How a Solopreneur Is Rebuilding Local News Trust (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: So Brandon Anderson, you're joining us from Newburgh, Oregon. I read that you actually started your company in the birthing suite where your baby was being born.

[00:00:08] Speaker 2: Yeah.

[00:00:09] Speaker 1: So the first question I just have for you, Brandon, is like, are you still married?

[00:00:12] Speaker 2: Yeah, somehow, someway. Yeah, we, my wife and I joke that we had two kids that day and they aren't twins. We were waiting for our first kid for a while. So while we were killing time, I thought, you know what, what better time than the present?

[00:00:27] Speaker 1: Is your wife like having contractions and helping you think of venture names? What's happening?

[00:00:32] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. We were just kind of, anything to distract in that moment is gold. So that's where we were landing as well. You know, what about this? What about this? And yeah, sure enough.

[00:00:43] Speaker 1: Forget Silicon Valley, we should all start companies out of birthing suites.

[00:00:47] Speaker 2: You know what, I think that we're onto something here.

[00:00:50] Speaker 1: And do you consider yourself a solopreneur?

[00:00:53] Speaker 2: Yeah, through and through. I feel so tied to it, just because it, from the top to bottom, everything that I'm doing is, is me. And it's been me and a suite of tech tools. But it's, I do feel like when I come into this office and I start working, this comes down to me trying to figure this out as best as I can to serve the community.

[00:01:14] Speaker 1: You're a hyper local media organization. So doing very local journalism, it, which is, it's so nice to meet you, Brandon, because I feel like everything we read is that local journalism is dead and you look alive.

[00:01:27] Speaker 2: I'm trying my best to look alive, at least. Yeah.

[00:01:30] Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. But talk about that, because we do, I feel like the, I'm a journalist. I've been journalism for a long time. And I feel like we always talk about media as a dying business. It's been dying as long as I've been in it, and it's still kicking. How do you look at that?

[00:01:44] Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, it's, you know, not so much that it's dying as much as it's reshaping, but it's really difficult when you look at the larger media landscape to see these, what I would call tanker ships. It's hard for them to pivot and to turn in the middle of the ocean, right? I consider myself riding on a jet ski. It's really easy for me to pivot. I might not be able to make it across the ocean, but that's why I focus on hyper local. I can stay near the coast. So that's where I'm starting to see this shift happen is that the, you know, trust in media is fractured. There's a lot of dialogue that's happening at these higher levels, but on the local level, people still need to know what's happening down the street. And that's been Newsberg's whole credo from the start is answering the community's questions.

[00:02:25] Speaker 1: Is it very like Parks and Recreation meets the office? One person?

[00:02:32] Speaker 2: Yeah, I describe it that way all the time. If you watch Parks and Rec, and you see a Shauna Mallway tweet, who's sitting in the corner asking questions, that is actually me showing up to city council meetings and to our actual Parks and Rec meetings with my little reporter badge in my notebook asking questions. Yeah.

[00:02:49] Speaker 1: And what keeps you going? Because I mean, it's not easy to be a solopreneur, I think.

[00:02:56] Speaker 2: It's important work. I've worked at several different careers. I studied journalism, graduated into a difficult industry, and pretty quickly found my way out of it. But the love of it never left. And what I find day in and day out is not only building a company that supports the community where I'm living and where I'm raising my family, but also supporting the businesses that are trying to make it work here. Shouting out the high schoolers who are doing cool things. All of that is rebuilding community bonds in a time where community bonds are increasingly breaking.

[00:03:30] Speaker 1: There's that thing, and you ask a lot of people, like, do you trust medicine? They're like, no. And then you ask them, do you trust your doctor? And they're like, yes, I trust my doctor. And then same thing with news, like media, people be like, do you trust the media? No way. Do you trust your, you know, X, Y, Z journalist? Yeah, sure.

[00:03:46] Speaker 2: A hundred percent. And there's stories that are still coming out, research stories that are coming out, reflecting that exact same thing. And I think the big reason why is because we do show up. You know, you, I think a lot of people would recognize me as their local reporter.

[00:03:59] Speaker 1: So you're doing this all by yourself. You don't have like a staff of reporters. You are your own reporter, editor, CEO, all the things. Selling your own advertising, everything.

[00:04:08] Speaker 2: That's right.

[00:04:09] Speaker 1: Oh, wow. And this is a sustainable business.

[00:04:13] Speaker 2: I would say that it's exceeded any expectations that I've had to the point where this is my full time and has been my full time job for nearly two years now.

[00:04:22] Speaker 1: I read that you want to bring print back. You can start printing. Yeah. I mean, that's one where it's like you say you're a jet ski. I'm like, maybe you're a horse.

[00:04:32] Speaker 2: Yeah, there's...

[00:04:34] Speaker 1: But print seems to be back. Print actually seems to be back.

[00:04:37] Speaker 2: There's something really real. There's a lot of stuff that's happening around the Internet that people don't feel safe with their data. Social media is increasingly being seen as a challenging way to consume news and information. But most importantly, I have a demographic here in Newburgh of 26,000 people, an extra 10,000 in the neighboring community of Dundee, and many of which have said we kind of just want to read the paper again.

[00:05:02] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:05:03] Speaker 2: And so I've been testing it for a little bit and printing my own little small newsletter to see if people would be interested.

[00:05:11] Speaker 1: Let's see. Oh, God. And... I like the newsletter so much more when it's not in my email is what I'm realizing. That's it. That's also my spot.

[00:05:19] Speaker 2: I dropped these off for free. I wanted it to look like a traditional newspaper, right? But I have a little locally made comic on the bottom. So people just want a classic reading experience again, I think.

[00:05:30] Speaker 1: Okay. Well, print aside, how does technology help you scale your business that you've been able to do this now, you know, run your own successful business for a year and a half, two years?

[00:05:39] Speaker 2: Yeah. I couldn't have done this without scaling technology, ironically, considering the print conversation. But there are so many things that I have been able to do thanks to the use of technology to speed up the process, right? I don't have to go to every city council meeting. They publish them on YouTube the next day, and then I can listen to it at 1.5 speed, which helps me get things done a little bit faster to report on that. Video conferencing, just like we're doing right now over Zoom. This is something that normally I'd have to drive across town or drive to another town in order to sit down and have an interview with somebody to get a face-to-face interaction where you can really get, as you know, the best interviews because you actually can read people's faces. Rise in AI. I will never use AI as a content generation, but for copy editing, copy editing is a set of rules, right? And so I worked with a person who works in journalism and AI to develop a copy editing prompt so that it will touch the stories and edit for AP, but it will not change the content, which is the most important thing. All of these things would have been wholly impossible if I were trying to do it all by myself. I would be able to publish one story per week, and right now I'm averaging six to eight stories per week.

[00:06:53] Speaker 1: That's good. You need six to eight if you're going to do a weekly newsletter.

[00:06:56] Speaker 2: That's what I'm saying.

[00:06:57] Speaker 1: I love that you're Zooming. It doesn't seem like a huge town, Newburgh, Oregon. Is it a huge town?

[00:07:02] Speaker 2: Yeah, we're not that big.

[00:07:04] Speaker 1: But you're Zooming because you don't need to go down a mile.

[00:07:07] Speaker 2: Even going across town can take 10 minutes, and when you're running this lean, let me tell you, 10 minutes means a lot.

[00:07:13] Speaker 1: It's so funny because when you talk about your business, you keep saying we, but it's I. As you said, the business is you from start to finish, from head to toe. But why do you say we?

[00:07:24] Speaker 2: It's me and Newsburg in this together forever. I do feel like Newsburg is kind of a child of mine. I've worked with this thing for the past three years trying to build something that I didn't know could ever exist again.

[00:07:39] Speaker 1: Well, I mean, you birthed it in a birthing suite as your wife was birthing a child.

[00:07:43] Speaker 2: There's something to it, right? There's something to that, yeah.

[00:07:46] Speaker 1: Yeah, local journalism is so important. There's stories that get to a state or federal level or a national or international level, and you're like, wait, somebody at a local news organization actually covered that 18 months before it got big.

[00:07:58] Speaker 2: It's so kind that you say that. Another thing that keeps me going is what I would call foundational reporting. What we report here by going to those city council meetings eventually spin off into larger stories that eventually can spin off into statewide. Without that foundation, the top of the journalism starts to crumble a little bit as well because they don't have that baseline. It's very cool work. It's something that we're hoping to replicate and find a model that is easy for people to start up in their own communities. Hopefully, we can continue bringing local journalism back.

[00:08:31] Speaker 1: Yeah, I hope you can. Local journalism is so important, and what you do is very important. I want to say on that point, there's so much to be done with schools.

[00:08:38] Speaker 2: There is a gal at a local elementary school whose mom reads Newsburg, and so she started her own called The Weekly Watchman, and she sends it to me every week. I'm going to do a story on her.

[00:08:52] Speaker 1: Hire that kid, but not until she's of working age because that would be a scandal for you at Newburg Media. All right, so nice to meet you, Brandon.