Episode description:

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media hosted by Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

Any listener to In Reality is aware of the crisis in local news. It’s a five alarm fire. It’s the news desertification of rural America. And so, we can admire the problem forever.

But one of the goals of this program is to highlight the people who are attacking journalism’s problems of trust and sustainability. So let’s do that. Eric’s guest is Erin Millar, the journalist-turned-entrepreneur behind Indiegraf, equipping news entrepreneurs with the tools and services that media businesses need to grow and thrive, but that most startup newsrooms haven’t the time, money or expertise to assemble on their own. If you think of Indiegraf as a media business in a box, you’re not too far off.

In the process of building Indiegraf and its clients, Erin has some definite ideas about how local newsrooms can build trust, how advertising is an important part of not just revenue but also trust, and why reports of the death of local news are not just exaggerated, they are missing the trend.

We think you’ll get a lot out of this. Maybe even hope. Now here’s Erin Millar.

 

Transcript

 

Eric Schurenberg (00:08.127)
Erin, welcome to In Reality.

Erin Millar (00:13.453)
Thanks, Eric, it’s great to see you.

Eric Schurenberg (00:17.922)
In 30 seconds, would you give me an overview of what IndiGraph does? You’re the CEO of IndiGraph, which a lot of people describe as in a shorthand as a media business in a box. But tell it to me straight as you would frame it.

Erin Millar (00:36.643)
Sure. Well, I’m a journalist entrepreneur. I began this work because I wanted to see more high quality journalism happening, particularly in markets that newspapers were no longer viable in. so IndieGraph is a company that my co-founder, who’s also my sister and I started in 2020. So it’s five years ago. And really the goal was to create a technology platform and services platform that made it easy to become a journalist entrepreneur or start your own community news outlet. And so it is a business in a box. It makes it cheaper and easier for anyone to start a small content business.

Eric Schurenberg (01:21.672)
How is IndieGraph funded? there a combination of venture and philanthropy or is it just one or the other?

Erin Millar (01:30.239)
Yeah, no, we actually have support from both of those types of capital. And so we started with a really clear vision of wanting to drive revenue from day one. Like we didn’t want to build something unsustainable. We did this in a company rather than in a nonprofit structure. And we did that because we wanted to crack the nut on a business model that was scalable. We felt that if we can really make this sustainable, then that was going to be our pathway to the largest impact that we could have.

And so we have raised a combination of investment, and that is some venture investment, some impact investment, yeah, equity investment like any other technology company. And also, we’ve also been able to raise philanthropic capital to support equity seeking news organizations that are building using our platform.

So we’ve kind of been able to do both of those things and we’ve actually, really proud. We’ve raised more money to support the news entrepreneurs that are building on our platform than we’ve actually raised and invested into our company. And so that feels like a really nice value aligned strategy.

Eric Schurenberg (02:48.568)
There are many different elements of the IndieGraph offering and we can talk about them later in more detail, including the philanthropic funding that you’ve raised that you can disperse to media entrepreneurs. But just to help the audience distinguish IndieGraph from other helping organizations in the field out there. How is IndieGraph different from say a technology platform like WordPress?

or from which is the website creation platform that many media companies use, including my old chops of Inc and Fast Company. And how does it differ from organizations that also aim to help entrepreneurial media companies get off the ground, things like News Revenue Pub or American Journalism Project? So where does IndiGraph fit into that spectrum?

Erin Millar (03:45.507)
Mm hmm. So I’ll take the technology piece first. So before we founded IndieGraph, my my co-founder and I founded a founded our own.

community news publishing company. our first venture is called Discourse Media. It is now a, it’s been, it just had its 10th birthday. So it is sustainable and it supports a small chain of digital news organizations, primarily supporting rural communities here in British Columbia where I’m based. So six different publications are under that. And we built with WordPress.

at that time, we built with WordPress, we pieced together the technology ourselves, and it was extremely expensive to get WordPress developers and figure out how to do this and then pick and assess all the different point solutions also. Do we use HubSpot? What do we use for payment processing, et cetera? And so from a technology perspective, the insight that we built…

Indygraph around was that, you know, there is enough revenue in many of these smaller communities to support a small team of journalists doing really high quality work. However, it doesn’t make sense. They don’t have the same kind of resources that a large news chain would have where they have centralized technology support and the capacity to assess, manage multiple vendors, figure all that out, piece it together. It was just not a cost efficient way to do things when you look at the unit economics.

And so IndieGraph is really a one-stop shop that gives you all of the pieces that you need in one package and allows you to configure how you use the tools so that you can really make it suit your own brand and your own community values. But yeah, it’s a standardized set of tools. And so it replaces your CMS.

Erin Millar (05:49.251)
your email service provider, your payment solutions, your advertising, it automates that whole process so that all you have to think about is doing the highest impact work, which is doing the content, creating, engaging with community, engaging with local advertisers and partners and that kind of work rather than worrying about a million different vendors. So that’s really how we’re positioned there. We also work to be

more cost effective. So if you add up all the costs of all the different, you your MailChimp costs, all your payment process, all of that. In terms of what we’re doing in the field that is unique around the other sorts of organizations is for one thing, we’re a technology company. And we, you know, we invest a lot of resources in developing the best products and user experience that

we can have for our local news leaders. So we’re not a services company, which most of the industry specific organizations are either services companies or they’re like funders like American Journalism Project. And then secondly, we are like laser focused on underserved communities. I actually saw a really interesting, a really interesting,

piece of research map yesterday that showed how philanthropy, there’s been a huge increase in the philanthropy in the United States going towards local news and how that has like 95 % of it flowed to urban organizations that are centered in urban centers. The reality is that when we really look at where the need is, it is in a top 10.

states that really have lower local news access per capita represents about 43 million people. So a huge or 43 % of the population, I should say not 43 million. And these are like, like these are rural communities, these are suburban communities. And so we are laser focused on the places where other organizations are not focused.

Eric Schurenberg (07:50.542)
Uh-huh.

Eric Schurenberg (08:03.212)
Yes, right. Those are the places most susceptible to being news deserts. And also, I would think the revenue is a little bit harder to come by in those places. Fewer advertisers, harder audiences to assemble at scale, and so on. But let me go back to the very beginning. to the discourse and discourse media, the sort of community network of local newspapers that you and your sister put together.

Erin Millar (08:07.203)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (08:33.634)
You know, of all the things that you could do from being in the, guess, was the discourse formed close to Vancouver? So would you consider it a suburb or an exurb, the area?

Erin Millar (08:43.937)
Yeah.

Erin Millar (08:48.195)
Well, I mean, we were based in Vancouver and we actually experimented in a lot of different communities. And we found, yeah, and we, and where discourse now focuses on Vancouver Island and, and the interior of British Columbia. That’s actually where we grew up. So, yeah. So we’re not in the urban center.

Eric Schurenberg (09:07.37)
Okay, well, I would say that.

I would say for someone who had technology chops in Vancouver, which is a technology hub in Canada, that you had many options and instead you chose local journalism. Why?

Erin Millar (09:27.415)
Well, I am not a technologist first, I am a journalist first. And I became a technologist and an entrepreneur in pursuit of my passion, which is really about contributing to stronger local journalism ecosystems and ensuring that all communities have access to the same kind of, the quality information and storytelling and cultural.

artifacts that they need to really be healthy communities. And so I started my career as a journalist and saw that I couldn’t do the kind of work that I wanted to do within the system. I was working in national newspapers as an education reporter. And I saw that, you know, where that kind of information and news really has the largest impact is at the local or regional level. But we were seeing

so many journalists get laid off from those newsrooms, so many local outlets get closed down. And so to have a beat reporter focused on education, like there just weren’t opportunities there. So I realized that if I wanted a system that really incentivized that kind of work, then I had to be able to build my own system. So that’s what drew me to it. And then the technology piece, everything else has been kind of a means to an end a little bit. I’ve been very consistent about…

my sort of guiding mission throughout this period, even though I’ve shifted from being a journalist to being an entrepreneur to being a technologist to being an entrepreneur again. so, yeah, that’s really the through line is that personal mission, which is really about contributing to the sustainability of news and information ecosystems.

Eric Schurenberg (11:08.76)
So in that way, you’re a lot like many of the clients of IndieGraph, who are journalists who decided to build their own, that that was the best way to go forward in this environment. then by force of necessity became entrepreneurs and business leaders, as well as journalists. Let me ask about the journalism environment. So we know how difficult it is.

Erin Millar (11:29.837)
That’s right.

Eric Schurenberg (11:39.13)
here in the US. You alluded earlier to people being laid off in rural newsrooms. So I’m gathering that it’s no better, no healthier in Canada than it is in the US. Is that the case? And is there the same kind of level of mistrust and suspicion of professional journalism in Canada that there is in the US?

Erin Millar (12:05.333)
No, it’s not as bad here. And I was actually just doing some research. So 85 % of the communities that we serve, the news leaders that we serve are in the US. So I spend most of my time working in the United States now, but my home is very important to me, of course. And we definitely see a lot of the same trends.

happening, but it’s not as exaggerated in terms of polarization. There is rising mistrust in news. You know, we really saw that during the last federal election, which in some ways was a referendum on our public broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC, where there was, one, the more right-wing party was…

was calling to defund it, the more left-wing party was calling to support it. And so we see things like that happening and a lot of distrust in media and the rise of independent voices. I think that’s a trend that impacts everywhere. And I think that makes a lot of sense. We trust people that are authentic and open about where they’re coming from and all of those things. And so that’s why we’re seeing this incredible

rise of independent media podcasts. You know, we’ve got some incredible entrepreneurs that are using like WhatsApp to directly connect with their audiences and building, you know, thousands and thousands of audience engagements every day through WhatsApp. So there’s some very cool things happening out there, but in Canada, we are certainly not at the same place that US is. And we also don’t have the same

saturation of news deserts. We do have a higher local news availability per capita.

Eric Schurenberg (14:02.398)
let’s talk about the, well, first of all, I’d like to talk more about the, role of a professional newsroom in this environment. You alluded to the fragmentation of the industry, the rise of, independent media and sort of solo entrepreneurs, citizen journalism, if you want to call it that. but first let’s, let’s dive a little deeper into what IndieGraph has to offer. Cause it’s shed some light on.

Erin Millar (14:13.091)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (14:31.906)
what it is that this rising cohort of brand new newsrooms need. So talk, there are kind of a couple of different categories in which IndieGraph has offerings. The first is sort of the website platform, the technology platform and email management, but talk about that and about the others as

Erin Millar (14:55.789)
Sure, so there’s really two buckets of what we do. The first is the technology platform, which integrates all of the key functions that you need to run to run a basic small newsroom. Actually, it doesn’t even need to be small. We’ve got some large customers using it now too. But that includes your platform for distribution with all the integrations built in.

your email service provider, automation, a lot of automation built in just to make it as easy as possible to create campaigns, to build your audience. It has all the tools that you need to monetize through sort of the top revenue streams. This is a big part of it. A lot of the existing tools out there cater to a single revenue stream, it’s let’s take like Substack for example.

is primarily built around paywall subscriptions to newsletters. So our platform is really about multimedia and multiple revenue streams. So we find that you can, a lot of our publishers drive membership and donor revenue. Some of them do also put up paywall or exclusive content. So we do have that functionality. And they also are generating revenue from advertising and sponsorship in newsletters, in on

in some cases on their apps, on their web platform. So it makes it super easy just to do all of that and automate a lot of the process. That’s the technology piece of it. The other piece is our services offering. So this is, we call it IndieGraph Experts, and it offers a marketplace of different kinds of business functions that small journalism teams need.

to do their business. and really where this comes from is just is the acknowledgement that a lot of teams just don’t have that business expertise. So whether that’s like a marketing, you need access to some marketing capacity or you need, don’t want to, you’ve never run a membership campaign before and you don’t want to, you want to skip over the learning part and just like run something on best practices.

Erin Millar (17:06.151)
or we do a lot of advertising work too. So you can hire somebody to build out your advertising strategy and put your pricing, figure out your pricing for you, put together a media kit, all of that, train you on how to reach out to people. So there’s a lot of different services elements there. So you can access the fractional support that you need to like function like a full business, driving multiple revenue sources and growing your audience, even if you’re a small team of just a few journalists.

Eric Schurenberg (17:35.5)
So let’s talk about building a newsroom around a small team. What would your advice be to someone who was considering someone or a couple of partners who was considering creating a local newsroom? Why would you encourage them to do that rather than say, set up a substack?

Erin Millar (17:59.981)
Sure. We’ve had a lot of publishers start on Substack and then transition to us. And Substack is a great tool for testing and learning. What we don’t find is that folks that there are not very many examples of local news outfits that don’t come with a large audience already that are succeeding in building the sustainable news businesses.

So if someone was starting and they’re like, hey, you know, I just want to set up a sub stack and see if it’s got legs and see if I can attract any, any subscribers. That’s a great strategy. That’s a great way to start. You can also start on IndieGraph. We’ve got, we’ve got a tier called the Essentials, which allows you to like get up a news site super quickly, super cheaply, and just start testing. But my…

recommendation, regardless of what tools that you use, is to bite off a chunk you can chew at first. And you know, whether that’s just like a weekly newsletter or something like that, and test audience demand. The most important thing you can do at the beginning is, know, whether it’s a survey or doing some like sit downs with community members, etc. But really test your assumptions about

what kinds of information that people actually want. A lot of the time, a big mistake that I made as a journalist entrepreneur and I see happen a lot of times is us producing the content that we want to produce, the stories that we want to tell, not necessarily the information and stories that the audience members want and taking a bit of a…

of a jobs to be done framework. Like how can an audience member use this information to do something in their lives? So that’s the framework that we often will guide folks through is thinking through that and coming up with a product strategy that they can deliver consistently and sustainably that actually really meets a need in the community.

Eric Schurenberg (20:06.324)
You obviously advise a lot of people at this early stage of their media journey, their media ambitions. The industry is obviously at a point of transition, a transition that is not managing extremely well. You don’t have to look very far to see layoffs in newsrooms around the country and you don’t have to listen very hard.

to hear rising suspicion about the entire profession. When you find someone who has perhaps passed through that essential stage and has a product that seems to have some traction, what do you tell them about what to expect? What’s gonna happen as you try to build this into something larger?

Erin Millar (20:59.907)
I think one thing that’s important to know is that it does take a significant commitment and investment to get from I’ve got a few hundred subscribers, know, somebody’s paying attention to this other than people in my immediate circle. It’s beyond just my mom reading it now or whatever that is to a sustainable

level of audience members. And it’s totally doable. created a fund called the New Startup Fund a few years ago and invested through grants, not investments, but we provided about 150 grand per publisher to a group of 24 publishers that were starting, they were very, very early stages.

in underserved communities. And one of the reasons that we did that was because we wanted to a, obviously, we were invested in their success, but we also wanted to understand what it really took to succeed and grow to a sustainable level. All of them are still operating three years later. yeah, sustainability means a lot of different things to them. It’s not the same in some places, it’s one journalist or two journalists.

Eric Schurenberg (22:13.358)
Congratulations.

Erin Millar (22:22.403)
In another place, it’s a larger team. And so that really needs to be defined by the leader and the community. But it’s definitely been harder and taken longer for all of them. And it does take a significant amount of investment. And so that is where I see the biggest gap is in that amount of seed funding. Putting in $150,000 or $200,000 to get a business going is out of reach for a lot of individuals, right?

And we’re seeing more and more philanthropy going towards that, but it’s also not something you can just go down to the bank and secure like a standard, like small business loan for. So we’re really focused on that piece and wanting to ensure that it honors the labor of these local news leaders and journalist entrepreneurs as well. It’s not sustainable if they can’t.

you know, if they can’t be at home for dinner with their kids if they want to or take a vacation once in a while. so, yeah, so really telling them to think about that. This is a marathon, not a sprint. And, and yeah, trying to pay themselves as early as possible in the process because otherwise it’s just another form of subsidization that will ultimately burn you out in longer term.

Eric Schurenberg (23:41.994)
Mm-hmm. That’s, that’s good advice. What do people, you have mentioned in some of your talks, the reluctance that many of the smaller newsrooms have towards attracting advertising, although that is a revenue source that is traditionally supported, newsrooms of, you know, large and small. what is it that people don’t recognize about, generating advertising and, and what are the strategies that work?

Erin Millar (23:47.148)
Ahem.

Erin Millar (24:12.545)
Yeah, and I should say the I don’t actually think it’s a resistance among small outlets. I think it’s it’s actually more among nonprofit outlets where there is a resistance to advertising. And I think that it’s a I think there’s a lot of money being left on the table by the nonprofit news sector in the United States by not activating advertising and sponsorship revenue. There are ways to do it in a value aligned way.

and you are more independent when we’ve got revenue, when we’ve got diverse revenue streams, we’re not overly reliant on grants from a handful of philanthropic organizations. So I strongly believe that you should be diversifying through sponsorship and advertising and that that isn’t some kind of mission trade-off. You obviously don’t need to advertise products that are misaligned with your impact if you don’t, you don’t have to advertise for

things that harm people or whatever it is, I can come up with a set of values. But there are a lot of organizations out there that are super aligned in terms of the mission. So as an example, we work with the Palm Springs Post, which is one of our most successful publishers, started on Substack, came to us with a few hundred subscribers, and now has grown to reaching over half the households in the region that they serve and expanding into new markets in adjacent news deserts.

And the entrepreneur there, Mark Talkington, was very clear about what he didn’t want to advertise. He didn’t want to advertise some things that were misaligned with his values. But we found so many incredible community organizations that were aligned. What they wanted to see was the same thing that what he wanted to see, which is an informed and connected community. So these are arts groups that are advertising cultural activities. These are the local hospital foundation that is

you know, wanting to share the impact of the work that they’re doing and attract new volunteers, things like this. There’s a lot of, there is a lot of advertisers out there that are value aligned and sharing what they do is strengthening the community. And so that’s what I encourage people to think about. The other piece too, I’ll just say is that the reason that smaller folks don’t necessarily look to advertising is also because

Erin Millar (26:37.741)
Programmatic advertising really doesn’t work for small organizations that aren’t driving significant traffic. There is a number of solutions. So one thing that our technology offers is integrations with programmatic sources that provide a higher CPM, is the acronym for how we pay for advertising clicks.

higher value to local news organizations because they realize that those are trusted relationships that is worth more to an advertiser than getting a click on some random website of clickbait. And so we are building those partnerships so that as a small organization, you can just plug into those networks and increase your overall CPM, your overall amount that you’re making per traffic.

I would also say email is really important. Even if you don’t have a ton of website traffic, advertisers will pay a premium for advertising within email newsletters because you’re writing somebody’s inbox. It’s a very intimate…

content format, you can track how many people open it, and you can really show very concretely that your audience is engaging with that content. So we find that that can command a higher price. So these are some of the tips that I would offer in terms of thinking about how to apply sponsorship and advertising revenue for smaller organizations.

Eric Schurenberg (28:12.558)
Okay, all right, great. Another big question that startup media company has, which is the same as any startup company has, is how to build trust, name recognition, faith in an audience where you are just kind of getting going. And the whole question of trust is obviously very fraught right now, particularly in the US because of the sowing suspicion at the highest levels of government. How do you advise

Erin Millar (28:40.898)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (28:42.456)
people to build, your clients to build trust with audiences when they’re coming freshly out of the gate and they’re competing with all that noise.

Erin Millar (28:52.703)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so, you know, I’m not going to pretend that I have, I know how to fix societal, like decreasing trusted institutions and polarization. But the one thing is I’ve read more and more of the research around distrust and polarization in our societies that I find super compelling is the fact that

when we engage with our local communities, we feel more connected and trust each other. And so that’s very clear in the research. And one of the reasons that I continue to focus and lean in on local rather than other forms of content, which might be a little easier to build a company around, is because research clearly shows that when people live in communities without access to local content,

They engage more in national and international news, which fuels our distrust and polarization. We’re less likely to vote, to volunteer, to run for office. We are more likely to get sick because we don’t have access to information that actually impacts our health. And the one that really gets me is we’re less likely to trust each other, trust our neighbors.

And so there is something about access to local information that brings people around talking about the kinds of issues that are happening in our neighborhoods, not only in the Middle East or in Washington, that allows us to find common grounds, right? Even if you disagree with politics or identity politics or what have you with…

with a local parent at the, that you, you know, your kids go to the same school, you can still get together and have a conversation about the issues impacting that school, right? And find common ground. And so, and so your question was, how do we build trust? And I think really leaning into local is so important. Engaging with communities and asking them what information that they need.

Erin Millar (31:01.889)
what issues matter to them, like what are the things that they really want to see somebody reporting on and tracking. So this isn’t just crime reporting or just accountability reporting in local government. This is like really paying attention to the issues that really matter to people. There’s a long history now about a decade of really important innovation in journalism around engagement journalism. The ways that we can use surveys, use…

user groups use events to invite our audiences to inform our work and tell us like what really matters. And so there’s a lot of resources out there that you can look to. And then secondly, it’s authenticity. I think this is if we can learn anything from the fracturing and sort of the move away from trusting like big media brands towards, you know, having more trust in people like

Joe Rogan or call her daddy, whatever your politics are, it’s that we are more likely to trust people who are authentic and tell us where they come from. And so you can do that in a way that also respects the important tools of journalism, like verification, fact-based work, like all of those sorts of tools. But you gotta be a real human and be authentic about how you’re telling stories and how you’re connecting with people.

Eric Schurenberg (32:23.95)
Which raises a question about an ongoing debate in journalism about trust in institutions. So the masthead, the Texas Tribune, say, or CalMatters as opposed to the individual journalists who work there. How does that split up in your mind and how does a brand like those two I mentioned and many others that I could mention.

Erin Millar (32:32.589)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (32:53.799)
grab onto the idea of authenticity, get that kind of benefit.

Erin Millar (32:58.889)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think we have, there’s a lot of examples of ways that brands are innovatively integrating these ideas of authenticity. So like just one example, New York Times, obviously a massive brand that is constantly in the center of these debates. But if you look at their homepage every day, they have a vertical video.

where they have one of their reporters in usually not a super fancy way, you know, they’re not, it’s not like an overly produced, like you’re not in some kind of formal, you’re not in some kind of like formal studio, like you would see with broadcast news or something, talking about the issue, right? And they look like normal people and they’re explaining their work. You see that every day. So that’s just like one way to like connect with the actual people behind it.

And I do, like there is obviously a place for media brands. think especially the largest brands, like there will always be a New York Times. There will always be a role for CBC here in Canada. I think it’s the middle folks that are really gonna have a hard time breaking through. And…

And so, you know, making sure that, you you stand for values and you connect with people. But that can be through an institutional brand too. I just think it’s really important to center the people and to treat audience members with respect. Like, they’re not like, I think there’s been a lot of disrespectful work. Like I remember certain points, like I came up through a very traditional newsroom and, you know, hearing things like, I don’t read the comments, like.

they don’t know what they even need to know, things like this. There’s a lot of, I think we’ve shaken, younger folks have shaken a lot of these ideas, but there’s still very much that culture that we somehow know better than our audiences. And I don’t think that has served us as an industry or as products very well.

Eric Schurenberg (35:05.229)
I agree with you. That is something that we in the profession will have to answer for. Perhaps you can say we’re already answering for it. It’s been too much part of the culture. You’re the chair of the Canadian Journalism Collective, which distributes a grant from Google’s local news initiative. Tell us about that. What kind of companies are you looking to support there?

Erin Millar (35:14.061)
Yeah.

Erin Millar (35:28.013)
Sure, I’m actually the former chair of the Canadian Journalism Collective. This is a great story that I’m happy to share. So Canada passed a law called the Online News Act, which C18, which basically created a framework for news organizations to negotiate with big tech that…

over a licensing deal. I won’t get into the details of the law, in order basically the bottom line is that Google agreed to fund a hundred million dollars a year Canadian to Canadian news organizations for five years in order because of this legislative framework. And how it worked was that they got to, know, Google doesn’t want to figure out how to distribute funds to

to hundreds of different small organizations. And so they did a call for proposals to create a fund that a central collective that would accept that $100 million and distribute it on behalf of the different news organizations in Canada. And it was a competitive process. And it was quite a David and Goliath story actually, because there was really two proposals, one of them by the large media organizations of Canada.

that was a lobby group that represents the large newspaper chains, CBC and a lobby group that represents the large broadcasters put together a proposal and it was just assumed that they were gonna get it and a group of independent outlets that I was honored to chair put together a competing proposal and we were chosen and

So that was really ruffled a lot of feathers here in Canada. And, you know, I’m happy to explain why we were chosen. But really what we want, your question was, what are we trying to do? And what really mattered to us and why we chose to kind of put ourselves out there in a way that there was some significant blowback back was because we truly wanted to see these big tech deals.

Erin Millar (37:45.57)
benefit a true diversity, equitable group of media organizations. And what has happened again and again, you know, the first country that really put forward one of these legislative frameworks to force big tax, so Facebook or Metta and Google was Australia. And what we saw is that the large media organizations of News Corp got big checks.

And the indies, the small indies and all of the like more community owned organizations were an afterthought. And they either didn’t get money or they didn’t get money for a long time. And nobody knows, there’s no transparency around like how much flowed or you know, who got more and why. And so we’ve seen that pattern happen again and again in Canada with different policies where they’re designed for the large media companies that are in decline. And I’m talking about post media.

tour star, and they’re doing really important work. Like I’m not suggesting that they shouldn’t get funding, but not at the expense of where we’re seeing growth and where we’re seeing growth in actual local news markets that need it is among small independently owned organizations, digital organizations. And so we wanted to see this fund be distributed in such a way that there was transparency, that there was representative governance.

that there was representation from a whole bunch of different groups. It wasn’t just going to be controlled by a few. That there’s transparency around who’s getting the money and that it was done really efficiently. So we wanted to see it done really well because some of the other programs that have been administered by some of the other lobby groups have not been done very well. So these were some of the basic principles and Google agreed with our approach. And so I spent a year

setting that up and that was a wild experience creating a fund in a regulated environment and once the money was flowing and we had elected a full representative board and hired a fantastic executive director I put up the old mission accomplished banner and took a little bit of my life back. So but yeah now I’m just a member.

Eric Schurenberg (39:56.91)
Well, congratulations. Okay. Got it. Well, congratulations. That is fantastic. Now, let me end by asking you to paint us a picture of the future. You clearly are betting, you know, the, because of your experience and perhaps because of your preferences on the growth in this kind of

Erin Millar (40:05.336)
Thank you.

Eric Schurenberg (40:26.456)
thousand flowers of local news, not only because that’s where it’s needed most, but because that’s where a lot of the energy is. So paint us a picture of the future in which we have legacy, giant legacy platforms coexisting with this kind of effervescence of small newsrooms.

Erin Millar (40:50.185)
Yeah, so, yeah, the future that I see is a much has a lot more diverse ownership. You know, people are consuming more news than they’ve ever been consuming. We’re looking for it online every day. There’s definitely news fatigue and avoidance happening. But we see that more at the international and national level. There’s demand and a need for people to connect with information about their communities and what’s happening.

That’s what I truly believe in and if we can do that in a way. And so the future that I see is there will continue to be some large companies, of course, but they’re going to control less and less of the local news. And they are, this is just what’s happening. Like this is not me projecting forward. This is just literally what the trends are right now. Like if you look at the mergers and acquisitions within the local news thing in the last three years,

What it always was, was consolidation where the large companies like Gannett, Alden were consolidating small organizations that were independently owned. That is not where most of the activity is happening anymore. We’re seeing local organizations buying. There’s a lot of activity. the percentage that the top 10 news companies own is now down to 25 % of all of the local news organizations. I’m talking about the US market here. So 75 % of

Local news sources are now community locally owned small chains. And I would also say the other thing I just want to say is just how fast independent digital is growing. Like we hit a tipping point and it is really exciting. we’re seeing, I was just trying to look at the number. I was looking at yesterday exactly how much grew last year.

in terms of the independent digital. yeah, it’s growing a heck of a lot faster than the print small newspapers are closing, which is really exciting in terms of percentages. So I just, I see that all happening. And then the last thing that I would just say is I want to challenge this idea that the demand for local news and the gaps in the market are all in places that can’t afford to pay in support for journalism. So if you look at

Erin Millar (43:13.859)
where the biggest need is per capita in the United States and you rank the states by access to local news per capita. The top 10 states that where the need is is clearest include Texas, Florida, Arizona, California. This represents 43 % of the population in the 10 top countries. These are also the fastest growing and most diverse parts of the United States. These are the places that are really

shaping America’s political and cultural future, right? Like these are not places that we should be thinking about as, you know, rural backwaters that will never be able, are, you know, dying communities that will never be able to support this. Like there is real opportunities in filling these gaps from a business perspective and that’s a

Eric Schurenberg (44:06.062)
Great. Well, Aaron, thank you. That’s an optimistic note to leave on. And I appreciate it. You’re spending the time with us and I appreciate what you’re doing with IndieGraph. Good luck.

Erin Millar (44:16.195)
Thanks so much, Eric. I really appreciate your time.

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Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Aug 6 2025

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