A data-rich view of how (and what) local news is working on Substack

This piece was written in partnership with Substats, a newly launched analytics product that tracks Substack publishers. Read more on our relationship with Substats at the bottom of this piece and learn more about the tool with a special offer.

A woman in Sebastopol, California wanted to support her local newspaper. Her husband already had a subscription to The Sebastopol Times, but she wanted to pay for one herself.

There was a problem: she found the Substack signup process intimidating. The auto-renewal confused her. She didn't understand why her credit card statement would say "Substack" instead of "Sebastopol Times."

So she did what made sense to her. She called the office, asked if she could just write a check, drove downtown, and hand-delivered it.

Dale Dougherty, the paper's co-publisher, took the check, thanked her, went into the Substack backend, and manually switched her account from free to paid.

This is local news in 2026 – on Substack and IRL. 

Four years after launching, the Sebastopol Times – a Substack newsletter named in honor of the print newspaper that once served the community – has about 1,400 paying subscribers from a total base of 5,700 readers. That's a 24.5% conversion rate. For comparison, national focused news Substacks typically convert around 3% of their audience to paid.

At $60 a customer per year, it makes up the lion’s share of annual revenue that Dougherty told me is about a $100K P&L. That’s enough for Dougherty's partner Laura Hagar Rush to draw a salary, cover a small office, and keep a town of 7,500 people informed. They cover school board meetings, planning commission decisions, and what it actually feels like to live in Sebastopol. That last point is something Dougherty says the big regional papers never really captured, even when they existed.

"The large metro dailies covered a broad geographic region," Dougherty told me. "That was their strength and then their downfall. They may not cover the town unless the shit hits the fan, but they don't inform people of what it feels like to live there."

We analyzed data about local news publishers generated by Substats – a new comparative analytic tool focused on Substack. What we found was that Sebastopol's numbers were part of a pattern.

The smaller and more local the coverage, the higher the conversion rate climbs.

First, some notes on methodology and data. Substats organizes publicly available information about Substack subscriber counts and engagement data. They then apply a proprietary formula to estimate paid subscribers and revenue, which has gone through dozens of iterations until it matches publicly reported revenue numbers — within about a 15% margin of error. Dale Dougherty was able to confirm his actual numbers were actually a bit higher but directionally in-line with Substats calculations, which gave us confidence to move forward with the caveat that all paid subscriber & revenue metrics are estimated.

We used Claude Code to sort through the data for trends and identified a cohort of 51 local news and culture publications that showed standout growth. They split into three distinct categories, each with its own conversion dynamics:

Substats, has been tracking the Substack ecosystem for several years. When we showed their founder this analysis, he said he wasn’t surprised and said: "Interest in local news is inversely correlated with distance radius. My interest in Silver Lake neighborhood news is greater than my interest in Los Angeles news. When you reduce the distance radius around the reader, you get higher interest — and willingness to pay."

The Sebastopol Times publishes a story every day. Monday brings the events calendar. Sunday is a roundup of odds and ends. In between: school board meetings, town council decisions, planning commission hearings. Rush, who was a Bay Area weekly reporter before this, does the bulk of the reporting. 

Compare those to mid-size markets:

As market size increases, conversion rates drop. London Centric, with 34,000 subscribers, has seven times Sebastopol's audience but makes barely more money. Charlotte Ledger generates more revenue through scale and premium pricing ($129/year), but converts at less than a quarter of Sebastopol's rate.

Why does the tiny town model work?

Dougherty thinks it's about identity, not just information scarcity. "The people who live here, chose to live here," he said. "They self-identify as 'quirky.'" He pointed me to a recent holiday essay he published that captures the town: “Our Thanksgiving Quirky (Ryhmes with Turkey). 

The paper recently published 13 personal essays from readers — "something in your life, could be anything" — as a way, Dougherty said, to help neighbors get to know each other.

Comments are limited to paid subscribers. "People have signed up just to make a comment," Dougherty said. Retention is in the high 90s. The email open rate is 80%, easily double what most national newsletters see.

"This is something that should propagate," Dougherty told me. The model of one or two journalists covering a small town. "But the consistency to do it and do it well — that's key."

The pattern is different from tiny-town news but equally powerful. Team fandom is tribal, geographic, and intensely personal. According to research from Comcast, American sports fans spend over 11 hours per week consuming sports content. The average household spends $1,122 annually on sports, with dedicated fans spending up to $4,785.

Some of that money is now being spent on Substack:

Local sports coverage has disappeared from newspapers. The Washington Post shuttering their legendary sports department last week is the most recent example but metro dailies around the country have gotten slimmer or disappeared.

Local coverage is shrinking among national aggregators too. The Athletic, acquired by The New York Times in 2022, has pruned lines of local coverage in favor of national interest. Four years ago when Will Sammon moved to become the second beat reporter for the New York Mets, no one took over that role for the smaller-market Milwaukee Brewers. 

So it’s no surprise to see this trend emerging on Substack.

Consider what Detroit Football Network provides that ESPN  doesn't: Lions practice reports, player availability updates, contract analysis specific to Detroit's salary cap situation, local beat writer insight, connections with team personnel. Rogers isn't competing with The Athletic's national NFL coverage. He's filling a completely different need.

Not all local coverage follows the tiny-town or sports beat pattern. City guides —especially for international destinations — demonstrate that local expertise can scale in surprising ways.

Meg Zimbeck's Paris BY MOUTH makes an estimated $567,000 a year — by far the highest local revenue in our dataset. She has 108,000 total subscribers and 3,240 paying at $50/year to read her take on the best eating and drinking in Paris. That's a 3% conversion rate — right in line with national publications — but at a much higher scale than you'd expect for hyperlocal content.

What's happening here? Paris BY MOUTH isn't just serving Parisians. It's serving tourists, aspiring expats, and people who love Paris from afar. Zimbeck has lived in Paris for years, knows the restaurant owners, has refined taste, and filters out tourist traps. She's not reporting Paris news; she's selling insider access to a city.

The FOUND network is building this model at scale. Founded by Eater and Curbed alumni Josh Albertson and Lockhart Steele, FOUND operates in LA, San Francisco, and Miami. Each city generates around $34,000 annually with identical structures: $80/year pricing, ~13,000 total subscribers, ~400 paying. They've created a template and stamped it across markets.

When we announced The Independent Journalism Atlas in December, we framed it as infrastructure for a journalism ecosystem being built in real time. We're watching multiple different models emerge, each working in specific contexts with specific constraints:

Each model solves an information need that exists in 2026. But they're also not comprehensive. They're fragments of what local journalism used to be, reconstituted in forms that can survive in the current creator economy — and focused on just the Substack platform when most publishers and audiences are living in a poly-platform existence.

The larger metro gaps remain. Can a city of 500,000 or a metro area of 2 million be served by solo practitioners or small teams making $75K-200K per year? What gets covered? What falls through the cracks?

Court reporting that requires daily courthouse presence? Education reporting that needs reporters embedded in multiple school districts? Investigative work that takes months of unpaid research? Regional transportation planning? State-level policy analysis?

Maybe that coverage gets picked up by nonprofit newsrooms and academic institutions. Maybe it happens through networks of independent journalists who coordinate coverage across a metro area—a model we haven't seen emerge yet but could, like the recently announced LA Local project.

Justin Bank is co-founder of the Independent Journalism Atlas and a frequent contributor to Project C. All data in this piece comes from Substats.io and was analyzed in January-February 2026.

About our partnership with SubStats: SubStats provided the Substack publisher data used in this analysis as part of an editorial collaboration. Project C maintains full editorial independence in our analysis and conclusions. SubStats is a newly launched analytics platform that tracks subscriber counts and revenue estimates for Substack publications. Learn more at substats.io. Use checkout code “ATLAS” for a 20% discount.