In the winter of 2015 Ted Williams was head of digital strategy at The Charlotte Observer and kept telling his wife at dinner that tomorrow’s media companies were being born right now. She could not take it anymore, he told The New York Times. I can’t have a lot of nerdy media chatter here, she said. What she meant, he decided, was: if you want to do it, go do it.
He left the Observer in March, launched The Charlotte Agenda on April 8, 2015, and sold it to Axios five and a half years later for close to $5 million. It is Axios Charlotte now, and its morning newsletter is one of the most read things in the city.
It started with less than $10,000
The site took about three weeks to build with a startup lawyer, a designer and a developer, and total startup costs came to a little under $10,000, Williams wrote in an early post explaining the business. The four founders, Williams, Katie Levans, Andrew Dunn and Cristina Wilson, put in $50,000 between them and never raised outside money. Levans, who Williams noted liked cats, started as the lead writer and joined full-time around day sixty. We were scared, he wrote. We still are.
The premise was what Williams called a user problem: young people moved to Charlotte every day and had nowhere to learn where to eat and what to do. At the Observer he had launched CharlotteFive to reach them. The Agenda did the same with a website, a 6:30 a.m. newsletter and original reporting straight to Instagram and Snapchat, and it had revenue from the first day, with early customers including Bojangles and Hendrick.
By 2017 the company generated $1.3 million in revenue and a pretax profit, according to the Times. By 2019 revenue was $2.2 million, it had been profitable for years, and a membership program had 1,700 paying supporters, according to Nieman Lab. The Columbia Journalism Review asked in 2018 whether the journalism matched the business model, which was the compliment the model deserved.
The people behind it
Williams is a Washington and Lee graduate who had spent his career in digital media, and the Agenda’s staff grew to about fourteen producing five to ten stories a day, a newsletter and an annual city guide. The site’s stated purpose was to make Charlotte the smartest, most human city in the world.
In December 2020 Axios, the national outlet known for scoops and bullet-pointed articles, bought the Agenda as the first move in a push into local news, using Williams’s approach as the model for Denver, Tampa, Minneapolis and Des Moines. Axios chief executive Jim VandeHei told Nieman Lab that Ted had me at hello: the moment Williams said he had cracked in Charlotte the code Axios was trying to unlock everywhere, the deal was obvious. Williams became general manager of Axios Local and helped expand it to more than a dozen cities before leaving his full-time role in 2024 to advise the company and write a personal finance newsletter called Tiny Money.
The Columbia Journalism Review’s 2018 examination of the Agenda asked whether the journalism matched a business model it called mighty, and the answer it found was service journalism: where to eat, what opened, how the city works, delivered to newcomers who arrived every day without a guide. Williams’s co-founder Katie Levans Loveluck, who had a background in marketing and app development, left the publication in 2019, the year before the sale, according to Carolina Journal.
What it does now
Axios Charlotte publishes a daily newsletter and a stream of stories in the Axios format, short, direct and organized under headings like Why it matters and What to expect, covering openings, real estate, development, food and drink and the city’s news. It is free to read, supported by advertising and membership, and its coverage of new restaurants and bars is the most complete in the city, which is why it appears throughout our own guides.
The staff is local and the ownership is not, which is the trade the sale made. The newsroom on Cedar Street reports to a company headquartered in Virginia, and the format that made Axios distinctive nationally now shapes how Charlotte reads about itself.
Axios Local grew from Charlotte to more than a dozen cities within a year of the acquisition, and the company’s chief executive said the whole strategy rested on what Williams had proved here: that a lean local newsroom with a morning newsletter and a membership program could make money. The Charlotte newsroom’s staff of about a dozen became the model for hiring in Denver, Tampa, Minneapolis and Des Moines.
Why it matters
Local news outlets were disappearing at about ten a month when Williams started, and he proved a local site could be profitable on a shoestring. That proof became the template for a national company’s local expansion, and Charlotte was the first city to get it.
The Agenda was a dinner table argument that turned into a $5 million company. Axios Charlotte is what a national chain does with a good idea it bought. Both are true, and the newsletter still lands at 6:30.