Digital media company Axios has purchased local news outlet Charlotte Agenda.
The acquisition is part of Axios' recently announced plan to expand into local markets. The Virginia-based media outlet agreed on Wednesday to buy Charlotte Agenda in a multimillion-dollar deal. Charlotte Agenda Publisher Ted Williams did not confirm the sale amount, but according to an article from The New York Times, Axios acquired CA for close to $5 million.
Charlotte Agenda, now called Axios Charlotte, was founded in 2015 by Williams and former creative director Katie Levans, who moved on from the publication last year. It's a 14-person staff, according to its website, and produces daily online stories, a daily newsletter and an annual city guide.
Williams said he began exchanging emails with Axios CEO and cofounder Jim VandeHei in early fall after reading an article about Axios' push into local news.
"I’d admired Axios for years and always thought they were a really smart team," Williams said. "I emailed [VandeHai], and he emailed me back two minutes later, so we struck up a convo after that."
Williams said their teams participated in a two-day best-practices session based around "thinking through local media" and quickly clicked.
"It really felt like our culture and approach to local really aligned pretty well," he said.
Axios' expansion to local news includes four other cities — Tampa, Florida; Denver; Minneapolis; and Des Moines, Iowa — using Williams’ approach in Charlotte as a model.
“If this works in these five cities, particularly if we can replicate the business success of Charlotte, we will move fast to scale it to as many cities as humanly possible,” VandeHei told The Times.
Charlotte Agenda has 55,000 newsletter subscribers, 235,000 followers on Instagram and gets about 650,000 unique page views each month, Williams said. Though some changes will be made — a newsletter and website redesign, as well as dipping its toes into the event space — Williams said the content will remain largely unchanged.
"I think our coverage will be similar. I think we’ll add more breaking news and maybe some more coverage that reflects what [Axios] is really good at, which are business, technology and media topics," he said. "I think we'll keep our identity in tact because we'll have the same exact people. At the end of the day, it's a business about people."
