Lookout Local saves more than $100K per year using Newspack

The background: During his speech congratulating Lookout Santa Cruz on their Pulitzer Prize, Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley became emotional when thanking the team for their service to the community. “What stands between us and a civilized society is the free press in this country and the free press that is in this room right now holding us accountable, holding other people accountable for their actions.” 

Lookout Santa Cruz won the Pulitzer for Breaking News in 2024 for their coverage of Santa Cruz County’s catastrophic January 2023 floods. It was a holiday weekend and devastating floods were beginning to displace thousands of residents and destroy hundreds of structures. The Lookout team reacted immediately, filing stories quickly and spinning up a live blog to give residents up-to-the-minute information about the disaster. 

Lookout Local Inc. is the parent company of Lookout Santa Cruz. It’s on a mission to serve its communities with a new and higher standard of local news, information, and community engagement. Early this year, Lookout will launch Lookout Eugene-Springfield in Oregon’s second-largest city. The intention: replicate the success in Santa Cruz and apply the model with sensitive localization. That’s phase two of the expansion plan, with phase three calling for three more Lookout sites by the end of 2026. 

The Lookout model is now one of several being acknowledged by the Knight Foundation, as its Knight Growth Challenge Fund moves aggressively forward in 2026. Along with six other local news leaders, all aim to expand into multiple cities, building on their success in single markets. Time to market, efficiency, and ability to innovate are fundamental to all that expansion.

Newspack has been a consistent partner in Lookout’s growth and technology leadership over time. Lookout began using Newspack’s Content Management System as a way to uplevel and cut costs. Lookout’s tech stack is now streamlined and transportable, serving editorial, audience development, and performance needs. 

“It’s been a twofer,” said Ken Doctor, Lookout founder and CEO. “We’ve significantly lowered technology costs and sped up revenue using Newspack.”

The bottom line: “Moving to Newspack was the first step that was helpful in connecting us up to the wider ecosystem of news innovation,” said Doctor in an interview with Nieman Lab. By using Newspack, they save more than $100K per year in development and analytics tools costs. 

The big picture

When Lookout decided to expand, they needed a CMS they could easily update and connect with a wider ecosystem of tools like ActiveCampaign and Parse.ly. 

They didn’t have access to the backend of their former CMS, which made it difficult to update anything. Even if they wanted to adjust the menu or the color of a button, they’d need to go through the CMS development team, which would cost them a lot of time and money. 

Getting to the next level: Ashley Harmon is Lookout’s Chief of Staff. She leads product and audience growth for the business. When it was time to choose a new CMS, it was important for her and the team to have more control over the site experience. They also needed full control over testing new updates, which was a huge draw to moving to Newspack. 

“With Newspack, we can easily test things like pricing, campaign design, and how many stories someone should get before they are prompted to become a member. Being able to work through those decision points with the Newspack support team has been great,” said Harmon. 

Newspack’s Audience Management system also provided a better way for the Lookout team to manage their memberships (aka subscriptions). The tools they’d used previously presented technological issues or were overly complex. 

“The ability to use Apple Pay and set up different credit cards is something our readers clearly wanted. It’s wild to think of the three years we were using other systems and how many memberships we must have missed out on because it was not a very intuitive process,” recalled Harmon. 

The result: Since moving to Newspack in March of 2024 and winning the Pulitzer Prize in May, Lookout’s revenue has grown by 103% compared to the same period in 2023. They also saved more than $100K a year in technology costs and about six hours per week on newsletter creation.

“We switched to using Newspack’s Audience Management system in March of 2024, and then we won the Pulitzer in May. We saw membership increase in that March to May window before the Pulitzer happened. And then the Pulitzer bumped us to a new level that we’ve never seen before. But we credit the switch to the Audience Management system with that initial bump in March and April,” said Harmon. The checkout flow on their old system was cumbersome and Newspack’s Audience Management system simplified the checkout experience. 

Lookout was also able to simplify publishing workflows and save time when creating newsletters by automatically publishing them as public stories. “There was a time when half the newsletters were manually made in ActiveCampaign and then copied and reformatted for the website. So, now we save five to six hours per week creating newsletters,” said Harmon.

The move to Newspack has also been better for their newsroom team. Journalists draft stories in Google Docs, send a link for an editor review, and then place it in Newspack when it’s ready for publication. Lookout’s Managing Editor, Tamsin McMahon shared, “Building stories, photo galleries, and creating email alerts in the previous CMS required a lot of time and manual effort. Newspack’s pre-built blocks, bulk photo uploads, and integration with services like ActiveCampaign have considerably shaved down that time. That’s especially crucial for breaking news stories like the Pulitzer Prize-winning storm coverage, which the newsroom needs to be able to publish and share quickly so that our readers stay updated on the latest news.” 

Another plus is Newspack’s integration with Lookout’s ads manager, Broadstreet. “It’s built into Newspack, so we have full control over our partner’s ad placements. It’s been nice to have Broadstreet baked in because before we had to manually place ads within each story, which was not ideal,” said Harmon.

Working together to find solutions

Harmon and the Lookout team note the close nature of the Newspack partnership.“We’re building this newsroom and expanding on the business model that will make local news sustainable. And the Newspack team has a similar mindset when it comes to innovation. There’s no ‘Oh this is the way we’ve always done it,’” said Harmon. “They listen to our ideas and questions and help us figure out the best workflow. Being able to talk through our goals and set up the next steps with the Newspack team has been huge.”

The Newspack support team has been a big help as well. “I’ve enjoyed working with everybody. When random things come up, it’s great to know I can reach out to an actual person. And it’s been very helpful. I like that everybody shares our mindset, we’re all building this anew to meet the need and the moment,” said Harmon. 

“Everyone on our staff enjoys the relationship with Newspack because their team has a solutions mindset,” Harmon explained. “When something comes up, we figure it out together. We’ll circle back; we’ll have another call. And we keep pushing things forward for the betterment of the whole product and all the newsrooms that can benefit from these solutions.” 

In the interview with Nieman mentioned earlier, Ken Doctor stressed the importance of Newspack’s mission to support journalistic ambitions and financial sustainability. “When we talked with Newspack, they were more mission-oriented, which makes a huge difference. They would ask: What are the features you need? What are you trying to do? We moved our system to Newspack on March 15, 2024, and it has worked wonderfully. It’s removed friction. It’s very user-friendly, for us as a staff and for the people who are trying to become members.”