At five, City Cast makes some changes — and reconsiders its markets

Skim a headline about the latest at a given news org, and it’s likely to suggest movement in one direction, whether growth — launching! expanding! — or all-too-familiar decline — layoffs, shuttering.

What to make, then, of the state of City Cast?

Five years in, the company best known as a local podcasting network is still, on the one hand, expanding; in March, it announced new operations in Seattle and the Twin Cities, which launched this fall. But City Cast is not profitable, and in October, for the first time, it also shuttered in two local markets: Houston and Boise.

CEO David Plotz says the company, in 13 cities and with a staff of around 90, is at a transition point. The closures, he said, coincide with making the entire company faster-moving, personality-driven, and social-first.

Shutting down Houston and Boise wasn’t primarily a budget decision, he said. It was about deciding whether the amount of energy and attention they were taking up was worth it — and gauging whether they could be profitable in a reasonable amount of time.

“When we talk about what City Cast is, we actually no longer begin with the idea that we’re a local podcast network, even though that is the most familiar thing to most people,” Plotz said. “Our view is, we are driving the local conversation in cities, and we are using that to help make people better neighbors.” It’s treating podcasting, newsletters, events, and social media as channels for pursuing that mission.

Lessons learned in Houston and Boise?

When I spoke with Plotz almost two years ago, City Cast was an 11-city network with expansions to Austin and Nashville on the horizon. Plotz said then that cities where City Cast tended to thrive had strong “master narratives” and senses of identity and were growing, but were not too big. He acknowledged then that a city like Houston is “too big for any one person to comprehend,” which makes it “trickier to capture what that city’s talking about each day” in a single podcast or newsletter, as City Cast seeks to do. That scale ended up being an insurmountable obstacle for the company (not the city’s first media newcomer to shutter this year).

“Houston is an empire; Houston is like an entire universe unto itself,” Plotz said. It’s tough to build local community when events and things to do that you’re pushing out are 90 minutes away.

City Cast’s Houston audience wasn’t its smallest overall audience, but was small relative to the size of the city, Plotz said. “We haven’t been able to bring in as many listeners, readers, advertisers, and members as we need,” the City Cast Houston team wrote in the announcement of the closure last month. “Ultimately, our bosses decided to close up shop here for now, with the hope that City Cast will be able to return to Houston in the future.”

The challenges Boise faced, Plotz told me, were different. Its growth is driven by people fleeing big cities and not looking for a “core urban experience,” Plotz said. What’s more, City Cast’s core audience is young, mostly female, and left-leaning, and those demographics make up a small segment of Boise’s residents. Despite spending on marketing and advertising on Facebook, “we just couldn’t bring in enough people, because I think what we were making was only appealing to a fairly small slice of that city.”

In 2023, Plotz told me City Cast requires a strong local media ecosystem to thrive — the company is set up to complement and uplift existing media, not fill a news desert with original reporting. Boise’s local media environment is sparse enough, Plotz said, that City Cast struggled to attract local advertisers because advertisers weren’t used to working with local media.

“If one set of local businesses is spending on local media, more local businesses will spend on local media,” Plotz said. “But if there’s no habit of it at all in a community, it’s really hard to build it up.” City Cast’s easiest ad sales, he explained, are to advertisers already accustomed to advertising in some form of local media.

In general, City Cast is “inventing a new advertising market because there is no local podcast advertising,” Plotz said. “But at least in cities where there is already local media, we don’t have to invent the idea of trying to reach people through media.”

City Cast laid off seven staffers from its Houston and Boise teams and gave its Houston ad seller a national role. (It did not have a standalone ad seller in Boise.)

Lindsay Van Allen, a popular TikToker, served as Boise’s podcast host for about 18 months, and was one of the staffers laid off.

“Being the host of City Cast Boise was a dream job, and as an activist in Boise, I could see how much City Cast was a resource the community desperately needed,” she told me, adding she was “heartbroken” when it closed down. She said that while she wishes City Cast Boise still existed, “I’m nothing but excited for the new teams in Seattle and Twin Cities.”

“I’m the CEO of the company; I failed,” Plotz said.

Expanding with a social-first emphasis

Despite those closures, Plotz pointed to Portland, Salt Lake City, Denver, Madison, D.C., and Chicago as among City Cast’s most successful markets so far, and said Seattle and the Twin Cities have a lot of potential.

City Cast has hired five staffers in both new cities. It’s changed some of the positions on its local teams; instead of an audio producer and newsletter writer, local teams now have two “creative producers.” Audio post-production is being transferred to centralized mixers/producers, freeing up the two local team members to work on social posts, choose podcast topics, and research and write the newsletter together. Hosts, meanwhile, are not just podcast hosts, but also “daily social” hosts.

City Cast has also added an audience development manager to each city. “We realized that we were not doing enough to build community locally, but that our content folks didn’t have the right time or training to do it,” Plotz said. The audience development managers “will guide social, cultivate relationships with the audience, work on partnerships with local businesses and influencers, and generally connect us with the community.”

The company is pushing daily, less heavily edited conversations and daily social. It is working toward uploading full video episodes to YouTube and leaning into a casual talk-show style where hosts don’t have to go into a studio.

The City Cast podcast episodes that tend to perform best, Plotz said, are its biweekly news roundups, structured as a conversation about three different topics in the city. It’s an advantage to have three different entry points to an episode, he said (one topic might be newsy; a second fun; a third plain weird). And, he added, “it doesn’t feel as dutiful as an interview with a local nonprofit person.” The goal now, rather than booking a new guest every day, is to lean on a “superteam of contributors” that City Cast knows are great talkers about given topics, from food to local politics.

“We haven’t done a good enough job making our hosts central figures in our city,” Plotz said. Some have become that way through “sheer force of personality,” but “we as a company haven’t done enough to highlight them.”

Plotz breaks down City Cast’s audience into two kinds of core listeners. There are the local activist types, and what he calls the “entertainment listeners” – people who are not news consumers, where social media is their primary interface with news and they’ll turn there to decide what to do this weekend. Leaning into social creates more opportunities to make inroads with that second audience.

“Those are people who probably don’t want a ton of news, period,” Plotz said. City Cast can give them a little bit of news, and answer the question they’re more interested in, which is, “how can I have a really good, joyful life in this city?”

Instagram is the most important platform for City Cast at this stage, Plotz said, but it aims to grow its TikTok and YouTube Shorts presences.

The company is also doubling down on local events. Events are difficult to make reliably profitable, Plotz acknowledged – “the media afterlife is littered with the corpses of media companies that have gone heavy into events and spent a lot to do events,” he said. While City Cast spends money on its smaller member events, Plotz sees sponsorship revenue and marketing opportunities in larger events, and, perhaps more importantly, sees live events as a natural outlet for the sense of local community City Cast aims to cultivate. The company has seen success in Salt Lake City and Portland with local festivals that attracted thousands of people: 801 Day and 503 Day.

By the numbers

Adweek reported City Cast’s newsletter subscribers are up to about 500,000, compared to 350,000 last year, while its podcast listenership is up to 240,000 monthly users from 175,000 a year ago. Revenue, meanwhile, will double this year to between $4 million and $6 million, up from $3 million last spring, and the company counts around 5,000 paying “neighbors” contributing $10 per month or $100 per year for perks like access to events, merch, ad-free shows and exclusive newsletters, per Adweek.

Plotz told me advertising makes up about 80% of City Cast’s revenue, with membership comprising the other 15-18% and the rest coming from events. (Plotz added that the company sees local, host-run advertising as part of its content.)

While City Cast has been moving in the right direction, it has not been growing “at a rate that gets us where we want to go fast enough,” Plotz said. Working off some low bases, “we’ve got to double again, and probably double again.”

To be successful, Plotz thinks City Cast needs 10,000 daily listeners per city, which would mean having 30 to 50,000 occasional listeners. “In our best cities, we’re close to that, but we’re not there,” he said. He thinks local newsletters should have 40,000-100,000 subscribers, and remains unsure about what the right goal is for social channel audiences.

In 2023, Plotz told me he wanted to see City Cast grow to a network of “40 or more cities in a decade.” That’s still the goal today, he said, pointing to Axios and 6AM City as examples of finding success with a local network model at scale.

“I don’t think a network that is just 13 cities is enough,” Plotz said. “We need to be in more.” Supporting City Cast’s centralized network staff, Plotz said, requires it to be in at least 20 cities, and if it hits that level, “you might as well get big.”

The key, Plotz said, is cracking profitability at the city level. He hopes to see City Cast’s strongest markets reach profitability next year, and to get the company to profitability in three to four years.

“We hoped that this would be the year we had a couple of profitable cities, and it will not be,” he acknowledged. “We have not done as well this year as we hoped we would. So hopefully next year, with our new model, we’ll be there.”