Greater Long Island's scrappy formula for local

On The Rebooting Show, I spoke with Mike White, founder of Greater Long Island, a scrappy, bootstrapped operation built by a veteran local news reporter. Mike launched Greater Patchogue in 2015 and has since expanded into towns across Suffolk and Nassau counties, the core of Long Island.

Location matters. Long Island is a fertile ground for news as an affluent suburb of New York City with 8 million residents and an average household income in Nassau and Suffolk well over $100,000. 

Mike worked at both the New York Post and New York Daily News before joining Long Island news weekly. He hustled Greater Long Island into existence. 

“I’d wake up in the morning, go to the coffee shop, walk around Main Street, drive around for story leads, then go back and publish five or six stories a day,” he said.

• The perspective of a lifelong Long Islander has been central to the brand’s success. Local news tends to work best when it grows out of the community itself rather than being parachuted in by a distant chain.
• A key editorial choice was to focus relentlessly on what readers wanted. That meant restaurant openings, festivals, and new businesses instead of endless meeting coverage or political races. As Mike put it, “I write stories that people want to like and share on Facebook. That’s what I do.”
• He treats advertisers like partners, emphasizing service and performance over simple ad placement. Sponsored content is packaged to feel useful and fun, and his team constantly updates clients with metrics and milestones to prove value. “They want to know you’re thinking about them,” Mike said. “You can show them 2 million impressions, but what matters is that they hear from you and see results.”

On PvA, Troy and I had a conversation with Pablos Holman, a technologist, hacker and investor. Pablos brought a tech maximalist point of view. He has little time for hand-wringing over whether AI consciousness is real (“nerds pretending to be philosophers”), government intervention (“The state is not going to regulate Instagram to make it functional for you. Go to China if that’s what you want.”), or concerns about tech subsuming humanity (“I’m not fearful of technologies. I’m fearful of idiots.”)

Pablos is part of a strand of the tech world that sees physics as the only real constraint to what is possible—whether that’s using lasers on mosquitoes to fight malaria, boring a mini-nuclear reactor a mile deep into people’s backyards, or building AI-powered cargo ships that sail themselves.

Tech has overwhelmed the media industry and some others, but much of the economy has yet to be fully disrupted. In Pablos’ view, software and media represent only 2% of global GDP, which leaves 98% to go. That means new solutions for everything from energy to food to construction. Arguably more compelling than B2B SaaS.

I found it a fascinating conversation. I can’t say I’m as much of a maximalist as Pablos and have learned to be less blasé about the second-order effects of all this disruption. But it’s an important reminder that massive changes are coming as Silicon Valley moves from bits to atoms in its attempt to remake the world. That gives me some pause coming off the social networking era, but I do think our greatest engineering minds can be put to better use solving energy shortages and finding cures to diseases rather than hijacking people’s attention with iPhone apps.

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