My Local Press is a network for community journalism — a place where local news is written by the people who live it, and where good journalism can be a real business.
The simplest way to feel it: open the app and you have your own newspaper — built from what people around you are creating, on web, iPhone, and Android. You can print it. You can listen to it in your car. You can jump to other cities, find the journalists and creators you like, and support them directly — with advertising dollars, or a subscription if they've turned one on.
Our mission is to ensure the future of local journalism — and make the world a better place: somewhere people with differing opinions can share them and treat each other with respect. The way content spreads here is built to reward exactly that kind of conversation — credibility comes from real people vouching for each other, not from clicks or outrage.
Local journalism should be a living. We're building the least expensive foundation there is for the journalism of the future, so anyone — an independent journalist, a group of friends, or an existing newspaper, TV, or radio outlet — can publish here, build a readership, and get paid, with the large majority of every dollar of reader support going directly to the journalists and publications who earned it.
Depending on who you are
If you want to read local news: open the feed and you'll see what's happening in your area — news, events, classifieds, and community notices, free to read. Follow the people and publications you trust.
If you want to report the news: this is built for you. Get vouched for, publish stories under your own name or a publication, build subscribers, and keep the overwhelming share of the reader support you earn (the split is spelled out in the subscriptions guide). Existing outlets — print, TV, radio — can bring their masthead here and even publish on their own domain.
If you're a storyteller — not a journalist: you're welcome too. Anyone can have their own feed about their own thing — stories, videos, narration — with the same tools journalists get. Two things always come with that: your work appears in your community's feed where readers discover it, and being here supports local journalism — that's what the platform funds.
If you run a local business: you can have your own feed and post about your business freely. When you want reach beyond your own feed, you advertise on journalism feeds or support a journalist directly — and that money overwhelmingly goes to them. That's the point: local businesses funding local journalism, visibly.
How we're different
The fair question is: why not just a Facebook group, or a Substack?
We're the anti-social-media news platform. Here's what that means in practice.
Real humans report the news here. The feed is written by people who live where you live, with names their community has vouched for. Credibility comes from that vouching, not from clicks or outrage. Engagement doesn't decide what you see — geography does.
You can do journalism. The work sounds intimidating; it's learnable. Anyone in a small town can look up a public official's number, call, and ask about the thing their community is worried about — that's reporting. Our resources guide collects the journalism books and the self-paced course we point people to.
The community feed is local-first; your own feed is yours. What your area sees is decided by where things happen. Your own feed can be about whatever you make — your town, your craft, your business, your topic. When you want reach beyond your own readers, you promote your work as advertising on journalism feeds. That's the incentive at the center of the platform: attention here funds the people reporting the news.
Your area gets an actual newspaper. Open the app and your town has its own paper — stories, events, classifieds, community notices, built from what people around you are creating. You can print it. You can listen to it in your car.
Local businesses fund the journalism, visibly. They post free on their own feed, and when they want reach they advertise on journalism feeds or support a journalist directly, with the large majority of every dollar going to the journalists and publications who earned it.
Existing outlets keep their identity. A newspaper, TV, or radio outlet can bring its masthead here and publish under its own branding — even its own domain — instead of dissolving into a platform's feed.
When a local story matters beyond your town, the network carries it. Local news becomes national and global news all the time. A story that earns it can surface across communities here.
One shared platform, so news stays cheap to produce. The reason to share a platform isn't so everyone can see everything from everywhere all the time. It's cost. We run one set of rails — the apps, payments, print-ready pages, audio, search — shared by every community, so producing and supporting local journalism costs as little as we can make it. (Printing itself stays with the publisher — their local or national printer; we produce the press-ready pages.) The least expensive foundation there is for the journalism of the future: that's how local journalism gets one.
We build this in the open, with you. The platform improves constantly — the tools here, especially the AI ones, get better month to month, and we ship improvements as we make them. You'll see it change while you use it, and sometimes you'll catch a rough edge before we do. Tell us through the feedback form. Bug reports and feature ideas from the people actually using the platform decide what we build next — that's how we shape the future of news together.
Why not on your own?
The other fair question — for a journalist who could run their own site and newsletter: why be here instead?
On your own, your ceiling is your town: the pizza parlor, the car dealership, the Kiwanis Club, your aunt. That direct support is real — journalists here keep 90% of it — and in a bigger market it might be all you need. In a small town, it usually isn't enough.
And what no journalist can do alone is walk into a national advertiser's office with numbers. A network can — one step at a time. The first step is underway now: journalists and publications here building their own readerships and their own revenue, through subscriptions, direct support, and local advertising. That growth is what produces numbers worth taking to regional advertisers, then to the national and global advertisers and funders the mission resonates with.
When that revenue comes, we aspire to share it: a shared-revenue program for the journalists and publications who meet its thresholds — a supplement to the income they're already earning here, never a replacement for it. The thresholds are still being worked out (the current shape is on the payments page), and we'll publish the final ones before the first payout.
Alone, your support ends at the edge of town. Here, it doesn't have to.
Open the feed and read what your area is making. If you're ready to report it, get vouched and start writing.