COMPANY PROFILE

The hyperlocal news company highlights its success with local markets and advertisers

Community Impact highlights its success with local markets and advertisers ................................

John and Jennifer Garrett created Community Impact, a collection of hyperlocal news publications, in the game room of their home in Pflugerville, Texas, in 2005. The company now reaches 2.6 million households and 160,000 email inboxes. Garrett worked at the Austin Business Journal when the idea for his business began.

“I felt like something was missing at the community level,” said Garrett in a vodcast interview with Editor & Publisher.

Garrett envisioned Community Impact as a business journal that focused on hyperlocal content. He said although there were community newspapers at the time, they weren’t meeting a need he saw.

Garrett has stayed away from the subscriber model since the company’s

inception, saying it was too expensive. Instead, he focused on creating a highquality free product delivered straight to inboxes.

“We’re going to send it to everybody. It’s going to be full color, stiffed to trim…and let’s see if it works. And we knew immediately — we knew it worked,” said Garrett.

Garrett said getting the business running was about a cash flow game. People who bought an advertising contract in month one got their first ad at half price.

“I knew after the first edition went out…that we had hit a home run. I had calls and emails, and it was because, in month two, we sold out within two weeks for the next edition,” said Garrett.

The company continued into different markets on that logic.

“We looked next door in Cedar Park, Leander…we were like, ‘Hey, wait a minute. They don’t have anything like Community Impact. Let’s start coming back there.’ So we found a lot of advertisers who liked what we were doing in Round Rock…so it created this, you know, kind of like the game of Risk,” said Garrett.

The content that attracts local advertisers to fund this venture is not typical “If it bleeds, it leads” type of local news. Garrett taps into his background in business journalism to find content consumers find useful.

“We cover city governments, and we have reporters showing up to city council meetings…we’re covering city budgets. We’re covering transportation. We do that really well. We cover healthcare; we cover real estate and development really well in the markets,” said Garrett.

These topics lean more towards business journalism and are an important factor in the success of the newspapers.

“Our goal is to take these kinds of complex city issues, like your tax bill, and we use high-quality infographics to make those complex issues compelling,” said Garrett.

Garrett said people don’t believe in the success of what he’s showing after 17 years. However, he said the data speaks for itself, citing a Round Rock survey on local news consumption. “We went from 74% of residents saying they get their news from Community Impact two years ago to 77%. So we went up. And the next nearest [news source] is below 50%, local TV news or Facebook or city website. So we’re reaching 70 to 80% of residents in the markets we serve,” said Garrett.

Garrett also said part of the organization’s success lies in design resources.

“We just did a story on local real estate trends about investors buying all this real estate, kind of created this bubble. If you go through that story, you’ll see continual charts and graphs that you can do better because you have unlimited scroll space on the web,” said Garrett.

The designers are separate from the reporters. Garrett said the designers are there to help tell the story, and the journalists are there to report.

“If a reporter is writing a complex story, we want the designer to say, ‘I don’t understand that; how do I make this infographic help tell the story?’ So the designers are in unique positions…they work directly with the editors to make a really great product,” Garrett said.

Each market has its own standalone office producing the product, although all the printing comes from Austin. Garrett said there’s a conscious reason why the operations are set up this way.

“Everything in Texas is so big. And so if you have somebody in Dallas that was designing something for Pflugerville, maybe you would leave the P off. But somebody in Austin will know that Pflugerville starts with a P,” said Garrett.

Garrett also said part of that structure includes having a local face. Christal Howard, the DFW publisher of Community Impact, joined the company in 2013 and is the face of that local market. Howard’s journalism career began in TV news. She said she was drawn to more dry news and nerdy stories, which didn’t make for good

TV. Then, she saw a job posting for Community Impact and knew it was the job for her.

“The description of the type of news that Community Impact was providing was exactly what I had always enjoyed and what always spoke to me,” said Howard.

Howard said this type of news can be dry and boring until it affects one personally.

“We’re able to cover news that would seem small if you told people about it and on a broad scale, but it’s not small, and it’s affecting your taxes, or it’s the road that you drive on every day, or it is a bond issue that you’re going to get to vote on. And we’re able to tell you what’s going to be on the ballot. Those are big things to people who live in these areas,” said Howard.

Howard said the success and the need speak for themselves.

“When I came to Community Impact, we had one paper in DFW… and I came on board to launch our second paper, Frisco, and we launched that in 2013. And so since then, it’s been fast and furious,” said Howard.

The partnership to deliver to each household is with USPS. Howard admits it is an expensive endeavor but is made possible with advertisers.

“It works because we write content people care about and can’t get elsewhere. And so we have the readership, which means the advertisers want to be involved. And so advertisers support our publication

and help us to be able to send out the papers that we already have and grow into new communities,” said Howard.

Billy Wadsack, the Managing Editor of Community

Impact for the DFW area, said the free content model attracted him to join three years ago.

“At my previous paper, we had a paywall. We were a subscriptionbased model. And there was a lot of pushback from the community…about ‘Why do I have to pay for the news?’ and it was very frustrating,” said Wadsack.

“On my first day, I was in Pflugerville, and I got to meet John Garrett. He came in and told us why it’s free — that his philosophy is that everybody deserves the news,” said Wadsack.

Howard and Wadsack both said they don’t feel pressure to outperform other major news publications in the area.

“I would say we’re highly competitive with ourselves,” said Howard. She couldn’t identify who would be their biggest competitor.

“It’s almost impossible to say because we’re just so different. I mean, the Dallas Morning News is covering such a broad area. We’re really in the local communities, and we staff each of those communities separately to make sure we’re plugged in,” said Howard.

Wadsack said there might be some self-imposed competition.

“If we get scooped by somebody, I don’t lose sleep over it. Because the way we’re going to cover it is going to be so vastly different than the way that anybody else is. We’re giving readers a different angle on things,” said Wadsack.

Coverage expands beyond the printed product for Community

Impact. It used to be named Community Impact Newspaper but dropped Newspaper to highlight its transformation. The company also updated its entire brand schematic in 2022, including the logo, colors, tagline, mission statement and vision statement.

“It’s important that we have a strong digital presence, and we’ve grown that over time and put in investments to have that digital presence and grow an E-newsletter as well,” said Howard.

Howard highlights the importance of having both a digital and print product in this day and age.

“When a decision is made at a city council meeting, that reporter is writing the story, posting it that night. Everybody may be asleep, but when they wake up in the morning, they’re going to have an email in their inbox, telling them with a link to that story about what happened at city council the night before,” said Howard.

Howard said when it’s time for the paper to be delivered, they can expand on that same story.

“When they get their newspaper in their mailbox, it might be two weeks later, that same story will be in there, but we will have had a chance to expand upon it. It might have an infographic with it now that will have greater detail and explanation that you simply can’t do in a quick turn story,” said Howard.

Community Impact is growing and looking to hire more reporters. Garrett said his business success is dependent on advertisers. Garrett recalls a conversation with another publisher in Texas who compared their company’s sales goals to Community Impact’s.

“He basically said, ‘You pick up the quarters; we’ll take the dollar bills.’ And I was like, ‘Hey, man, I think I see a quarter on the floor right there. I’ll take it,’” said Garrett.

Garrett said he has $500 Mom and Pop shops up to large regional hospitals spending thousands of dollars worth of advertising on their product. He said there’s one data point he counts on as his best seller for advertisers.

“Every single advertiser that is with us knows the number one most important thing is geography. Because if stores knew that geography, they want to reach that geography. And so we have been able to grow and sell the whole business and grow our local business advertising because we own geography,” said Garrett.

What Garrett means by geography is his direct reach into consumer households.

“If you own a business in Round Rock, Texas, and want to grow that business, really mostly b2c, right? If you’re not advertising in Community Impact, you’re making a mistake. We can actually go to business owners and say that,” said Garrett.

Garrett also said connecting with advertisers is about building relationships - going to Chamber of Commerce lunches, networking events and the like.

Garrett said one of its core values is innovation. That notion goes beyond the product and is also tapped into the newsroom staff.

“As a CEO, I have learned so much in the last three years about the next generation and expectations of balance and fulfillment in the world,” said Garrett.

Garrett underwent a listening tour to gain more understanding of the needs of each generation of workers.

“We’ve heard a lot about balance. Right? We heard a lot about mental health. We heard a lot about the cost of living and inflation increases. And we are tackling all of those issues,” said Garrett.

Garrett highlighted what he thinks is important when hiring Gen Z candidates.

“The most important thing I’m learning about that next group is the sense fulfillment has to have a sense of purpose. So, in other words, the next generation — they want to be fulfilled at work. They just don’t want to be engaged,” said Garrett.

Garrett and Howard both note there’s room to try different things and opportunities to grow because of the company’s success as one of the largest news organizations in Texas. Expanding editorial content into sports, more neighborhood markets and innovative storytelling techniques are all on the table for consideration.