Bill Sullivan is a local newsman at a time when local news is struggling. That’s why, after the Folsom Telegraph publisher was laid off two years ago, his plan was to go into real estate. “I’m glad I didn’t go that route,” he says.

Instead, his buddy, tech-entrepreneur Adam Frick, reached out, and the two launched the Folsom Times the very next day. Sullivan handles the news-gathering operation, and Frick manages the website. Together, their digital startup aims to fill the gaps in local coverage as many community newspapers fade away.

The Capital Region’s largest title, The Sacramento Bee, has seen its average daily print circulation decrease by 76 percent over the past four years, according to an archived company webpage and an ownership statement obtained from the U.S. Postal Service via FOIA request. Circulation was 21,367 in 2024, down from 90,244 in 2010.

And the Bee isn’t alone. A Pew Research Center report shows print circulation is declining industry-wide. Any additional money papers make from digital doesn’t come close to replacing the revenue lost from print. This deficit led to job cuts. In 2005, papers nationally employed 75,000 newsroom workers. Sixteen years later that number was less than half, according to the Medill School of Journalism.

Many digital news outlets like the Folsom Times have popped up in the Capital Region over the past two decades. Are they destined to cease like the newspapers that came before them, or is it possible to build a local newsroom financially sustainable enough to last?

Sullivan says yes. His business is “very profitable” due to low overhead costs and support from community stakeholders. Sullivan has the skills and connections needed to write “heartfelt stories that people really engage in.” The web traffic generated helped Folsom Times pick up “major premier advertisers” like entertainment venues, hospitals, credit unions and a local casino.

Frick was also vital to their success. He designed their website and created ad placement software and an online business directory. “Any local news site is going to need a journalist and a (web) developer. This is the partnership of future news,” Frick says. His efforts saved money and caused the Folsom Times to appear higher on Google search results.

Equally important were the two men’s local ties. Sullivan serves on history and museum boards, and Frick is a rodeo announcer and auctioneer who plays Santa Claus at public events. “We got the popularity as quickly as we did because we pumped out news and we knew everybody,” Frick says. “That was a key for us to get embedded into the community pretty quickly.”

The Folsom Times makes enough to afford a few private contract ad salespeople and some freelance writers. The owners want to grow the business and hire full-time reporters. For the moment it’s a two-man operation, which makes it twice the size of many digital newsrooms in greater Sacramento. Its profitability also makes it an outlier. However, a lack of funds hasn’t deterred other local journalists from reporting on their communities.

The volunteers

When the local newspapers cut staff or shut down, it was the bloggers who took the first stab at replacing them. Two decades ago John Todd launched a community news site for Rio Linda, citing a lack of day-to-day coverage of his hometown, especially in high school sports. He had little journalism experience but used his background in IT to create MyRioLinda.com in 2005, which later became Rio Linda Online. “Before I knew it, I had a following,” he says. Still, it isn’t a lucrative business.

Todd makes scant money from online ads and donations. “I’m generating more revenue now than I ever thought was possible,” Todd says about Rio Linda Online. However, he has to work as a self-storage facility manager to pay the bills. That doesn’t bother Todd. He sees his reporting as an act of community service. “It’s what I do. It’s part of my identity,” he says, and a side effect is “there are a lot of people who call me Mr. Rio Linda.”

Dan Gougherty takes more of a watchdog approach to his reporting for Elk Grove News.Net, which he started in 2008. He mostly covers mundane government meetings to hold elected officials in Elk Grove accountable to the public. It’s a “civic service” he does in semi-retirement. Gougherty had little reporting experience prior, but possessed the free time and drive needed to do the job. He’s seen other hyper-local news sites come and go because “it’s a grind” and “it’s hard to make a living on this.”

Gougherty makes some money from ads, but he would rather focus on reporting than try and compete with social media platforms. Both he and Todd lack succession plans. The future of their websites will depend on a person stepping up. “It would have to be somebody who’s really committed,” Gougherty says. Time will tell if it’s too much of an ask.

The aggregators

Attending public meetings, researching and conducting interviews is time consuming. So some bloggers take a different approach. In 2008, Danny Luna started WestSacWeb.com as a news source for West Sacramento. Luna grabs social media posts from government agencies and articles from newspapers and TV stations to tease on his website. His posts consist of text snippets with a source link. He shares this on Facebook to drive web traffic.

Luna’s background isn’t in journalism but in IT. He’s retired, and what little he earns from selling website ads is spent on cigars, golfing and vacations. His news aggregator offers readers convenience and small family-owned establishments a marketing opportunity. “​​If you want to promote to West Sac, unless you have your own social media promotions, there’s really not a lot out there,” Luna says.

Doc Souza runs another local news aggregator called Elk Grove Laguna News. The website spawned out of an online forum Souza started in 2010, with the news site coming about six years later. Souza didn’t have any formal journalism experience but started the site because he saw the need for local news and “it was a void that I could help fill.” The stay-at-home dad’s hobby became a full-time job after he started selling ads posted to his Facebook page.

Souza doesn’t do original reporting. Instead, he summarizes articles and social media posts while linking back to them. His business curates and brings attention to stories from official sources. However, he doesn’t think news aggregators like his can replace a traditional newspaper. “Most of the people that are doing what I do, I don’t think that they have the resources to actually do an in-depth story,” Souza says. “So we definitely need both.”

The columnists

Local news sites are typically free, but some community journalists have found financial success using paywalls to charge readers for content. Last May, Bob Dunning, a general news columnist and sportswriter at the Davis Enterprise, was laid off. He had worked at the newspaper for 54 years and unexpectedly lost his main source of income. Today he’s doing “substantially better” with help from subscribers to his Substack newsletter called The Wary One. Substack writers can choose either to share their newsletters for free or charge a monthly subscription, of which the company takes 10 percent.

People pay to read Dunning’s slice-of-life writings and UC Davis sports coverage. And he’s making more now than he ever did at the Enterprise. Other Substack writers have asked Dunning for advice, and he doesn’t know what to say because “my situation was relatively unique.” Dunning is well-known in Davis, and his layoff shocked the community. Residents rallied to his aid. “​​By golly, the word got out and the subscriptions started rolling in,” Dunning says. “It was mind-boggling how fast it happened.”

A similar situation happened to business columnist Wendy Weitzel. She started writing her column Comings & Goings for the Enterprise in 2001 and cut ties with the paper in protest after Dunning lost his job. She moved to Substack, which quickly became her main income source. It’s so successful that she plans to stop public relations writing.

Like Dunning, Weitzel “got a boatload of subscribers all at once,” though she says newsletters are typically slow to build momentum. “I don’t claim to be an expert in this, because we just got lucky with our timing, and we’ve been building this for so long,” Weitzel says. Local news writers like Dunning and Weitzel can make a living off paying subscribers, but they’re not the norm and succeeded after cultivating an audience for decades.

The nonprofits

Grants and donations are another option for supporting local news and are the go-to funding source for nonprofits like the Davis Vanguard. The organization doesn’t have a traditional newsroom or full-time writers, but trains college students in courtroom reporting and teaches journalism to prisoners. Founder David Greenwald said some of the more than 500 Court Watch program participants have gone on to journalism careers. Many others have enrolled in law school to become attorneys. The Vanguard originated in 2006 as an alternative news site written entirely by Greenwald while studying political science in graduate school. The educational programs came years later, and the Vanguard became a nonprofit in 2012.

Greenwald produces some local news coverage and takes article submissions from the community. The nonprofit has eight on its payroll, most part time, with a “shoestring budget” funded entirely by donations and grants. Greenwald spends half his time on fundraising, which can be difficult. But to him, nonprofit news, ​​”that’s the wave of the future, and then figuring out how to fund it is the challenge.” And he isn’t alone in that thinking.

Open Vallejo is an experimental investigative and explanatory newsroom. It originated in 2019 when Geoffrey King, First Amendment lawyer and college professor, became concerned with his city government and local police department. His first act as a journalist in Vallejo was posting “a response to a comment to somebody else’s thread on NextDoor.com.” The fatal police shooting of Willie McCoy led King to start “filing just a gazillion public records requests.” The name Open Vallejo was used to avoid retaliation. “I decided to do just what felt was the way I could be most useful to my hometown,” King says.

The nonprofit has published 200 stories, some taking up to a year to produce, and has a staff of three. King volunteers his time and two full-time professional journalists are on the payroll, with 80 percent of funding from grants. “We’re not trying to replace the local paper, which is still here,” King says. “We’re just doing the things that were not being published.” Success will depend on philanthropists.

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