focusing on what they can learn from this ‘foundational’ year. “By the end of this year, our expectation is that we will have systems operational for our reporters to support the work that they do, that really does alleviate some of the burden around manual tasks,” she explained. 

“After, if we’re able to get where we are pointed right now – and all the signs are really positive – then we can transition next year into a new phase of more rapid expansion, and have more data at our fingertips to help drive the decisions that we make about where we expand, and how fast, and what the model looks like.”

Listen to the full episode in this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast, available wherever you find podcasts.

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