How do you find enough local content for a newsletter every week?

Here's the system I use across 20+ local newsletters.

Where do news and story ideas come from?

Mostly from watching the places locals already talk. Where we live, we're in the local Facebook groups, and the local section of Google News is a big one too.

"Throughout the week, whenever we see something on our phone in a Facebook group or on Google News or whatever, I just copy the link and throw it in our Discord. Then when we go back to actually write the newsletter later, we have the list."

The rest is research: searching Facebook, Instagram, events sites and Google News. In bigger markets we have too much content, so the real job is curation. What goes in, what stays out? That comes down to judging what people care about. Smaller areas may have less to pick from.

How do you get events without paying for scraping on every newsletter?

Events are the bigger deal because they need a constant refresh. My order:

1. Connect every free public calendar first. Eventbrite is a home run. Chamber of commerce and city pages publish events openly and aren't trying to hide them, unlike Facebook and Instagram, which actively block scraping.
2. Use paid scraping only as a backup. We have 20+ locations running every week. We can't pay real money to scrape all of those events automatically.
3. Make the gap fill manual. AI event search runs only when someone presses the button for that week. Automating it would cost about $7 a month per location, and I don't want that.

Civic calendars add volume but not quality. Our local library posts eight events a day, most of them tiny three-person events we'll never feature. I still want them connected so they're available.

Facebook is the hard one. When my assistant sourced events for four newsletters, she found many events existed only on Facebook. For the formatting side, see how to write the events section.

Do you need every event in town?

No. My version won't have every event, and that's fine. Who cares if we don't have every event ever?

The problem also solves itself at scale. An operator I know has most of the adults in his town following him, so people go to his site to submit events because they know that's where residents look. A publisher I talked to has about 55,000 Instagram followers in a city of about 700,000, and organizers submit events to him at a massive scale because of his Instagram. He isn't scraping. Audience turns sourcing from a scraping problem into a submission flow.

How much content should be loaded before launch?

For each new location, I load restaurants and businesses once with a paid scraper, since the cost is low, and refresh it about once a year.

Content	How much
Restaurants (initial load)	About 100 to 150
Businesses (initial load)	About 50 to 75
Minimum to start writing	50 restaurants and businesses, 30 events

With that loaded, a location is ready to write in lightbreak.

How do writers cover a city they don't live in?

Give them a cheat sheet per brand. My writers produce newsletters for six to ten locations each, and they can't remember the details of places they don't live. Each brand gets a sheet linked right from the writing task:

• The top ten news websites for that area.
• The top five event websites.
• What counts as cheap, average and high-end home prices in that market, because every market is different.
• Brand quirks, like Canadian spelling for a Canadian brand.