A peek beneath the hood of Lookout Eugene-Springfield’s launch

By Joseph Lichterman

July 9, 2025

Earlier this spring, about 80 people crammed into a newsroom in downtown Eugene, Oregon for the launch party for the college town’s newest news organization, Lookout Eugene-Springfield.

The party was filled with local residents and supporters of the news site along with its staff — many of whom were younger and new to the community. Throughout the evening, attendees kept coming up to staffers to express their excitement, founder and CEO Ken Doctor told me. 

“You have all these people hugging them and saying thank you for doing this,” Doctor said. “It’s an amazing thing. And so we can talk about business models as much as we want —  [they’re] hugely important, and that’s got to be my main job. But what’s under this is community and the emotion of hope.” 

While community service is at the heart of the organization, it’s the business model combining reader revenue, advertising support, and philanthropy that has fueled the expansion and supported the initial growth of Lookout Eugene-Springfield. 

Lookout Eugene-Springfield has seen fast growth since its April 10 launch. It has passed 1,200 paying members, generating $228,000 in revenue. The site has booked $212,000 in advertising through June. (That’s an increase from 910 paying members and $175,000 in booked advertising in May, which Nieman Lab’s Sarah Scire reported in a great profile of the site.) 

Eugene-Springfield site is about one-fifth of the way to its long-term financial goals, Doctor said, adding that the site has a two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half year runway of funding. 

Lookout Eugene-Springfield is the second outpost of Lookout Local, the company Doctor, a  veteran media analyst and executive, founded in 2020 with Lookout Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz, California. The model has already proven successful: Lookout Santa Cruz won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for its breaking news coverage of local floods. The site reached profitability for the first time in the second quarter of 2025.

The Lookout sites aim to provide the type of coverage historically produced by a daily newspaper — from local government and civics coverage to sports, arts, and culture, and more. The sites did not enter into news deserts. Each launched in competition with long-standing legacy newspaper titles: The Alden Global Capital-owned Santa Cruz Sentinel and the Gannett-owned Eugene Register-Guard. 

Once fully staffed, the Eugene-Springfield site will have 16 staffers on its local newsroom team. In comparison, the Register-Guard’s website lists 12 newsroom staffers. 

“The goal now is not just to replace a once really good daily newspaper, which it was, but to build it back better,” Doctor said.

Laying the groundwork

The site began laying the groundwork for its advertising business — which it calls marketing partnerships — reader revenue strategy, and philanthropic support prior to its launch. 

Doctor reports that he made 23 visits to Eugene, meeting with hundreds of local leaders to drum up support for the enterprise before it began publishing.

Those efforts paid off. 

Lookout received a $1 million challenge grant from the Tykeson Family Foundation, a local funder. It’s planning announcement this month that it has matched the grant, and plans to share with the next steps for expanding Lookout’s philanthropic plans.The company is a for-profit, but it is able to accept tax-deductible donations of $5,000 or more through The Lenfest Institute, which serves as its fiscal sponsor. (Learn more about the Institute’s fiscal sponsorships here.) 

The site has booked 30 different advertisers thus far, and about 35% of them are local nonprofits. Local institutions like healthcare providers, banks, and small businesses are core to the advertising business. It offers digital ads across its website, newsletters, app, and other social platforms. 

Lookout Eugene-Springfield made its coverage free-to-access for the first 90 days after launch so it could reach as wide an audience as possible and allow readers to sample its reporting before paying. It will eventually have a metered paywall, but it signed up local organizations — including the Eugene-based University of Oregon and the local chamber of commerce — to be “Founding Marketing Partners,” which paid for the free access period.. 

Still, it has pitched memberships from the start. It opened up a “Founding Membership” program six weeks or so prior to first publishing. Founding members received special recognition on the site, with the opportunity beginning at $250/year. Supporters had the option to contribute more, and about 60 people gave $500 or $1,000. 

An annual membership to Lookout Eugene-Springfield starts at $180/year and then renews at the $250/year rate. The site also has a monthly rate, which renews every four weeks, at $17/month. 

The news site is encouraging readers to sign up for the annual membership, which provides more predictable income, but it views the monthly option as a valuable trial period to allow readers who aren’t ready to commit for a year to sample the work. It will send messages to active monthly readers to encourage them to upgrade to an annual subscription. 

But Lookout intentionally provides different levels to reach as many subscribers as it can. 

“What’s really important for membership sites or subscription sites is not just memberships or subscriptions, but figuring out the nuance of it to both make it a community building exercise but also a revenue optimization exercise to get every last dollar you can,” Doctor said. “If you don’t ask people for money or give them the option of paying you more money, they won’t .”

‘Power the business’

The Lookout sites are powered by a tech stack of off-the-shelf tools. Its website is run on Newspack. It uses ActiveCampaign for email newsletters. Its apps are built by PugPig. It uses Parse.ly for analytics. It has worked with BlueEngine Collaborative to build its reader revenue strategy and Broadstreet for its ad production and placement.  

The integrated tech stack has been key to the company’s growth, Doctor said. By relying on trusted, user-friendly, cost-efficient partners, the Lookout team has been able to focus its efforts on building audience and revenue. 

“We didn’t have to sit back and say, ‘How are we going to build a tech stack to power this?’ We essentially could turn that on. It wasn’t one switch but it was fairly easy,” Doctor said. “Our goal here is not sustainability, our goal is growth.”

To fuel that growth, the Lookout team is planning to continue to engage with community members to understand their needs and introduce them to its products. The site plans to hold weekly community listening sessions across the city to help inform its coverage. 

About 65% of its audience is mobile, Doctor said, so it’s continuing to work to encourage user uptake through newsletters and pushing people toward its app. 

“That’s a really big thing for us, to get those most loyal people using the app,” he said. “It’s usage, but also it is really retention and then acquisition.”

As the Eugene-Springfield site gets established, it’s also looking to deepen ties between that newsroom and its Santa Cruz outlet. It hopes to apply lessons from one newsroom to the other, and it’s also trying to seed cross-newsroom experiments — starting with a companywide AI taskforce. “It is one company and we are working together and we’re learning together,” Doctor said.

With Lookout Eugene-Springfield up and running, the company is eyeing further expansion — though Doctor remained mum on where it might go next.

No matter where the company expands though, Doctor emphasized that Lookout is just one part of a broader solution for managing the crisis in local news nationwide. 

“There are hundreds and hundreds of communities that don’t have a decent resource, ” he said. “However much Lookout grows, and we are looking at growing, we need a number of other companies and organizations — they can be nonprofit or for-profit  — as long as they’re well run that are going to take up this challenge.”