Atlanta media group Rough Draft expands to Athens, including a print edition
For years, Rough Draft has grown its footprint across the Atlanta area, meeting both residents and advertisers’ demands for local news coverage. Now, it’s expanding outside of the metro area for the first time.
Rough Draft is launching a newsletter and print edition in Athens, bolstering the amount of dedicated local reporting in Georgia’s sixth-largest city. Coverage will span local news, politics and the city’s music, arts and culinary scenes, among other areas, manned by a new part-time reporter, existing Rough Draft staffers and freelancers.
The first Athens newsletter will launch in October, while the first edition of the monthly print issue will be mailed to households in January, with a starting circulation of about 7,500.
The Athens expansion is enabled by a grant Rough Draft received as part of the Google News Initiative’s Growth Catalyst Program, which is designed to help news organizations grow through geographic expansion. Rough Draft was one of 12 organizations across the country to receive a grant, the amount of which was not made public.
Publisher Keith Pepper, who is a graduate of the University of Georgia, calls the expansion a “big test,” proving whether the organization can make its business model work in a market where it’s not based.
“If we’re going to take a big swing and do something in another market, this is the time to do it,” Pepper said. “We’ve got the ability to test some things so we can ramp it up with a little bit more runway because we have that support from [Google].”
This is the latest step forward for Rough Draft, an organization Pepper acquired in 2020 when it was then a network of hyperlocal freebie publications called Reporter Newspapers.
Since then, he’s reshaped the organization for the way audiences consume news today, with a dozen neighborhood or topic-specific newsletters and an active presence on social media, while still keeping print at the center of its business.
It’s worked: Rough Draft has increased its full time journalists and editors from three to eight, increased its full-time salaries by 50% and its freelance budget threefold. It has added new print editions in Tucker and Norcross, adding to the issues it publishes across Sandy Springs, Brookhaven, Dunwoody and Buckhead, all of which run under the “Rough Draft in Print” umbrella.
Rough Draft has two other papers: Atlanta Intown, which reaches the intown communities from Midtown to Grant Park and from Emory to the Westside, and The Georgia Voice, which covers the LGTBQ+ community.
Rough Draft’s revenue comes from a few different buckets: advertising across print, digital, social media and its newsletters, along with sponsored content. It also receives funds from readers through memberships and subscriptions.
Pepper said he has long wanted to expand to another market. Athens felt like the likely first choice: it’s still within a 90-minute drive of Atlanta, has the gravitational pull of the University of Georgia and the city already has an established advertising base. Athens and Atlanta share thousands of alumni, businesses and students, and stories about one city often resonates with the other audience.
Rough Draft has also struck a content partnership with The Red & Black, the independent student newspaper at UGA. The print edition will include a selection of articles from the nonprofit student outlet, which covers both citywide and on-campus news. Student journalists will also have the opportunity to do paid freelance work for Rough Draft.
Charlotte Norsworthy-Varnum, the executive director of The Red & Black, said the partnership is one way to provide the reassurance to students that there is a future in journalism. The fundamentals of the industry haven’t been encouraging, with many newspapers shrinking and closing, federal funding for public media stations having vanished and employment in local news declining.
Still, there is a need for thoughtful reporting in the community, which has seen its local news environment become decimated over the years, Norsworthy-Varnum said.
“If you’re willing to engage collaboratively, if you’re willing to look to your peers as allies instead of competition, then that might be the way forward for local news, for regional news and beyond. It’s changing shape, but if you’re willing to engage, if you’re willing to try something new, if you’re willing to innovate, that just might be the answer,” Norsworthy-Varnum said.
The organization will inevitably encounter challenges in moving to a new market. One is figuring out how to manage remote employees in a different city, Pepper said. But it hasn’t been a hard sell just yet. Rough Draft has engaged some launch sponsors, including local real estate agents and financial services firms.