These for-profit local news sites have become the 'papers' of record in their communities | Nieman Journalism Lab

In most American cities, the largest local newsroom still belongs to the local newspaper. But that certainly doesn’t mean the largest local news audience always goes to the people with a printing press. And in some cases, the local traffic champ isn’t even a TV station or public radio station — it’s a for-profit, digital-native news site.

When we write about local news here at Nieman Lab, we spend a lot of time on local papers, nonprofit news sites, and public radio stations — the sort of sites that usually aspire to produce quality watchdog journalism. That’s in part because investment capital in digital news media has tended to go to sites more national in scope (Politico, Axios, Vox) or topic-focused (The Verge, The Information, Morning Brew). But there are plenty of for-profit digital-first operations in cities and towns around the country, and some have achieved remarkable success with readers.

So we’re debuting a new regular set of traffic rankings for you — the top local for-profit digital-native news sites. This joins our similar rankings for local newspapers, nonprofit news sites, and public media outlets. Over the years, we’ve told you about plenty of local for-profit successes, from Ohio’s Richland Source and Idaho’s BoiseDev to North Carolina’s The Assembly and California’s Lookout Santa Cruz — founded by longtime Nieman Lab columnist Ken Doctor. Now, you’ll be able to see which sites are happy to open up Google Analytics each month.

First, a few words on who’s eligible for this list. There is no single database that lists all U.S. local for-profit news sites — just as there is no single list of local nonprofit news sites. So as we do with our nonprofit rankings, we rely on an external trade association to define our universe of sites. To be eligible for these rankings, a news site must be a for-profit member of LION Publishers — LION as in local, independent, online news. According to its latest lists, LION has 223 for-profit members and 218 nonprofit members.

That certainly means that there are some local for-profit digital natives that we’re missing — but we need to have a defined universe of sites to compare, and LION’s membership criteria fit the sorts of sites we’re interested in. (If your site really wants to be included, LION dues range from $140 to $550 a year, depending on your site’s annual revenue.) Also, we’re using LION’s own judgments on whether a site qualifies as for-profit or nonprofit. There are a surprising number of outlets that mix spiritual elements of the two — L3Cs, B corps, for-profits with an attached nonprofit, future nonprofits still in the process for 501(c)3 status — so we’re relying on LION’s delineations.

Here are a few of the remarkable for-profit local sites you’ll find in these rankings, followed by numbers for the first quarter of 2026.

TAPinto is to our for-profit traffic rankings what The Conversation is to our nonprofit rankings — the site whose success and structure virtually guarantee it the No. 1 spot in the rankings each month. Just as The Conversation is actually a global network of sites combined under a single domain name, TAPinto is a network of more than 100 local neighborhoods-and-suburbs news sites in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Because they all publish at the same tapinto.net domain, their traffic gets combined here — even though individual sites are franchised out to local editors/publishers. Those franchisees pay a $5,000 fee upfront, plus about $8,000 a year and 10% of site revenue.

Muddy River News is a local traffic monster in Quincy, Illinois, a town of just 39,000 residents along the Mississippi River. Founded in 2021 by Bob Gough, the former news director of local TV station WGEM, it’s an example of a digital outlet that has become much more popular than the market’s incumbent. In Similarweb’s most recent traffic estimates, Muddy River News drew 6.5× the monthly visitors of the Quincy Herald-Whig, the local newspaper that traces its history back to 1835. For context, its 858,624 visits in March were higher than the totals for the daily newspapers in larger cities like Memphis, Wichita, New Haven, Chattanooga, Richmond, and Boise. Its staff is up to seven full-time employees and a handful of part-timers.

Oil City News is a major traffic driver in Casper, Wyoming and one of the state’s largest websites, claiming 2 million pageviews per month. Publisher Shawn Houck was previously the CEO of Adbay, a local marketing and advertising agency, and he now runs sibling hyperlocal news sites in other parts of the state. Last year, Oil City News expanded into print, launching the 12-page Oil City Weekly. In March’s Similarweb numbers, Oil City News’ visits were more than 9× those of the local daily, the Casper Star-Tribune — still the state’s largest newspaper.

Lost Coast Outpost describes itself as “Humboldt County’s home page. That’s Humboldt County, California.” In case you were to think LoCO was a stodgy old daily, the fact that its about page lists the site’s “official sonnet” should dissuade you. (“O mighty lighthouse rise to banish dark! / Illume, you scribes, benighted towns, cesspools / Of envy, lust, despair.”) The Outpost is owned by Lost Coast Communications, a local media company that also owns four radio stations, and it commits itself to a certain NoCal vibe:

Sometimes there is some sort of countywide emergency underway, and we drop everything to find out what is going on and get that to the public. That’s what you’d call “breaking news.” Other times we spend days or weeks to find out something interesting and perhaps alarming about a local branch of government, say, or a local company’s business practices. That’s what you’d call “investigative reporting” or “enterprise reporting.” Then other times we take a funny video of a dog leaning on a car horn in Old Town. If there’s a name for what kind of reporting that is, we don’t know it. But it doesn’t matter. It’s a thing about Humboldt County, and for Humboldt County. People like it.

Lost Coast Outpost’s monthly traffic, according to Similarweb, is around 10× that of the local daily newspaper, the Alden Global Capital-owned Eureka Times-Standard.

Photo of downtown Quincy, Illinois — home of Muddy River News — via Adobe Stock.