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The Business of Content


Jul 13, 2020

Arlington Country, Virginia is a suburb of DC. It has over 236,000 residents, thousands of local businesses, and an average household income north of $100,000. With those sorts of attributes, you’d think it would have a vibrant daily newspaper, but instead its citizens mostly rely on the Washington Post metro section and a few weekly newspapers to get their news.

Or at least that’s all they had up until about a decade ago. In January 2010, a former TV news producer named Scott Brodbeck launched Arlington Now, an online only news site dedicated specifically to Arlington. It quickly grew an audience and revenue base, and Scott has since launched several other sites covering Northern Virginia.

I recently interviewed Scott about the founding of Arlington Now, how his journalists approach their coverage, and why he doesn’t consider Google and Facebook to be much of a threat to his advertising revenue.