It began as a blank screen. A flicker of the text cursor blinked back at me in Google Docs. I had an idea that sat at the back of my mind since starting in the news media industry. The difficulties I faced when forming connections with others in the news industry may not be unfounded. Surely, I was not the only person struggling to find my place amid the overlapping or parallel social circles. It seemed, in the spaces I had the privilege of gracing, that everyone knew each other. I had been at my news organization for less than a year at the time. I had not made a mark on the industry in the way that others in the room had. They had legacy, experience that trumped mine substantially, and had secured enough connections through that tenure to comfortably float between conferences, workshops, and events with a social ease I lacked. It was lonely.

One night, I opened my MacBook, unsure of what to do. My boss had encouraged me to make industry connections. I saw how beneficial her business relationships were, how they moved the needle on important projects, and exposed us to new ways of doing business. Replicating it seemed near impossible. I tried LinkedIn first, following the advice of articles telling me to cold message others in similar positions to myself. It yielded nothing. I tried out the platform Lunch Club next, where I did meet some pretty incredible people, but none of them worked in news. One day, an email popped up in my inbox encouraging me to join a news media Slack community run by a nonprofit. I figured, why not?

By then, I already had a project in the works. I hadn’t thought much about it until this point. I’m a tinkerer by nature, and this happened to be just another thing that I tinkered with. Yet, it wasn’t until I joined a free Slack community organized by a news media nonprofit that I realized it could be something more. Months after being a part of this Slack, reaching out to people and attempting to forge connections, I was allowed to attend the Nonprofits’ in-person conference happening in my city for free. The community ticket got me in the room, where I heard people's needs firsthand and sat in on a session that articulated the very problem I was trying to solve. I took it as a sign that what I was building, albeit premature, could be something useful one day.

During those days, I had already purchased the audientia.org domain and established Audientia as a legitimate business. I had a bare-bones MVP that I showed to one of the presenters, willing to stay behind for a few minutes to hear me out. Whether or not he was intrigued, I could not tell, but it made Audientia feel a bit more real in that moment. After the conference concluded, one of the organizers and execs from the nonprofit reached out in a general Slack channel, offering an inviting message to meet with those of us working on innovative ideas. I reached out, put time on her calendar, and for the first time, pitched an idea and demoed an MVP for someone - someone very important at that. I spent the evening before running through it alone in my home office, talking to myself, and convinced that I was out of my depth. I knew nothing about startups and had only recently begun business school. At best, I was technical and could rely on the fact that I built it myself to carry me through the conversation.

The actual conversation the following morning was much more relaxed than my imagined scenarios. I found myself feeling much less like an imposter and more like someone who could have a legitimate business idea. Still, I stalled, unsure of how to respond to the question “What do you need from me?” I didn't know, because I hadn't thought I'd get this far. So I sat with the question. She offered to help me secure funding, contacts, mentoring, and other resources. I even considered working for her. I opted to keep Audientia bootstrapped. A decision I doubted at the time, but I still wasn’t entirely comfortable in this new lane of being a founder, and I wanted to see where self-direction would take me.

Audientia was, even then, hideous. What I had in programming skills and ideation, I lacked in UX/UI design expertise. The software itself could do interesting things, but visually left much to be desired, and even I struggled to hold an interest in what it had to offer. I'd suffered the embarrassment of demoing it to people in the news industry who were willing to listen. People who knew me. None of them were willing to tell me the design was weak.

The exec I was communicating with permitted me to recruit beta testers from her Slack community. I knew I needed fresh perspectives from strangers, even if what they were going to say to me was negative. I set out with a goal of getting fifteen people to sign up, which at the time seemed a big little number. I was curious if I would find fifteen people who would care enough to test the platform in its current ugly state and provide feedback. I had my doubts, but to my surprise, after posting it in a Slack channel reserved for “Asks,” I did get some responses. Not fifteen, but it was a start.

Not long after that post, a friend of mine who hosts monthly calls with news media folk reached out to me and asked if I would be comfortable demoing Audientia to people who were going to be on the next upcoming call. She wanted to provide me with the space to get word out about Audientia and maybe walk away with a beta tester or two. I said yes without thinking and spent the days leading up to the call biting my fingernails and writing out a script to follow for the demo. My friend reserved time at the end for me to present, and asked those in attendance to help out if they could with the early stages of testing and feedback. Several people from the call signed up through the form, and one later enrolled in Audientia, providing feedback that ended up changing a core functionality on the platform for the better.

That feedback was about the core action on Audientia: contributing meaningfully to the platform. I hadn't yet figured out how best to implement this flow. The original version forced users through a very long form with the assistance of an LLM, and one of Audientia's founding members, shortly after joining, was honest about its flaws. I later reduced the steps from 10 (horrible, I know) to 4.

I took on a steady rhythm of recruiting, welcoming people into the beta testing workspace, demoing, and eventually building new things from the feedback I was receiving. Things were casual and slow, which was a perfect introduction to this new world as a founder who was “selling” a product for the first time. Audientia feels like a real product today. It’s much more useful than it was back then, and now the challenges are growing its membership. Each day, I find myself doing things I never imagined myself doing. Things far beyond the scope of my character, but so far, I have no regrets.

What comes next is the part I'm still figuring out. Building was hard, but growing a membership is slower, messier, and more public. I'll keep writing here about what I learn along the way, including the ugly parts. If anything in this resonated, I'd love to hear from you.

After a two-month break from school, I started the second semester of my MBA program. If you didn’t know already, I work full-time at a nonprofit news organization, build a startup at night, and go to grad school. You may be surprised to learn that I passed all my classes (two A’s and one B) in the first semester and survived doing all three. That was before I developed two bacterial infections that left me dead to the world for the last three weeks. School started up again last week—syllabus week and discussion posts were the only things due. Next week, I have three writing assignments.

Many of you may be asking why I would subject myself to a lifestyle like this. The truth is, if I wanted to be serious about building Audientia Institute alone, knowing absolutely nothing about business wouldn’t help. My background is in computer science, so while I have the technical skills to build Audientia, I lack the business acumen to run it successfully. I felt more comfortable growing my business alongside my MBA journey, with access to resources through my school and professors. Being an MBA student has granted me access to organizations, social events, and professional development opportunities I would have missed otherwise. So what’s another couple of loans to learn at a local university, even if I have to work full-time to sustain this lifestyle?

I’m sure many of you are in the same boat. You have no choice but to take on too much and somehow pull through to better your life and build something meaningful. It’s hard, but all I can envision is how life will look when Audientia moves to open beta or when I finish grad school. To me, this temporary discomfort is worth what comes next.

I learned a shocking amount in my first semester of business school. Some might scoff at this, but understand that I come from a pure technical background. Most of what I encountered was concepts and practices I was seeing for the first time—not necessarily the topics themselves, but the way they were considered or applied. Ironically, I learned the most from my information systems class. With a background in computer science, I thought the class would be easy, and it was. But it was interesting learning how businesses should decide which systems are the right fit for their needs and security.

At the time, I was still choosing between content management and customer relationship management systems when I completed a homework assignment comparing several. As a super lean, self-funded startup, I knew the tech stack for Audientia would have to be efficient but also dirt cheap, if not free. We all know businesses have more options now than ever before when choosing between platforms and their offerings. SaaS companies have gotten more generous with their free tiers. I floated between HubSpot and Zoho CRM for a while, testing both before settling on HubSpot. I tested countless project management software before settling on both Notion and Monday.com. I didn’t just settle. I tested each one, and when I chose a SaaS provider, I made sure to use everything available in the free tier.

Right now, it’s just me. I’m responsible for development, marketing, onboarding, and more. Notion keeps me organized—everything to know about running my organization is there. HubSpot Free is where I track user journeys, see where they’re coming from, and monitor their interactions with Audientia. Audientia is fully integrated with Stripe, which keeps me payment-compliant. Through each assignment from my information systems class, I learned how to build a tech ecosystem that works for me as a solo founder.

Financial statement analysis did something similar, but with Audientia’s finances. Full disclosure: Audientia has been built so lean that it can run continuously on my personal finances—or what some call bootstrapping. Though it has a separate bank account and cards, I have yet to receive a grant or take out a loan for the platform. I did apply to some programs, but never received any offers. My full-time job has essentially funded my entire experience as a solo founder. This approach has required strict discipline with my own finances but has allowed me to keep Audientia financially healthy, even with limited resources. The class has made me conscious and careful about outside investments because I ultimately want myself and Audientia to be held accountable by the news media industry as a whole, not acting within a specific party’s interest.

I still have three semesters to go. This spring I’m taking marketing, global business management, and corporate finance. I’m already thinking about how they’ll shape the next phase of Audientia’s growth. But even one semester in, I can say this: the temporary discomfort is working.

If you’re a founder who feels like you’re missing something foundational, you’re probably right. And that’s okay. You don’t have to know everything before you start. You just have to be willing to learn while you build.

I sent cold messages on LinkedIn to people doing similar work, but received no responses. I joined Slack channels where some accepted me and others went quiet. I reached out to someone from my first conference, but nothing happened. Every article on professional networking recommended these exact steps, but they didn’t work for me. I kept hitting a wall.

I came to my current organization to work in customer success. Within months, I was building landing pages, prototyping apps, and presenting to leadership, not because it was my job, but because I could. When you have technical skills in news media, you become the person who just... does it.

It started small. I built a landing page for a subscriber-exclusive product after the product team gave me CMS access, and I ran with it. Then I prototyped an app, created a deck, and presented to leadership. As months progressed, my team trusted me not just with ideas but with execution. With little to no resources, I got technical projects over the finish line time and time again. But a thought loomed: this work is incredibly lonely when you’re doing it alone. With each project, I wondered about others out there doing similar work who could benefit from shared knowledge.

I sought out more information on networking in the news industry. Most of it was geared toward journalists. Over time, I realized the thing I was seeking might need to be built with my own hands. I come from a family of firm believers in “being the change you want to see.” Cliché, but it became my operating principle. I didn’t want to wait for someone else to solve this when I had the skills to build it myself.

I opened Notion and started mapping it out. The idea was simple: a platform for knowledge sharing, inspired by how developers use GitHub to collaborate. But I knew it couldn’t be purely technical. Everyone in the news, not just people like me, needed access to the resources that could transform their work. One feature never changed throughout development: serving both journalists and the business side of news. I work in audience and product, and I know how under-resourced and under-networked this part of the industry is. But I also didn’t want to isolate journalists, who make up most of the industry. I wanted to build something news media as a whole could rely on.

Local news is at an inflection point. Newsrooms are shrinking, budgets are tighter, and the traditional routes to professional development—conferences, consultants, formal training—are increasingly out of reach. But the knowledge exists. It’s just trapped in individual news organizations, siloed by geography and competition. If we could unlock that, share it systematically, we might actually help newsrooms not just survive but transform how they reach their different audiences.

I’m launching a closed beta with over 10 individuals from different news media organizations. The goal is simple: test whether algorithmic matching based on challenges and roles could create more meaningful connections than passive networking. I’m building it in public, with the news media community. I want to share what works, what fails, and what I’m learning along the way. Because if there’s one thing I know from my time in news media, it’s that we’re all solving the same problems in isolation. And that’s a problem I can actually fix.

It was an extremely cold midwestern morning when my friends and I made our way to the slopes in Wisconsin. We hopped out of the car, trembling from the wind chill, buzzing with anticipation. We took pictures, grabbed snacks, and got our rentals before heading to the beginner hills—my friend with rusty ski skills, and me, trying to snowboard for the first time. The day started well and ended with me in the emergency department wearing a neck brace, awaiting CT scan results.

I had fallen backwards after my board suddenly flipped from front to back, my fourth really bad fall before I finally stopped snowboarding altogether. Not too long after that, slumped in a chair by a window in the cafeteria of the resort, I asked my friend to take me to the hospital and the rest… well. I ended up being okay, severely dehydrated, with a concussion and went home to my apartment, where I sat in the dark—unable to look at any screens or do anything that required heavy concentration. I realized then that I would fall behind with my planning for my organization, Audientia’s founding cohort.

For the past year, I’ve been building an online networking platform for news professionals—Audientia Institute. I created it to provide a space where news organizations of any size or funding level can share what’s working in the industry. Among conferences and nonprofit memberships exists Audientia, an affordable alternative for organizations without the budget for larger events. Everyone working in news, whether in business or the newsroom, is welcome to join and browse, looking for resources or people who can help with the unique challenges their organization faces.

This platform has been part of my life for just over a year now, something I’ve worked on every day. To stop suddenly and be unable to work was incredibly hard. It made recovering difficult, too. Days passed with me restless, thinking about everything that could be done while I sat in my apartment. Just as I was getting better and slowly returning to work, I got hit with a fever and severe headaches. What followed was a series of emergency room visits for severe dehydration and fainting that left me exhausted. I’m still recuperating while searching for specialists to figure out the cause and how to prevent this in the future.

I never imagined January would involve a freak snowboarding fall or a mysterious virus that would cause debilitating acute sinusitis—leaving me unable to walk long distances, eat properly, sleep well, or go about my day normally. I had many fears about my work with Audientia and what a long break would mean, especially since I’m developing the platform solo through coding sprints under strict constraints. I was disheartened at the thought of pausing everything and losing momentum. That all my hard work would be in vain.

Until one day, I had more energy than usual. I took a chance and dusted off an old bed desk I’d used years ago when working from home with a horrible case of COVID. Then I got to work. I caught up on everything I owed my day job after too many days off and eventually picked up where I’d left off with Audientia. I spent days lying down with that desk, feeling unstoppable as I debugged the last few documented issues before my beta cohort started. I just made the February 1st deadline to have everything as functional as possible for my founding members as they explore the platform over the coming weeks.

If you’re building something while your body is fighting you, here’s what I’d tell you: lower the bar on everything except what actually matters. Rest when you have to. And find your bed desk—whatever version of working your body will actually let you do. The thing you build during the hard stretch still counts. Sometimes it counts more, because you know exactly what it costs.

Audientia Institute is a subscription-based platform connecting news media professionals to learn from each other. As of February 2026, it is currently in early beta.

Become a beta tester at: https://audientia.org/programs

There is a significant ongoing decline in the number of local newsrooms across the United States. Northwestern Medill’s The State of Local News Project reports that since 2005, the US has seen nearly 40% of its local newsrooms close their doors. In just 2024 alone, 130 news organizations shut down, and the numbers and trends only get worse as time goes on. I’m not one to be alarmist, but the numbers speak for themselves and, frankly, they’re alarming.

Working for a news organization—and one that’s a nonprofit—I often get anxious about what my future in media holds. I’ve grown to love working in this industry, but statistics like those produced in Medill’s The State of Local News Report (which details how “over 50 million Americans have limited or no access to local news”) or the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) deeper look into how this has affected rural and big cities alike, leave me feeling hopeless at times.

By nature, I want to help uncover a solution that would single-handedly save all local newsrooms, but it’s never that simple. I will do my best, though, to utilize my development skills and resources to build tools or software that could make a difference to newsrooms in need.

It became apparent to me when I first joined my news organization that tech companies show little interest in developing innovative solutions to advance the news industry. Most news organizations to date are likely struggling with legacy tech stacks that are unable to integrate with modern-day solutions. Some larger outlets may afford to build custom solutions from scratch, but more likely organizations are remaining on the platforms that emerged decades prior, with minimal support and limited resources to adopt newer technologies. With the lack of new technology specifically built for news organizations, there remains little choice for a switch, even if an organization really wanted to.

Entering a market like this, where B2B consumers have relied on the technical infrastructures of a handful of providers and are operating with tight budget constraints, is unattractive to most tech companies—especially startups, who often chase after large clients with the hope of securing multi-million dollar deals. I can’t imagine this changing in the near future, as local newsrooms continue to close and large tech companies appear to be deprioritizing news altogether.

So what can be done? If my work for a nonprofit newsroom has taught me anything, it’s uncovering under-leveraged resources. What exists within the current tech stack today that’s either not being used at all or whose use is not fully optimized? If most news organizations rely on similar tech solutions, would it help to open-source the sharing of these unique use cases with the broader journalism community? When and where would this take place?

My work today solely relies on resources my department is currently budgeted for. I often joke to other colleagues that the large variety of work that I do for my organization—video ad production, web development & design, custom solutions—is done on a zero-dollar budget. While my work itself may not be as valuable to another organization or meet its unique needs, my knowledge and use of the tools that were at my disposal could benefit it in other ways.

Then I realized I may not be the only person sitting on hard-won information like this. What if someone in a small newsroom in the middle of nowhere in Ohio also figured out how to make their CMS do something it wasn’t originally designed for? A development director at a public radio station may have figured out a way to solve a donor retention problem that dozens of other similar organizations are struggling with. You get my point.

This valuable knowledge exists within silos, shared occasionally at conferences or when you happen to make a connection with someone in an online community. The journalists and media companies who need it most are often the least likely to come across it. My work, both through independent projects and my organization, eventually merged into one entity. That’s what led me to build Audientia—a knowledge-sharing infrastructure designed to be accessible to all. Something more intentional. A way to connect people in the news industry based on actual needs and matched by the realities of their organizations, rather than who they know.

Audientia is still early, and I’m still learning as I build it. Over the course of the next year, I hope to make significant strides in its development as I move into early beta next month and continue working with news professionals to create something truly impactful. I believe the knowledge to help newsrooms survive already exists inside the industry. The problem is access.

Although I work on the business side of news, I am no stranger to budget constraints and limited time to innovate or transform my work. Still, I have met others in similar roles who were kind enough to share their work and resources with me — resources that earned executive buy-in and helped push my projects over the finish line.

The willingness to share, collaborate, or help others is present. I see it in how my colleagues are eager to share their work or assist with my projects. I notice it at conferences, where attendees take me under their wing to teach me industry nuances. It’s evident in online Slack communities, where members quickly reach out to make me feel welcome or mentor me.

The motivation to help one another exists. We must continue strengthening communication channels between newsrooms and developing innovative tools to advance the industry together.

I’ve reflected a lot on the silos within the news industry, especially when we should be fostering a culture where news organizations of all sizes, funding types, and locations share strategies, resources, and ideas. Each outlet reaches a unique audience with an experience only available through their content. Sharing how an organization grew that audience or connected with readers doesn’t diminish that experience.

While we have industry conferences, career development organizations, Slack channels, and WhatsApp groups, it’s clear that small, independent newsrooms are often excluded if they don’t actively seek these spaces or the funding to access them — missing valuable knowledge. Participating in major conferences can be costly without subsidies, and hunting for funding requires time many don’t have. It’s noticeable that larger organizations frequently attend these events, while others do not.

Last year, I explored solutions, but there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. We need industry events, institutions like the Poynter Institute or the American Press Institute, and online communities such as the News Product Alliance Slack community. In today’s digital age, meeting professional needs demands multiple platforms and resources to grow. I was concerned that my creation would add to that burden, but I realized it could complement existing tools.

Just as programmers use LinkedIn and GitHub, news professionals could benefit from both social platforms and Audientia Institute. Open sourcing shouldn’t be limited to technical feats; it can include research, strategy, and ideas from news organizations. Having a single trusted source for these contributions makes it easier to find reliable information that benefits everyone. Audientia is built with affordability in mind. My goal has been to develop features that are extensive and useful, built on a fully self-funded budget, delivering an experience that members deserve.

Audientia is not perfect; it’s a functional but still messy bootstrapped platform. Nevertheless, I’m proud of how far I’ve come. Early beta launches next month, thanks to the support from the News Product Alliance’s Slack community. I’m moving forward with a fantastic group of beta testers, and I’m grateful for the trust they’ve placed in something that is still evolving.

This Substack is where I’ll continue thinking in public about collaboration, access, and how we can build stronger knowledge-sharing ecosystems for news organizations.

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