[Pocket PDF] Caprock Local Newsletter Business Plan
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Imagine Elisabeth at the feed store in Putnam, Texas, population sixty-eight, listening to a rancher named Dale read out a certified letter. A transmission company wants a corridor across his north pasture, and the letter calls it a good faith negotiation. Nobody in the store knows what the letter means. The county paper will cover the outcome, never the part where Dale could still do something. Elisabeth has a political science degree, a MacBook, four hundred dollars, and a strong belief that independent journalism should answer to readers and to nobody else.
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Description
Elisabeth’s first idea was the one most independent journalists start with. Build an audience, sell advertising, take sponsorships, keep the reader free. Run through the numbers and that model pays almost nothing until the audience is very large, which puts real revenue somewhere past month twenty. The targets here are month three and month twelve. It also hands leverage to the advertiser. A pipeline company or a wind developer buying ad space is a company with an opinion about your next story. The one thing Elisabeth said she wanted, editorial independence, was the first thing an ad-funded newsletter business plan takes away.
The advertising trap
So the ad model was cut. The Momo Hero method has a fixed order for fixing this: change the product line before you change anything else.
The niche that made the numbers move
A political scientist who wants to be an independent journalist is competing with every national outlet. The niche was narrowed hard: independent reporting on rural Texas, focused on land, water, energy and local government. Transmission lines and pipelines crossing private land. Groundwater district rules and low-turnout elections. The ERCOT grid build-out. Property tax. It is the world Elisabeth lives in, it has a large and growing set of paying readers, and it has almost no independent full-time coverage.
From one revenue line to three
The business was renamed Caprock Report, after the West Texas landform, and the model changed from one revenue line to three: individual subscriptions, a low-cost annual reference, and an institutional licence for the organizations that operate in rural Texas. The mix is the point. No single payer can set the agenda.
