The Importance of Local Media to Boost Startups in Rising Cities
In recent weeks, several major media organizations, including Verizon (Huffington Post, Yahoo, AOL), Buzzfeed and Gannett, the owners of more than 120 local media organizations across the country, announced thousands of newsroom layoffs in an attempt to reduce costs.
It’s the Gannett cuts that worry me the most. As reported by Slate from a study from researchers at the University of North Carolina, “We have lost about 20 percent of local newspapers in the United States since 2004, and at least 900 communities now are without any local news source in that same time frame.”
Now more than ever our society needs objective news gathering and fact checking from both national and local news sources that provide citizens with independent and diverse reporting and is representative of what’s happening across the United States. I say this as both a concerned citizen and from perhaps, a more unexpected vantage point, an investor at Revolution, an investment firm that invests in companies across the U.S. Our firm is built on the idea that startups can start and scale anywhere and five years ago we launched our Rise of the Rest bus tours to shine a spotlight on entrepreneurial activity in places like Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Chattanooga and many more.
In each of the 38 cities we’ve visited on our bus tours, our team works with the local media to highlight local startups and the entrepreneurs behind them. It is a very important element of how we engage the local communities and shine a spotlight on what’s happening in innovation communities. We often hear from the winners of our Rise of the Rest tour pitch competitions that winning our pitch competition was more important to spotlight the company locally than any of the national or industry recognition that also accompanies the winning investment.
I believe this to be the case because local media goes a long way to legitimize local businesses and gives credibility to young entrepreneurs in the two areas they need most when building a business: investment capital and talent. Large angel investors and family offices who are looking to invest in local startups are more likely to discover these companies in their hometown paper than in TechCrunch or Venture Beat. Having these businesses highlighted and profiled in a local paper can elevate them and provide awareness to the all-important local angel investor groups.
Stories in local media outlets about rising startups can also aid in talent recruitment, which we have found to be a consistent hurdle for high growth companies. In addition to the legitimacy media coverage offers, it can help compel job seekers to take a risk and explore employment at a new company once they have insight into the startup’s founders, leadership, and business ambition.
Lastly, all politics is local. Local city councils, zoning commissions, school boards and other local government organizations are the ones to decide on policies affecting businesses and having detailed coverage of these organizations is critical for startups’ operations. Many startups in rising cities are building Third Wave businesses in industries like healthcare, energy, agriculture, where understanding local or statewide regulation and policy is critical to the success of a growing startup. If you look at tech titans like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and many others, local political and media strategy has been an important element in the growth of the business and one in which they would have likely invested earlier if they understood the stark ramifications of these policies on their business.
I am fearful that this decline will negatively affect startups and that is an unfortunate outcome. The best thing we can do is support local media outlets by subscribing and take a minute to read about the next generation of companies in your communities that are creating jobs.
