The problem: nobody's watching city hall anymore

When a town's newspaper dies, nobody shows up to the school board meeting. Nobody reads the zoning agenda. Nobody tells you your taxes are about to go up.

That's happening all over the country. About 3,500 U.S. newspapers have closed since 2005. Roughly 50 million Americans now have little or no local news. More than 1,000 counties don't have even one full-time local journalist. Newspaper ad money fell about 80% between 2005 and 2020.

The papers didn't die because people stopped caring. They died because a small town can't pay for a newsroom anymore.

In my words: "There is no freedom without a free press."

Our solution: one local editor plus a team of AI helpers

Daily News gives one person in each town the newsroom their paper used to have.

1. The AI team does the legwork. It reads every council and school board agenda, drafts short stories in plain English, and links each one back to the public document it came from. It also runs the website, the email newsletter, and the app.
2. The local editor does the journalism. They decide what's news, edit or kill any story, and put their name on the masthead. Many spend under an hour a day on it and keep their day job.
3. Sensitive stories always wait for a human. That covers anything with legal risk, a police story that names someone, and every obituary. If a fact can't be checked against the record, the story is held, not guessed.

Every town gets its own website and Substack newsletter. On phones, there's one Daily News app for Apple and Android. Readers pick their town and get their local paper, and the app is built to hold thousands of local papers in one place. Coverage starts with local government and grows into schools, high school sports, business, music, art, culture, theater and other community events, obituaries, and classifieds.

Traction: real editors, real papers, paying today

Since we launched on Oct 15, 2026, here's where things stand:

1. 97 people applied to run a local paper; we approved 90.
2. 18 editors are paying us, for $7,337 a month. The rest are being approved and billed.
3. 11 papers publishing, with 2,013 stories in the last 30 days. They run from San Jose to Omaha to Tampa, and our team runs a handful more ourselves.

We also ran a price test. Editors picked $299/$1,999 over $300/$2,000, so that's what every new applicant sees now.

Business model: editors pay us, and readers pay the paper

There are two plans. Editors can switch from the first to the second at any time.

1. Share a paper: $299/month. We own and run the site, app, and newsletter. The editor keeps all paper revenue up to $299 a month, which covers their fee. Above that, we split it 50/50.
2. Own a paper: $1,999/month. The editor owns the masthead and readers outright and keeps all revenue up to $10,000 a month. After that, 20% comes to us.

Papers earn money from reader subscriptions (we suggest $7.50 a month or $75 a year, and each paper sets its own price), local ads, and paid listings like obituaries, classifieds, and jobs. On a shared paper, 40 subscribers at $7.50 cover the editor's fee.

Today almost all of our revenue is editor fees. Reader and ad revenue are just starting ($14/month in reader revenue so far).

Market: thousands of towns with no paper

There are about 10,263 U.S. towns and cities with more than 1,000 people. Our long-term goal is a daily paper with a local editor in 10,000+ of them. We picked 3,500 as our first target, one for each paper lost since 2005.

Competition

Others are trying too — nonprofit newsrooms, chains like Patch, Nextdoor, Axios Local in bigger cities, and AI-only sites with no human in charge.

What’s different: a real neighbor runs each paper, every story links to the public record, and the paper aims to fund itself with readers and local ads — not a grant or a big-city ad budget.

Why now

1. AI can read a long agenda packet and draft a clean summary in minutes. Tools for one town cost about $200/month.
2. Citizen Portal already transcribes public meetings at national scale (2M+ meetings), so each new town starts with its local government on the record.
3. Readers are already on Substack, app stores, TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. We meet them there.
4. We're partnering with Polco, which works with local governments across the country. For 30 years, Polco and its NRC resident surveys have worked with about 2,000 local governments. About 350 cities generate engagement results on Polco every year, its panel has 400,000 verified, registered residents, and its GPAL data covers 40,000 jurisdictions with 500+ indicators going back 15+ years. Our local editors and their AI helpers are working toward using that data to cover their towns accurately, and any Daily News story can carry a Polco survey, poll or budget simulation, with verified, privacy-protected responses.

Vision

A daily local paper in every American town, run by someone who lives there. We think a thousand small, self-funding papers adds up to a major media company. More important, it means every town hall has someone watching again.

My background is Ancestry.com, and the playbook here is the same. In my words: "take a vast public record nobody has organized, make it searchable, and build the audience that needs it."

The round and use of funds

We're raising on a post-money SAFE with a $6.5M valuation cap; the first $200K invested gets an early-bird $5M cap (Regulation Crowdfunding / Community Round on Wefunder).

Plain English for investors: A SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) isn't stock yet. You put money in now, and it turns into shares later, usually when the company raises a bigger priced round. The valuation cap is the highest company value your money converts at. A $6.5M cap means you'd convert as if the company were worth no more than $6.5M, even if the next round prices it higher.

What we'll use the money for:

1. Paying Citizen Portal to build Daily News's technology: the website, the AI system behind every paper, and the Daily News mobile app for Apple and Android
2. Paying Citizen Portal for 20-year rights to its content across all Daily News local papers
3. Launching and supporting local editors in new cities
4. Recruiting editors through the Polco and Citizen Portal communities
5. Bringing Polco's resident data into our editors' tools

A portion of the funds goes to Citizen Portal under our agreement with them, which is related-party: Paul Allen is behind both companies, and Citizen Portal is the majority shareholder of Freedom Portal, Inc. Paying Citizen Portal for engineering and content means Daily News can run without a large full-time staff. Amounts and terms will be set out in our Form C.

Our goal is to reach roughly $1M in annual recurring revenue and hundreds of local editors, then raise a stronger next round. That's a goal, not a promise.