Samuel Fatola, Author at State of Digital Publishing

Trust in news is becoming challenging to earn. Global trust in news fell to 37% in 2026, a big drop from 43% in 2019 and the lowest level recorded by the Reuters Institute since the Trust in News Index started in 2015, with especially sharp declines in 29 of 48 markets studied. But despite the overall collapse, local news brands consistently rank higher in trust than national brands, with the same year-on-year downward trend. Few publishers exemplify that journey better than Her Canberra. Amanda Whitley launched Her Canberra in her spare room in January 2011 without institutional help or investment. But in the last 15 years, she's learned, evolved and shaped the publication along the way, without a roadmap. Her Canberra now ranks among the city's leading media titles, with a readership of 150,000 every month and more than 130,000 followers across social channels. Whitley has been named to UN Women's 100 Years, 100 Great Women list and ACT Woman of the Year, and runs her own new media business, but for now, Her Canberra is the media business she continues to operate as a founder. What makes her story more noteworthy is that Her Canberra grew at the moment the old playbook of most publishers began to unravel: revenue from programmatic display advertising disappeared, AI content started drowning out every other topic, and the platform economy started rewarding scale at the expense of specificity. Her Canberra didn't out-scale that; she doubled down on the alternative. In conversation with State of Digital Publishing, Amanda of Her Canberra explains how AI could make hyperlocal content more valuable and why the "local media is dying" narrative has always misread the actual problem. You built HerCanberra from your spare bedroom in 2011 into a masthead with 150K monthly readers, and you're still running it alongside your role at Supercurious. What's the biggest thing about running a hyper-local community brand that hasn't changed in 15 years, despite everything else in publishing shifting around it? The power of connection. Canberra is a big country town in a lot of ways, so relationships are incredibly important. We work hard to ensure that we have our finger on the pulse of this city, and that involves nurturing connections that we’ve built over the last 15 years. Even though modern publishing is so focused on data, people and their stories remain at the heart of everything we do. You started with essentially no institutional backing and built a genuine community. What's one piece of "how to grow a media brand" conventional wisdom that you now think is actually wrong, based on how HerCanberra actually grew? At the recent Mumbrella conference, there was so much discussion about data, dashboards, customer acquisition and ‘stickiness’, and while I absolutely understand the importance of approaching audience growth and engagement through this lens, I think it can dehumanise the relationship with the audience. Canberra is a city of 500,000 and I quite literally run into my audience at the local shops. But I don’t think you can grow a genuine community if you approach it as a transactional exercise. HerCanberra has survived by building more than just an advertising-supported audience. How has your revenue model evolved over the years, and which revenue stream has become more important than you initially expected? I launched HerCanberra before programmatic advertising took over, so initially, digital display was the greatest driver of revenue for us. That plummeted once agencies and advertisers moved towards programmatic. We still sell display direct, but it’s now our smallest revenue stream. Over the years, we have monetised everything from events to print. Today, sponsored editorial and social content is a significant part of our business, with social racing ahead. For over a decade, we treated social as a traffic driver to the website, but now we are approaching it as a powerful channel in its own right, and the revenue growth of that stream has followed. I think this trend will continue and expect HerCanberra’s social channels to become even more important over the next five years. With a readership this locally concentrated, how do you think about audience "quality" or value differently than a national or global publisher would – is bigger ever actually worse for a brand like HerCanberra? For us, relevance is much more important than scale. If you’re a hyper-local publisher, having an audience who lives in, works in and cares about Canberra is incredibly valuable. That’s what makes the audience valuable to advertisers too. A million readers who have no connection to Canberra aren’t necessarily more useful to a local business than 150,000 people who are highly engaged with what’s happening here and are actually in a position to visit a restaurant, buy a product, attend an event or make a purchasing decision. That doesn’t mean we don’t want to grow. But we’re very conscious of protecting the thing that makes HerCanberra valuable in the first place. For our advertisers, it’s not just about how many people we can put an ad in front of; it’s about whether we can put their message in front of the right people, in a trusted environment, and make an impact. AI-driven discovery tends to reward broad, generic content that scales across audiences. How is that reshaping or threatening a brand whose whole value proposition is hyper-local specificity?I actually think AI could make hyper-local media more valuable, rather than less. The more generic information becomes, the more important genuine local knowledge and judgement become. AI can tell you what’s happening in Canberra, but it can’t really know Canberra. It also can’t tell you that a new restaurant is opening next week until we break that news. Our value is in the relationships we’ve built, the people we talk to, the places we visit and the understanding we’ve developed of what matters to our audience. The challenge is discovery. People are increasingly getting answers without necessarily clicking through to the original source, so we have to keep giving people reasons to seek us out directly. For me, that comes back to trust. We’re not trying to compete with AI on the volume of content we can produce – we’re focused on producing content that is genuinely useful, relevant and distinctly Canberra. As a founder who has personally handled everything from video and design to writing, editing and events, which hands-on skill have you had to consciously let go of, and was it harder than it sounds? We are a small business, so I literally still do every one of those things, as well as financial and human resource management, as a matter of necessity. I am very good at trust and delegation, but I also love being ‘on the tools’ – I got into comms because I love what I do. That hasn’t changed in 30 years in the business, and I still learn something new every day! HerCanberra's community engagement (130K+ social following on top of readership) suggests loyalty that's hard to buy. What's actually driving that loyalty that a well-funded competitor couldn't simply replicate by spending more? Without sounding egocentric, it’s us. It’s about connection and consistency. We’ve been showing up for Canberra for 15 years, and our audience has grown with us. You could certainly spend a lot of money building an audience, but you can’t buy 15 years of relationships and local knowledge. We’re part of the fabric of the city – we know the people, the businesses, the places and the stories, and our audience knows that we genuinely care about Canberra. Over the last couple of years, we’ve been putting ourselves in the frame more, rather than staying behind the words or the camera. Our followers feel like they know us and they trust us. For me, that’s what creates loyalty – people know that HerCanberra understands their city because we’re in it too. You've built a highly engaged local community rather than simply a large audience. How do you translate that community trust into commercial value without weakening the credibility factor? I think the biggest thing is recognising that the trust is actually part of the commercial value – so you have to be very careful not to undermine it. Our audience knows that we work with businesses, government and organisations, and I don't think commercial partnerships are inherently at odds with editorial credibility. The important thing is being transparent about them and making sure the content still has genuine value for our audience. We also try to think beyond simply putting an advertiser in front of an audience. Because we understand our community so well, we can help a brand find a meaningful way to participate in that community – whether that's through content, an event, a giveaway or something more experiential. Ultimately, if we start publishing things that our audience doesn't find useful or interesting just because someone has paid us to, we'll lose the trust that makes the audience valuable in the first place. So there's a fairly simple test for us: would our audience actually care about this if there wasn't a commercial relationship behind it? Local and community media has been described as dying for over a decade, yet HerCanberra has grown the entire time. What do you think the "local media is dead" narrative gets wrong? I think what’s changed is the business model, not the need for local media. People still want to know what’s happening in their community; they still want recommendations from people they trust, and they still want to hear stories about people and places they recognise. I also think HerCanberra sits somewhere between traditional publishing and user-generated content. We have a strong editorial voice, but a huge amount of what we do is informed by our community. People send us story ideas, tell us about new businesses, share their experiences, recommend places and tell us what they want to know more about. Our audience isn't just consuming HerCanberra – they're helping create it. That's quite different from the traditional publisher model, and I think it's one of the reasons we've been able to evolve. The old model of simply publishing content and selling advertising around it is much harder, but the need for connection hasn't disappeared. If anything, I think people increasingly want to feel part of the places and communities they live in. For us, the opportunity has always been to evolve with our audience rather than get too attached to a particular format or revenue model. HerCanberra looks very different from what it did in 2011, but the fundamental reason people come to us hasn't really changed – they want to feel connected to their city. If a founder came to you today wanting to build a hyper-local community brand from nothing, the way you did in 2011, what's the first concrete step you'd tell them to take this quarter, and what's different about doing it in 2026 versus 2011? I would tell them to think long and hard about it, to be honest. Fifteen years ago it was a slog, but it was relatively easier to build a following through social media – the competitor landscape was much smaller, and there was much less competition for attention. Today, anyone can publish, and AI means anyone can produce an enormous amount of content very quickly. So I don't think the opportunity is to simply become another publisher producing more content. The opportunity is to become useful to a particular community. Find the gap, develop a point of view and build relationships. If you can do that, the audience and the business can follow. Fifteen years in, what's a metric or definition of success you've quietly stopped caring about, and what have you replaced it with? I don't think I've stopped caring about audience numbers – they’re still important, particularly when you're running a media business, because we all know that advertisers and agencies want all the data. But for me, what will always define success is when someone says, ‘HerCanberra was my bible when I moved to Canberra – it made me feel like I belonged’. For me, that is what it has always been about, and that’s not something that a statistic can express. Final Thoughts As publishers see trust scores fall and AI is leveling the playing field, Her Canberra has this alternative diagnosis: It was never about reach on platform; it was about publishers building audiences before building relationships, and now everyone else has to retrofit trust back into their product. Amanda's experience suggests: revenue before relevance. Every single monetisation shift she describes followed the point at which enough trust had been established to spend on content. That order matters even more today, when AI's free for the taking; that's everything but a publisher who lives locally and so deserves a click. It’s not important for every publisher to go hyperlocal." It's more granular: Trust is not just a feature of the brand, or an asset you bring to a business model; it is the business model itself. Her Canberra suggests that the publishers who will survive won't be the ones who expanded the fastest, but the ones who refused to let their audience forget what brought them together.

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