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AI Local-News Substack for Underserved Towns · £5-15/mo × 300-800 Subs

Weekly council + planning + crime + community digest for one specific town → £5-15/mo × 300-800 subs = £2-6K/mo passive per town.

The complete local-news micro-publisher playbook. 10 prompts covering town selection, source mapping, weekly digest structure, editorial guidelines, sponsored spots, community Q&A, verification workflows, launch sprints, multi-town scaling and print-directory upsells.

Act as a UK local-media strategist. My region: [REGION].

Deliver: (1) 12 UK towns ranked by (news-desert score × dog population × dog... sorry — × dwell time × engagement × ad-buyer density × my proximity) covering under-served market towns, coastal towns, ex-mining villages, commuter belts, (2) top 3 with specific data (population, existing local media presence, active Facebook groups, engagement metrics), (3) willingness-to-pay evidence per town (existing local mags, newsletter benchmarks), (4) the ONE wedge town I'd launch first in the next 30 days, (5) my launch positioning statement, (6) a 12-month sub target (0 → 100 → 400), (7) 3 organisations to partner with in the launch town. End with the ONE town characteristic that looks lucrative but consistently has an existing media incumbent that will crush a challenger.

Act as an open-data journalist. Town: [TOWN].

Deliver: (1) a definitive source map — Tier 1 council portal (planning, licensing, council meetings, agendas + minutes), Tier 2 emergency services (police + fire + ambulance data feeds where public), Tier 3 community sources (parish council, WI, community centre, church noticeboards), Tier 4 commercial (Rightmove, business rate rolls), Tier 5 social (Facebook groups, X hashtags, Nextdoor), (2) which sources publish RSS / JSON vs need scraping, (3) polling frequency per source, (4) my compliance stance on scraping public data (robots.txt, terms of service, Open Government Licence), (5) a 5-tool scraping stack (Feedly, Google Alerts, a scheduled Make.com scrape, Notion, Substack scheduler), (6) a monthly source-health audit, (7) 3 hidden .gov.uk endpoints most local pubs don't know. End with the ONE local source that always breaks its RSS feed within 6 months of launch.