Aura and lore

Today’s conversation: Schneps Media’s Josh Schneps on building a sustainable local news business.

We are entering the home stretch of the year. I’ll have more on our new initiatives planned for 2026. (Get in touch to discuss sponsorships: [email protected]) 

One addition we are rolling out next week: TRB Backchannel, powered by Subtext. I’ll be providing regular updates to TRB Pro members and incorporating their contributions into this newsletter. I want to see how SMS can be used as a two-way channel that can build connection because everything I see points to this as critical. Sign up for TRB Pro.

Today:

Schneps Media is one of the largest independent local media companies in the country by doing what most others gave up on: printing half a million papers a week. Print is still the engine of local news. Schneps, home to amNew York, Dan’s Papers and dozens of New York City-area publications, is a family business that’s building from its print roots with events and newsletters. Josh takes a practical approach to the business, arguing that hyperlocal only works with several titles and that local credibility makes scaled local models difficult to execute. Listen to The Rebooting Show.

Texting is emerging as a critical direct connection channel, serving as a powerful complement to email. The big takeaway from this TRB Live session with Mike Donoghue of Subtext and Alex Ptachick of Hearst Newspapers is simple: SMS works when it feels human.

“Don't be afraid to be yourself and don't be afraid to be maybe a little bit less formal,” Mike said. “The medium calls for that, and this is really what your subscribers are looking for.”

Five things we learned in this TRB Live episode:

Voice matters. Hearst’s most effective SMS efforts are personality-led. Alex stressed that the campaigns that work—weather alerts, sports runs, political explainers—are built around a specific reporter’s voice. People aren’t texting “the newsroom.” 

Start with moments, not channels. Hearst’s biggest wins came from pop-up, time-boxed use cases: the Astros’ playoff run, March Madness, hurricane season, the Texas legislature’s session. These are natural moments when immediacy matters and audiences want proximity to an expert. SMS fits the rhythm of events better than an always-on content push.

Participation is the product. Mike explained the “two-way but not group chat” structure of Subtext, which creates far more earnest replies than social platforms. Hearst bakes participation into every welcome message: ask a question, tell us what you need, we will respond. That framing turns a text list into a feedback loop rather than another outbound channel.

Frequency matters less than consistency. Both Alex and Mike said the biggest driver of opt-outs isn’t sending too many messages—it’s sending too few. If you disappear, people forget they signed up and instinctively unsubscribe. Setting clear expectations (“no more than two texts a day”) and sticking to them matters more than finding the perfect cadence.

There’s real revenue potential. Mike walked through how SMS can drive subscriber acquisition, retention, and conversions thanks to extremely high open and click-through rates. Alex pointed to the Dallas Morning News’ Rangers campaign, which built over 1,000 paying subscribers for behind-the-scenes access.

Register to see the replay of the session.

The Olivia Nuzzi discourse has reached a fever pitch. It’s a good reminder that the media industry has been shoved into a peripheral role within the broader Information Space, and like it or not, Nuzzi is the kind of Media Person who can thrive in this kind of environment.

Nuzzi’s fall-from-grace story includes a sexting dalliance with RFK Jr, enlisting Keith Olbermann as a Sugar Daddy and apparently a fling with another presidential candidate, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who famously told his wife he was “hiking the Appalachian Trail” while carrying on an affair in Argentina. It’s a lot. This is the kind of aura and lure that works in a decentralized media environment. Institutional aura is mostly gone, replaced by Main Characters who are more performers than craftsmen. 

That is unwelcome news for the journalism establishment. Nuzzi is an affront to the values of the profession. Sleeping with sources is discouraged, even if “seduce and betray” is embedded in the profession; it’s not meant literally. The Epstein files revealed the unseemly side of this in Michael Wolff’s interactions with the sex offender. Flattery and horsetrading in journalism? Who could imagine? What’s next in Casablanca, beat sweetener puff pieces about key sources?

Mediaite’s Colby Hall calls her comeback “everything wrong with modern media.”

What happens when an industry spends 15 years telling talented young journalists that personal brand is currency, that access is the game, that being a character in the story makes better content—and then acts shocked when someone takes that logic a few degrees too far?

I have real sympathy for this line of thinking, particularly the impact on the already tarnished reputation of the profession by the assumption that sleeping with the people you cover is the norm. That’s a disservice to reporters trying to simply do their jobs with integrity.

Yet the focus on personality and brand isn’t something “the profession” imposed on the hardworking, salt-of-the-earth reporter class. The marketplace created these incentives, particularly the modern tech distribution systems. Columbia Journalism School deans were not involved. 

These businesses operate within markets. The decision to fold Teen Vogue was dictated by a lack of demand, not some effort to kowtow to Trump. I know he’s a media addict, but I do not believe that Trump spends much time concerned about Teen Vogue. 

The decentralized media environment I call the Information Space is fundamentally about the ability to attract attention and then metabolize that into money, power, influence or some combination. Nuzzi is quite good at that, with a modernized take on Hunter Thompson’s gonzo journalism. Her writing has never been for me, but I can see the attraction to her as a performer. Nuzzi, like Wolff, has Main Character Energy. 

The pearl clutching over it is also not very new. Geraldo Rivera was excommunicated from the journalism sanctuary as he drifted into being more entertainer than reporter, culminating in the famously ludicrous opening of Al Capone’s vault in 1986. That said, Geraldo was the one to expose pro wrestling as fake – and got his ears boxed for his trouble. Geraldo had aura and lure. 

Media no longer has the luxury of pretending it operates above performance. The incentives of the information space are clear: personality, narrative, drama, conflict. These are the ingredients audiences respond to, whether we like it or not. The question isn’t whether journalism should compete on those terms. It already does. The question is how to do it without sacrificing credibility or becoming self-parody. Algorithmic distribution rewards Main Characters with lore, not institutions with process and credentials.

And of course, the Information Space is big enough to have journalism exist on a spectrum. Quasi-journalistic products are currently outperforming legacy journalism products in the market. Wolff, for instance, identifies as a writer, as I’d put Nuzzi. For writers, the narrative is what’s most important and the integrity of the story rather than abiding by a set of rules.

Pressure will undoubtedly build on Vanity Fair to jettison Nuzzi as a columnist. The problem is that Vanity Fair likely needs Nuzzi more than she needs Vanity Fair. She would be ideal for the independent path of a newsletter, podcast and YouTube. Her notoriety would give Vanity Fair a needed relevance boost.

Much of institutional media has been neutered. A generation-plus of cuts and playing defense has taken its toll on morale and self-confidence. The union marches on executive offices at Condé Nast are, in the words of my podcast partner Troy Young, sad. They’re a reflection of brands in a state of stasis and seeming permanent decline. Tina Brown believes this long period of handwringing and desperation to find workable business models has had the secondary effect of draining the energy from these brands. 

The real tension for legacy brands is simple: create their own characters to compete in the Information Space while maintaining their distinctiveness.

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