Michele's List
Building blocks in the emerging local news ecosystem

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Statistics
Unique monthly visitors

56,104
E-newsletter

  • Yes, a single newsletter
E-newsletter subscribers

3400
Facebook followers

11,560
Twitter followers

5972
Instagram followers

2290
You Tube

N/A
Revenue

  • $101,000 - $250,000
Ad products

  • Traditional Web display advertising sold directly by your organization
  • Sponsored content or native advertising
  • Business directory or shopping site
  • Social media services

Paywall

  • No
Distribution

  • Direct to web/mobile
Total personnel/contributor FTE

10
Date of most recent publisher update

06/04/2019
Last Publisher Update

  • 2019-06-04 15:46:33 UTC
Cary Citizen
North Carolina
Cary Citizen

CaryCitizen publishes daily community news for the fast-growing town of Cary, NC  in the region known as "The Triangle."  Stories are mostly written by a full-time writer with additional content submitted by local citizens. Other lines of business include festival event management, film & video production, photography services, and a quarterly printed downtown map. The site won a Knight Digital Media Center fellowship in news entrepreneurship in 2011.

Who is in charge?

Hal Goodtree

Job title

publisher

City

Cary

State

NC

Zip code

27511

Year launched

2009

Tax status

  • S Corp

Geographic scope

  • Large city or Metro area

Population of coverage area

170,000

Scope of coverage

  • General news or a number of topics that are not necessarily closely related to each other

Primary focus

  • Current news and events

Topics of coverage

  • Entertainment & arts
  • Events in coverage area
  • Food
  • Government
  • Sports & recreation

Watchdog journalism?

  • Yes, infrequently

Facebook link

www.facebook.com/carycitizen

Site Twitter handle

@CaryCitizen

Effective engagement practice

To engage our audience we publish a newsletter to our free subscribers and the open rate is 33%.
Second, we publish all of our stories to facebook. The average story post is seen by over 1100 followers.
Then we publish additional points of interest to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and that has worked in terms of growing our audience.
As more and more people get their news from mobile and social media- these avenues are very beneficial for attracting new readers and pushing them to our website.

Revenue challenges

Now that many small businesses are using Google ads and promoted facebook postings, they think they can do without any other outside ad platforms. It has become MORE challenging instead of less challenging during the last 3 years.