No. 01·June 8, 2026·2 min read
You Are an Audience Platform
A local publisher isn't a newspaper that sells ads. It's the most trusted audience in its market, and it monetizes almost none of what that's worth.
Field NotesBuilt Revenue
Field Notes
Dispatches on rebuilding local-media revenue, from inside the operation.
No. 02·June 11, 2026·7 min read
Own the Everyday
Habit, not headlines, builds an audience. Weather, scores, school closings: the unglamorous stuff is what makes you the place people already are.
No. 03·June 15, 2026·6 min read
A Hundred Years of Data
A century of records and a live read on what the whole market pays attention to. That's first-party intelligence the rest of the economy is starving for, and most publishers don't sell it at all.
No. 04·June 16, 2026·6 min read
Every Business in Town Already Knows You
You have relationships with local businesses that a software company would spend millions to fake. You're using them to sell the cheapest thing you've got.
No. 05·June 22, 2026·6 min read
Trust Is the Scarcest Thing Online
On an internet you can't believe anymore, a name people trust is what makes everything else pay. Including with the machines now deciding what's true.
No. 06·June 29, 2026·6 min read
The Competition Isn't Local
The publisher one county over was never the threat. A dollar split with a neighbor stays in local journalism. A dollar sent to the platforms never comes back.
No. 07·July 6, 2026·5 min read
The Revenue Stack
No single line saves local journalism. The durable model is a stack: habit, ads, readers, intelligence, services, verticals, events, and retention, each doing a different job.
No. 08·July 9, 2026·8 min read
Build, Buy, or Partner
Some shops rent everything and bend the operation around someone else's tools. Some build everything and quietly become software companies with one customer. Both are defaults. The skill is the call: build, buy, or partner, one system at a time.
No. 09·July 21, 2026·7 min read
Build It Like You Mean It
A funded newsroom isn't a cause to rally around. It's a business someone runs well. What that takes, and an ask.
No. 10·July 23, 2026·8 min read
The Machine Can't Go Ask
A study said an AI beat the journalists three to one. The bigger story is what it's already doing to the ad desk, the back office, and the agency work — and the one line it can't cross in any of them.
No. 11·July 29, 2026·3 min read
I Do Worry About the Ethics
The water is real. The power is real. The lost jobs are real. And I still lie awake over something else entirely — the one cost I can actually do something about.
No. 12·July 30, 2026·3 min read
The Work Was Never the Value
Most media companies aren't behind on AI because they won't use it. They're behind because they aim it at the wrong half — speeding up the busywork instead of deleting it — and their own people are wired to keep it that way.
No. 13·August 10, 2026·10 min read
The Organization Has to Change
AI does not just make the old revenue organization faster. Once software can carry the repeatable work, the organization itself has to be redesigned.
— Field Notes, by email
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Field Notes publishes one essay a week — how local journalism gets funded, what to stop doing, what to build, and in what order. Read along as it runs, or take the whole thing at once.