Exclusive / Local media startup City Cast reshuffles leadership - Semafor

The locally-focused media startup City Cast has named Andi McDaniel, the company’s chief creative officer, its new CEO, replacing David Plotz.

City Cast launched in 2021 as a local podcast and newsletter venture aimed at serving cities where local news was shifting from old newspapers and radio to screens. The company has since expanded to 13 cities, including Austin, Las Vegas, and Philadelphia, among others.

“This next chapter for us is about expanding audiences. It’s about adapting to AI, and it’s about making the business successful,” McDaniel, a veteran public radio executive and co-founder of City Cast, told Semafor.

City Cast has gained greater visibility in recent months, primarily for its expansion in its hometown. As Semafor first noted last year, in response to what the company saw as an opportunity created by the turbulence at The Washington Post, City Cast scaled up its newsroom and business in Washington. City Cast is backed by Graham Holdings, which owned the Post before selling to Jeff Bezos. City Cast DC now has 20 people on staff, and said it has found some success attracting a younger audience to its content, tripling the size of people it reaches regularly from roughly 100,000 at the beginning of the year to around 300,000.

Not every bet has paid off. The company shuttered two arms, in Boise and Houston. In a telephone interview, Plotz said Houston was too large and sprawling an area to cover with the company’s resources — most cities operate with a staff of just 5 or 6 employees — while he said the company didn’t understand Boise enough when City Cast launched there. The company learned that their podcasts were not a replacement for radio, and that the City Cast model seemed to resonate best within mid-sized cities with concentrated downtowns that orient residents’ perspectives. Plotz said that revenue was up 40% this year, but the company was still not profitable.

In the six years since the company’s launch, the company’s founder told Semafor he’d grown to better understand habits in the local media landscape. He noted that many people under the age of 60 largely got their information from social media, neighborhood listservs, local newsletters, and Reddit.

“People do not want local news,” Plotz said. “They want to know about things to do in their city. They want to know what’s going on in their city. But if you ask them about local news, they do not express an interest.

“Local news as a concept does not really have a lot of valence. It’s more like learning about my city.”

He also noted that national media narratives and big political fights were not as animating to local audiences, who seek out information to be connected to their local communities.

“The need that people are finding met in local media has almost nothing to do with the highly partisan, cortisol-driven conversations that drive national media and national news media,” he said.