16 Years In, Potomac Local Runs on a Paywall and AI

Uriah Kiser has covered Northern Virginia since 2010, longer than most people in local media have been paying attention to it. In this conversation he explains why he started when he did, why he waited years to add a paywall, and how AI helped him after he nearly sold the business.

From TV to selling ads at a newspaper

Uriah started in television, working at several small stations before landing at NBC in Washington. He grew up in Northern Virginia, which is a transient place full of military families who get stationed for four years and leave. He is one of the rare people who stayed.

He liked TV, but he wanted to understand "how do we make money at this? Who pays for all this?" An ad sales job opened at the Manassas Journal Messenger in the town where he grew up, and he took it. He had never sold anything. His territory was simple: walk around, meet business owners, make relationships.

That is the lesson he kept. Whatever you are selling, it comes down to the relationships you have with people.

Chasing fire trucks with a police scanner

The news bug pulled him back. A reporter job opened at another paper in the same regional group, and he had never written for a newspaper. TV writing is short and lets the video drive the story. Newspaper writing is longer.

He turned out to be good at it. The group figured out he was good at chasing fire trucks, cop cars and house fires, so they gave him a laptop and a police scanner and told him to hang out in his car and email in news and photos. The pay was worse than ad sales. The freedom, he says, was the life of kings.

When the paper started shutting down

Then the paper did what many did over the past 15 years. Layoffs came first, then the press closed and the paper was printed in Richmond and trucked up 90 miles every day on a flatbed. He had delivered that newspaper as a kid. He decided it was not long for this world.

So he started Potomac Local in 2010 to keep local news alive where he grew up. The newspaper closed two years later.

Meat and potatoes, plus something sweet

Uriah thinks of the coverage as a dinner plate. The meat and potatoes are city council, school board, taxes and the mayor. The sweet and light part is new restaurants, business features and weekend events. You give people what they want to eat, and some of what you think they should be eating.

His bread and butter is local: why were the cops on your street last night, what is happening at your kids' school, what new restaurants are open. He rarely writes about the president or Congress, even though Washington is next door.

He is the only full-time employee. The rest of the team is freelancers who care about the area: community members, students and retirees. Since 2022 he has also brought in interns from high school career and technical education programs, who apply through a Google form.

The paywall: wait until you have an audience

For years everything was free. Then Uriah spent all of 2017 weighing the move. His fear was that you give people a free bus ride for nearly 10 years, then stick your hand out for money.

Some readers were angry. But the majority of his revenue now comes from the paywall. About 500 members pay roughly $100 a year, and 98% of the site stays free. The paywall covers the detailed, exclusive stories, the ones that took real research or hours in a long meeting.

Members see fewer ads, not zero. Those ads are sold locally to mom and pop businesses, which he treats as local content. It is also a sales line: some of the people seeing your ad are paying to be there.

He is also clear that he could not have grown this way if he had started with a paywall. His early audience came from breaking news like house fires and crashes, which goes viral but rarely brings people back.

How the list went from 3,000 to 20,000

The newsletter is a plain RSS feed of whatever ran on the site that day. Uriah calls it boring, and says it needs an upgrade. It started in 2011 and by January 2020 had only about 3,000 subscribers.

Then he tried a different wall. A tool he used briefly let people read two articles free, then asked for an email address, then allowed a few more before a hard stop. In a year the list went from 3,000 to more than 20,000 because he simply asked for the email.

He is honest that luck helped. Riots in the suburbs that year drove traffic. He also says he never invested much in growing the audience, though he bought some Facebook ads in 2016 or 2017.

AI took the grind out

By 2023 Uriah was burnt out. Every story felt like the same one with a different mayor, and he had his business valued and a sale price put on it. He even did a police ride-along, since he always wanted to be a cop, and decided that ship had sailed.

What changed his mind was a webinar from Broad Street Ads, where Kenny showed that putting an interview transcript into ChatGPT produced three sponsored posts. Uriah's world changed right away. He had sat in meetings that ran three to five hours, and once one that ran 27 hours with no breaks.

His rule is good information in, good information out. He feeds AI the transcript, not a prompt to invent a story. If you asked for a story about a gondola in Northern Virginia, he notes, AI would happily write one, and there is no gondola. Every article carries a note: "This article was produced with AI and reviewed by humans for accuracy."

YouTube wants a topic

Uriah's YouTube channel started in 2011 as a video repository: a business owner interview, a newsletter update, a chat with a congressman. It drew 20 to 100 views, and only recently crossed a thousand subscribers. The algorithm had no idea what to do with something so local and random.

Then he made a video about the new governor, the legislature changing hands and a pile of proposed taxes on things like Uber, DoorDash and dog walking. It got 20,000 views. He took it as a message. If you are not getting views, he says, it is not because you stink. The algorithm just does not know you will post about the same topic again and again.

Now the main channel focuses on broader Virginia coverage, and he started a second channel for interviews and random videos. A video on the huge sewage spill in the Potomac River, which he had also discussed on local TV, does very well. The broader topics are what work on YouTube.

Be the person people ask about

TJ calls it the creator model: people follow a person, not just a brand. Uriah agrees, and says AI makes it urgent. If people soon ask an AI bot to read them the news, he wants them asking what Uriah said, so the AI has to come get his reporting.

On selling ads, he says you have to be top of mind, and that means getting out: the Chamber of Commerce, One Million Cups, masterminds and trade associations. A business owner will not buy from someone they do not know.

He tells his student freelancers that business owners get hit up all day for ads and subscriptions while putting out fires. Once they see you are not another problem and that you do what you say, the relationship lasts for years. His summary: in a world where we can only half trust what we see, everyone in this business is selling trust.

His best events are low on program. A 40 Under 40 brought in Washington football players and a Bentley dealership, and the framed certificates still hang in offices. Brewery meetups, where someone talks for five or 10 minutes and everyone then mingles, do best. Town hall webinars can draw hundreds on Zoom versus about 40 in person, and a best-of contest builds the brand because winners share it for you.