Local media startup City Cast reshuffles leadership
The locally-focused media startup City Cast has named Andi McDaniel, the company’s chief creative officer, its new CEO, replacing David Plotz.
Key points
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
Additional details
- 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.
- “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.
- 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.
- He noted that many people under the age of 60 largely got their information from social media, neighborhood listservs, local newsletters, and Reddit.
- 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.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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