Newsletter-first local media network 6AM City has acquired AI newsletter startup Good Daily to accelerate its subscriber and market growth. The price was not disclosed.
As part of the deal, Good Daily, founder Matthew Henderson—the sole employee behind the startup—joins 6AM City as vice president of engineering.
With the acquisition, 6AM City expands from around 1.4 million to nearly 2 million subscribers and grows its footprint from around 30 markets to over 400 cities across the U.S. It will also remove coverage of crime and politics from the Good Daily titles, in keeping with the 6AM practice of focusing on lifestyle content and events offerings.
But more consequentially, the deal gives 6AM a new playbook for expansion. Instead of launching new markets by hiring editorial and sales staff up front—a process that could cost up to $250,000 per market—6AM City will now begin seeding new markets using AI-powered newsletters that require minimal human involvement until those markets mature.
“This acquisition creates a feeder system for us, which allows us to chart a path to one day operate in dozens, hundreds, if not thousands of cities,” said Ryan Heafy, chief operating officer and cofounder of 6AM City. “With the technology that [Henderson] built, combined with our editorial policy and content mix, we believe we have a formula for success.”
Beyond the Good Daily acquisition, 6AM is also launching three new core markets—in Northern Virginia, Orlando, and Knoxville—and introducing two new products: a white-label newsletter studio for other businesses and a free Slack community for newsletter professionals.
From seed to core
Historically, 6AM City has entered new cities by hiring at least one editor, often a small team, to curate a daily newsletter focused on lifestyle, civic, and cultural happenings. That approach has been slow and costly.
Good Daily instead uses AI and scraping technology to gather free, publicly available content from social channels, civic sources, and nonprofits, distributing it via daily newsletters and acquiring subscribers through paid marketing.
The AI-first model enables Good Daily to operate in hundreds of smaller, often rural markets where the economics of traditional local journalism are not viable. 6AM City plans to integrate this model as its new “seed market strategy: launch markets using AI-driven newsletters, then layer in human staff as those markets develop.
To graduate a seed market into what 6AM calls a “core market,” it must meet two of three benchmarks: audience scale, advertiser demand, or advocacy from local institutions like chambers of commerce.
“You start with AI, get to 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers, generate a few thousand dollars in revenue, then bring in full-time staff and grow it into a core product,” Heafy said.
An AI expansion model for local media
The strategy will test whether media companies can successfully outsource a broad swath of their editorial generation to AI.
