Voter Guides Answer Who. They Don't Answer How.

On primary night in March, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett stood in front of supporters in Dallas and told them the election wouldn’t be decided that night: confusion over new precinct‑based rules and a late court fight had thrown Dallas County’s results into doubt. 

Months earlier, county officials had moved away from the countywide Election Day system voters had grown used to and shifted to precinct‑only voting, a change that was reported in January but still left hundreds of people (disproportionately voters of color) arriving at familiar polling places only to be turned away or redirected. Because of this, a judge ordered polls to stay open later; the Texas Supreme Court quickly scaled that back and required ballots cast after regular hours to be separated, leaving an unknown number of votes hanging in the balance while lawyers argued over which would count.

By the time those voters were standing at the wrong site, it was already too late for one more explainer or Election Day story to fix the problem. As local media looks to November, it isn’t enough to publish a voter guide and a single article about rule changes months in advance. 

Truly serving communities means treating changes to voting policies as a proactive beat, making sure “how to vote” and “where to vote” get as much attention as “who’s on the ballot.”

Why voter guides aren’t enough 

Most election coverage falls into one of two buckets. The first is horse-race coverage: who's up, who's down, what the latest poll says about a primary that's still months out. It's coverage built around the contest, not the voter.

The second is the voter guide — the genre most newsrooms consider their civic-duty coverage. Candidate bios, issue questionnaires, sometimes endorsements, published in the final weeks before an election. It's useful, but backward-looking at the rules of the election. It assumes the machinery (where you vote, whether your registration is intact, whether your mail ballot signature will clear) is fixed and working. It answers "who should I vote for" without ever asking "will my vote count."

Chris Piper, Virginia's former chief elections official, put it plainly to NPR this spring, describing a redistricting fight that scrambled congressional maps mid-primary across several states: "The biggest impact on voters is confusion. 'Where do I go vote? Who is even my elected representative? Or, which district am I even in?'... There's the potential for them to not know who they're voting for."

Many election offices are underfunded and reactive; they implement changes as best they can, but they’re not built to communicate every shift to every voter. In many cases, there’s no strong legal requirement to proactively notify people when their precinct moves or when new verification rules kick in. The burden of discovery falls on voters, watchdogs, and, of course, local media.

That’s why a third, more recent, coverage model looks at the unanswered questions. Newsrooms and community organizations are starting to proactively track changes to election administration: precinct reassignments, voter roll maintenance, signature verification, citizenship-check databases, redistricting fallout, and surfacing them before they cause the kind of chaos Dallas saw in March. The methods it follows can be divided into two.

Method one: Monitor changes before the crisis

Election systems change periodically and voters should be aware of them before casting their ballot. The best examples of this genre treat election administration as an ongoing beat and not a once-every-four-years event. 

For example: Votebeat — a nonpartisan nonprofit newsroom built entirely around this beat — has teamed up with the Texas Tribune and ProPublica to show how tools like the federal SAVE database and related state data checks routinely mislabel citizens as “potential noncitizens” and drive quiet voter‑roll purges. If you knew your right to vote has been compromised, you’d want to fix that as soon as possible.

Build your own dataset. When Louisville Public Media reporters Justin Hicks and Roberto Roldan heard from a single persistent voter that she'd been assigned to the wrong precinct, they pulled a public database of roughly 450,000 addresses and wrote a program to check each one against the county's own "Where Do I Vote?" tool — and found 1,800 households with mismatched precinct data, including a state House race decided by five votes where five wrongly-registered voters had been turned away. As Roldan put it: "disenfranchising one person through these data errors has to be fixed."

Be present at the statehouse and the board meeting. Nonprofit state newsrooms — Georgia Recorder, Florida Phoenix, Tennessee Lookout, NC Newsline — have made a habit of sitting in on election board meetings and legislative sessions and reporting rule changes as they're made, not after they've caused a mess. Tennessee's decision to eliminate the requirement that counties notify voters when their precinct changes only became a story because a reporter was in the room when it happened.

Let the tip come from the ground. Sometimes monitoring starts with one voter's Facebook post. That's what happened in Louisville, and it's what happened in Dallas, where a voter who'd walked 2½ miles to her usual polling place became the anchor of Votebeat and Dallas Free Press's reporting on the precinct confusion.

“A lack of local reporting means that individuals do not have easy access to information about the specific voting procedures in their communities or in-depth coverage of local candidates, propositions, and policies. Election procedures can differ significantly state-to-state, and local reporting is vital for people to understand procedures where they live.” - Brennan Center report

Method two: Make sure your community knows what’s happening

You’ve outlined the problem. That’s only the first half. The second half, that’s completely skipped from the traditional voter guides, is getting the information to people before Election Day.

Publish the explainer before the confusion, not after. LAist ran a piece walking through exactly how L.A. and Orange County verify mail ballot signatures, what gets a ballot flagged, and how a voter "cures" a rejected one — timed ahead of California's June primary. It's service journalism, but aimed at the process rather than the candidates.

Build the infrastructure once, let many outlets use it. American Community Media convenes live news briefings that “bring community and ethnic media together with experts, officials, nonprofit leaders, and advocates” on topics like voting rights and voter ID, so outlets serving immigrant and non‑English‑speaking communities can localize and translate the same rule changes for their own audiences.

Meet people where the information already lives. The nonpartisan Election Protection Hotline (866-OUR-VOTE) exists because a press release or a news story published once isn't enough. Reporting on the issue will bring, hopefully, bring fixes later down the road. Voters need to find solutions as soon as they find something is wrong.

Make the most essential voting information accessible. If stories about precinct changes, purges, or verification rules sit behind paywalls, or are available only in one language, while campaign coverage is free, the voters most affected by those changes may never see or understand them. Treat “how and whether you can vote” as the coverage that must be easy to find, share, and reuse — even if other election reporting is subscription‑only.

Sometimes the response isn’t a byline. When Rev. Lelious Johnson realized voters walking to his South Dallas church were being turned away for the wrong primary, he arranged a bus to get them to the correct polling place. It's not journalism, but it's the same instinct: someone noticed the gap between what the system assumed and what voters actually needed, and closed it.

“In communities facing language barriers and uneven internet access, relying on news coverage alone guarantees that many eligible voters won’t see or understand the rules; that’s why long‑term organizing through trusted local institutions is more effective than any single story.” - Aspen Institute

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These models don’t replace voter guides; they augment them. One explains the choices on the ballot. The other proactively helps people recognize precinct changes, verification rules and roll maintenance so they know how to vote and can trust their ballot will count. 

Most voters don’t even know they should be asking those questions, which is why local media has to raise them early and often.

The newsrooms doing this well aren't waiting for the midterms to find out what’s broken. They've already been on the beat and their communities know it.

Size Your Audience Like You Mean It

Growing an audience from scratch is one of the most exciting and challenging things a publisher can do. And one of the first things we figured out building The 19th was that the hardest questions isn't actually 'what should we cover?' It's 'who, exactly, are we for?’

Without clarity around that, everything downstream — growth targets, funder conversations, product decisions — gets harder.

Many publishers do have an answer to the "who is your audience" question — it just tends to be a traffic number. Monthly uniques. Email subscribers. Social followers. Those metrics tell you how many showed up, not whether the people showing up are the ones you're actually trying to reach. The gap between those two things is where a lot of growth strategies quietly break down.

The publishers I work with who have the most clarity are the ones who stopped chasing reach and started defining it: a specific audience, in a specific place, that they can measure and grow toward over time.

That discipline does two things at once. It grounds your growth story in something real — not viral spikes, but sustained progress toward a defined community. And it gives funders, sponsors and donors a denominator: a number that lets them evaluate how effectively you're reaching the people you say you serve.

This post gives you a framework for building that denominator — and a concrete example of how the math works.

Using TAM to size your audience

TAM stands for Total Addressable Market. In its original form it doesn't translate well to mission-driven publishing — you're not trying to capture a market, you're trying to serve a community.

Adapted for publishers, it becomes a defensible estimate of how many people exist in the world you say you serve, grounded in data you can source and assumptions you can defend.

The base formula is simple:

One primary segment × one primary geography × one measurable proxy = a TAM you can stand behind

A perfect number isn't the point. The discipline of arriving at it is.

The piece most publishers skip: the proxy

When what you care about isn't directly measurable — "people invested in civic life," "Spanish-speaking families who want local accountability journalism" — you need a proxy: a measurable indicator that's directionally aligned with your mission.

Good proxies for community-first publishers might look like:

• Voter turnout rates (for civic/accountability journalism)

• Bilingual household data from the U.S. Census (for language-specific outlets)

• Broadband access rates (for digital-first outlets in underserved geographies)

• School enrollment or poverty rate data (for outlets focused on education or economic mobility)

The proxy is what turns "we serve engaged residents" into a number — and a number into a growth target.

Mapping TAM to your audience funnel

The framework doesn't stop at TAM. Think of it as three nested estimates — each one bringing you closer to a realistic audience target:

• TAM (Total Addressable) is the universe: everyone in your geography who could plausibly be in your audience. Your defensible ceiling. In the calculator, this maps to monthly unique visitors — the broadest measure of who's in the world you serve.

• SAM (Serviceable Addressable) is your relationship market: the share of that universe you can realistically reach through your primary channel. For most digital publishers, that's email — and SAM maps directly to your active subscriber pool.

• SOM (Serviceable Obtainable) is your revenue market: the share of your reachable audience you can convert to paying members or subscribers, based on realistic benchmarks for outlets like yours.

The house graphic says it well: know the ceiling, then build toward it. TAM is the roofline. Your near-term target is somewhere in the middle. The gap between them is unreached potential — and a growth story waiting to be told.

What the math actually looks like

To understand how TAM math can work for a community-first publisher, consider the fictional outlet, Raíz Austin. Here's the scenario:

Outlet: Raíz Austin, a nonprofit 501(c)3 producing solutions-focused civic journalism for young Austinites. Est. March 2024.

Mission: Covering housing costs, student debt, climate and democratic participation — "Legacy outlets cover city hall; we cover the block."

Primary audience: Civically engaged Austin residents ages 18–40, especially Gen Z and younger Millennials navigating housing insecurity, first-time voting and a city that's changed faster than its institutions.

The market stack:

Starting from a base population of 1.97M across Travis, Williamson and Hays Counties (U.S. Census, 2023 ACS), Raíz Austin applies three successive filters:

1. Eligibility: 21% of adults actively follow local news (Pew Local News Fact Sheet, 2025) — narrowing the pool to roughly 414K

2. Behavioral: 63% voter turnout rate (U.S. Elections Project / Univ. of Florida) applied as a civic engagement proxy (our measurable stand-in for civic interest) → TAM: 99K

3. Reachability: 32% of that group uses email newsletters as a news source (Pew, Feb 2026) → SAM: 31.7K — the audience Raíz Austin can realistically reach

4. Conversion: At a 15% nonprofit news benchmark → SOM: 4.8K paying members/subscribers

A demographic sub-filter (38% ages 18–40, Census) layers on top to confirm the primary segment is well-represented in the TAM — it's a check, not a cut.

What the actual numbers say:

Here's how Raíz Austin's actual funnel metrics compare across stages — with TAM as a ceiling, not a direct benchmark:

Stage	Estimated	Actual	Signal
TAM ceiling (estimated addressable population)	99K	--	--
Monthly uniques vs. SAM	31.7K	38K	🚩 Assess out-of-market traffic
Email subscribers vs. SAM	31.7K	4.2K	Healthy
Paying members vs. SOM	4.8K	180	Early stage — conversion focus

A few things worth noting in the data:

🚩 What if uniques exceed the SAM? You'll notice Raíz Austin's monthly uniques (38K) already exceed its SAM (31.7K). Here's what that means — and why it's not cause for alarm. At 38K visitors against a SAM of 31.7K, Raíz Austin is likely reaching people outside its core reachable segment — perhaps some combination of secondary audiences (educators, advocacy orgs, national journalists) and organic discovery. That's not a problem; it's a targeting question. The SAM is the audience worth converting. The overflow is context.

Email conversion is healthy. At 11.05% of uniques converting to email subscribers, Raíz Austin is above the 3–8% nonprofit news benchmark. The top of the funnel is working.

Member conversion is the growth story. 180 paying members out of a SOM of 4.8K means Raíz Austin is at 3.8% of its realistic paying audience — early stage, with significant room to grow. The mid-funnel conversion rate (email → members at 4.29%) trails the 5–12% benchmark for nonprofit news, which points to where the work is: moving engaged readers toward a financial commitment.

That's what TAM gives you — not just a ceiling, but a map of where you are in relation to it.

Two patterns from the field

Earlier this year, I ran a TAM coaching sprint with 10 publishers through Tiny News Collective. Publishers used the same framework, with very different starting points. Before getting to the cases, one thing I told every publisher at the start: you do not need perfect data. You need credible logic.

Think of it like building a house. You don’t need architect-grade blueprints before you can describe the structure — a good sketch with sound reasoning gets you further than a perfect model that never gets finished. Start with what you have: Census data, Pew research, your own surveys, editorial judgment. Build from there.

Once publishers got into the data, two issues were common.

Too small. A local digital outlet in a news desert had applied such restrictive demographic filters that their TAM came out unrealistically small — undermining both their confidence and their pitch.

The instinct was understandable: they wanted to be precise. But precision without proportion isn’t credible, it’s limiting. We rebuilt it using voter turnout as the proxy: population × turnout rate × newsletter consumption assumptions. The result: a realistic near-term subscriber target and a funder-ready story about civic participation.

Too broad. A high-performing outlet with strong conversion metrics had the opposite problem: their TAM was “all adults in the metro area.” The number was technically defensible but strategically inert — it didn’t say anything about who the outlet was actually for.

The TAM insight was directional: reframing to “civically engaged residents” and grounding that definition with a measurable proxy tends to produce a smaller, more meaningful number — and a significantly stronger pitch because it better matched what they were actually building.

In both cases, the data wasn’t the problem. The framing was.

The blocker is usually the deciding, not the math

Another issue that the TAM exercise helps surface: vague or conflicting audience definitions. Publishers who moved through the TAM work fastest were willing to pick, even imperfectly, and iterate from there. "We serve everyone in our community" feels inclusive. It also makes it hard to tell a coherent growth story, align product decisions, or give a funder a number they can evaluate.

Choosing a primary segment doesn't mean excluding everyone else. It means being clear about who you're optimizing for.

Run this before your next funder conversation

You don't need the full worksheet to start:

1. Write one sentence: We primarily serve [segment] in [geography].

2. Find one public data source that approximates that group — Census, voter rolls, Pew research, an academic study.

3. Apply a realistic consumption assumption. (Pew's local news data is a useful benchmark for digital outlets.)

That's your TAM v1. Rough is fine. Defensible is the goal.

From there, your near-term target becomes a share of that number — a claim you can explain and update as you learn more.

Use the TAM calculator

The worksheet behind the El Raiz example is the same tool I use in 1:1 coaching sessions with community-first publishers. You can access it at the link below — submit your name and email for access to a 5-step worksheet.

It walks you through segment, geography, proxy and funnel assumptions — and generates a TAM you can evaluate against actual audience stats.

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The Audience Almanac: A Seasonal Framework for Intentional Engagement

A note of gratitude: This framework builds on a growing body of community-first practice, including work by Hearken, the Listening Post Collective and Trusting News — organizations whose thinking on listening and audience-first journalism has shaped this field.

When I moved from the newsroom into ecosystem work, I was coming from having built something from the ground up — with intention.

At The 19th, Emily Ramshaw and I and our founding team had the privilege of naming an audience before we published a single story. We could ask: who, exactly, are we here for? What do they need from us that they can’t get anywhere else? And we could build every decision — editorial, product and revenue — from that foundation.

That experience of building audience-first, intentionally, from day one, underscored something I’ve carried into every consulting engagement since: our internal processes and systems shape the end results for our readers and communities far more than we acknowledge. You can’t separate how you work from who you serve.

When I transitioned into consulting — working across the news ecosystem with publishers with various missions, sizes and models — this theme of alignment emerged again and again. The publishers building audience-first solutions successfully were also taking the time to get their internal systems in shape.

The work feels massive. Where to start?

A growing number of publishers want to center their audiences with greater intention. They know it matters. They’ve heard the research, attended the trainings, crafted the mission statements.

But the work feels massive — and so they try to do everything at once. They broadcast and listen and build community and analyze metrics and plan campaigns all in the same week, never going deep enough in any direction to see results. They feel behind before they’ve started.

What I’ve observed, across publishers large and small, well-resourced and scrappy, is that audience development doesn’t suffer from a shortage of good ideas. It suffers from a shortage of focus.

This framework is my attempt to give publishers permission — and a practical structure — to tackle this work in stretches of focus that are far more doable, and far more impactful.

Enter, the almanac.

An almanac is a farmer’s planning guide — a calendar rooted in natural cycles, built on the understanding that different seasons call for different kinds of work. You don’t plant in winter. You don’t rest in harvest. Each phase has a purpose, and rushing any one of them costs you later.

Audience engagement works the same way. The four seasons of this framework map to four essential phases:

Spring: Define.  Summer: Listen.  Autumn: Build.  Winter: Sustain.

These aren’t sequential steps you complete once. They’re a cycle — one that repeats and deepens with each pass. The goal isn’t to finish the cycle. It’s to know which season you’re in, and to do that season’s work well.

🌱  Spring: Define (Planting the seeds)

The almanac analogy: Farmers don’t plant without knowing their soil and climate. They select seeds intentionally, for their specific conditions.

The Define phase is about getting specific. Not just “we serve our community” but: which community members, what they need, and why your outlet is positioned to serve them better than anyone else.

Publishers who skip this phase — who jump straight to content production or community-building — often find themselves months down the road wondering why their engagement isn’t growing. The answer is almost always rooted here: the audience was never clearly named.

Key activities in Spring:

• Define your target audience with specificity — demographics, lived experience and information needs, and what they’re NOT getting elsewhere.

• Set clear engagement goals. What does success look like in six months? In a year?

• Establish your KPIs — but choose metrics that reflect civic impact, not just reach. Open rates and pageviews matter, but so do community trust signals.

• Develop a communication strategy: what channels, what voice, what cadence?

Key question: If you described your most important reader to a colleague, could they pick her out of a crowd?

☀️  Summer: Listen (Tending the crops)

The almanac analogy: Summer is active tending — monitoring, watering, protecting. Farmers don’t plant and walk away. They pay close attention.

The Listen phase is about building real feedback loops — not just monitoring metrics, but hearing from your audience directly. This is where a lot of publishers underinvest. They track traffic but don’t ask readers what’s missing. They watch open rates but never text a subscriber to ask what story they wish existed.

Some of the most effective listening practices I’ve seen are also the simplest. The 19th asks every new subscriber: How did you hear about us? What stories are missing from the news? Those answers offer insights in ways an analytics dashboard simply can’t.

Key activities in Summer:

• Monitor social media for what your audience says about your coverage — not just engagement metrics, but sentiment and gaps.

• Analyze website behavior with curiosity, not just performance pressure. What are readers looking for that they’re not finding?

• Run short surveys or reader polls — even a single question sent monthly builds a habit of feedback.

• Show up in the spaces where your audience already gathers: WhatsApp groups, community events, local Facebook groups.

• Read your support tickets, your reply-to emails, your DMs. These are reader dispatches. Treat them as such.

Key question: When did you last hear something from a reader that surprised you?

🍂  Autumn: Build (The harvest)

The almanac analogy: Autumn is the harvest — the fruits of intentional planting and careful tending. The work here is collecting, sharing and distributing.

The Build phase is where publishers often spend most of their energy — creating content, responding to readers, running events — but without the grounding of Spring and Summer, they're building about their audience, not with them. 

When you've done the Define and Listen work first, that changes. You're not guessing at what your audience needs. You're building from what they've already told you.

Key activities in Autumn:

• Create content that is directly responsive to what you heard in Summer — and tell your readers that’s what you’re doing. Closing the loop builds trust.

• Respond to audience feedback visibly and specifically. Not just “thanks for your input” but “you told us X, so we did Y.”

• Build community infrastructure: newsletters, events, WhatsApp channels and membership programs — whatever fits your model and your audience’s habits.

• Invest in your customer service and reader experience. The way someone feels when they reach out to you shapes whether they stay.

Key question: Are you building about your audience, or with them?

❄️  Winter: Sustain (Rest and prepare)

The almanac analogy: Winter is for resting, analyzing the harvest and maintaining tools, and planning the next planting season. It’s strategic — not idle.

This is the phase most publishers skip, or feel guilty about. But Winter is what makes the next cycle better. It’s where you step back from execution and ask: what did we learn?

I’ve seen publishers run excellent audience-building programs and then immediately pivot to the next campaign without pausing to analyze what worked, what didn’t, and why. That institutional knowledge evaporates. The next cycle starts from scratch instead of from strength.

Key activities in Winter:

• Audit your engagement metrics from the past cycle — not just what performed, but what it signals about your audience’s evolving needs.

• Update your audience definition and your KPIs based on what you learned. Your audience is not static; your understanding of them shouldn’t be either.

• Maintain relationships with key community members even when you’re not in active campaign mode. Sustain, don’t just sprint.

• Evaluate your tools and platforms. Is your tech stack serving your audience strategy, or constraining it?

• Draft your roadmap for the next cycle. Spring comes whether you’re ready or not.

Key question: What would you do differently next cycle — and have you actually written it down?

What season is your newsroom in right now?

Before you start planning your next audience initiative, take five minutes with these questions:

• On Define: Can you describe your primary audience in two specific sentences — not in mission statement terms, but as actual people who have problems to solve?

• On Listen: In the past 30 days, have you received direct, qualitative feedback from readers — not traffic data, but actual voices?

• On Build: Is your most recent content initiative directly traceable to something your audience told you they needed?

• On Sustain: When did you last formally review your audience strategy and update it based on what you’ve learned?

• The big one: Which phase are you currently neglecting — and what’s one thing you could do this week to tend to it?

There are no wrong answers here. The goal is clarity about where you are in the cycle — so you can do that season’s work with focus, instead of trying to do every season at once.

One more thing.

The almanac isn’t a prescription. It’s a permission structure.

Permission to stop trying to be everything to everyone, all at once. Permission to go deep in one direction before moving to the next. Permission to rest and reflect without feeling like you’re falling behind.

The publishers I’ve seen build the most durable audience relationships aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated tech stacks. They’re the ones who know their audience with specificity, listen to them consistently, build in genuine response to what they hear, and return to the beginning of the cycle, curious about what they still don’t know.

The almanac is a place to start. What season are you in? 

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This framework is featured in the April edition of the Audience Almanac newsletter. Subscribe at thisisagencia.com/newsletter.