Iowa Starting Line: 10 years of doing things differently. What you can learn.

We’ve built up an important community that has stood up for Iowans.

What a world.

Amidst all the stupidity and suffering so far in 2025, our team has had one small reason to celebrate: Iowa Starting Line turned 10 years old earlier this year.

It’s a minor miracle that Starting Line has survived this long—launching a left-leaning news site in this difficult time for journalism wasn’t the easiest endeavor, nor was building it out into a real newsroom of full-time, creative Iowa reporters.

During those ten years, we’ve covered the most chaotic and tumultuous time for Iowa and national politics in generations.

And if you’re anything like me, the aspect that’s driven you the most mad during that time has been the complete inability of otherwise good people and institutions to change and evolve to confront the crisis consuming our nation.

Meanwhile, Starting Line has looked different every single year of our existence, constantly adapting to new social media realities and how people consume their news. It’s what I’m most proud of in this work—we are always thinking through the best strategy of how to reach Iowans, which has changed drastically in the past decade.

I have many thoughts on the state of the world and what people could be doing differently, but I figure what might be most helpful is to talk openly about our thought process over the years. Perhaps by explaining how we’ve analyzed and adapted in our little corner of the world, it can give you some ideas to do the same in your work.

When I launched Starting Line in 2015, the immediate question was this: How do you get enough people to read your brand-new website? The answer was: You don’t. You get your reporting out to other news outlets who have far larger audiences.

Starting Line began as an insider politics site, using my knowledge from working in Iowa politics to explain how the Iowa Caucus was really playing out. Those insights attracted a loyal audience of state and national reporters, as well as various influential political people. 

Then, when we broke an important Iowa politics story, other outlets would pick up our reporting. Our stories regularly generated coverage from CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and nearly every Iowa outlet, spreading our original news to millions, far beyond our initial audience.

When 2017 rolled around, Republicans took complete control of the Iowa Legislature and implemented their agenda. I switched from writing in-depth stories to more quick-hit pieces, usually under 800 words, to cover the many bills that drew backlash. Our Facebook page and website traffic exploded, with our website hits going from 593,000 in 2016 to 1,815,000 in 2017. 

I got serious about the business side in 2019 and was able to expand from what was basically a one-person blog to a fully-fledged newsroom, with six full-time staff and about a dozen part-time. Covering the 2020 Iowa Caucus was fun and brought even more national attention to our coverage, though our real focus was on Iowa campaigns.

However, after the 2020 elections in Iowa, it was time for serious reflection. Things weren’t working. While our website traffic was growing and our stories kept getting picked up in Iowa and nationally, the reality was that too many Iowans simply don’t follow their local news outlets anymore. 

How people consume their news has drastically changed. They’re not subscribed to their local newspapers, and many don’t watch their TV evening news. Few people read 800-word stories, much less 2,000-word ones. 

I personally reject the notion that these are “low-info” voters, which I think is insulting. They actually get a lot of news and information in their social media feeds. Some of what pops up is straight-up misinformation, but the bigger problem is it’s a lot of national, hyper-partisan, or culture-war crap.

To reconnect Iowans with their local/state news, we needed to switch to a social-first reporting strategy, to produce news that would organically show up in Iowans’ social media algorithms and inform them in whichever online format they favored. During this time, Starting Line joined the COURIER Newsroom network, which was working on this exact problem.

We also started mixing in community and lifestyle content to grow our audience, with the idea that a politics-only news outlet will only attract people already interested in politics. Bring them in with the fun stuff, then deliver them the serious.

The results were immediate. We focused on Facebook first, where we mixed in infographics, videos, quote cards and more into our feed. Our 2021 impressions and engagements jumped 10 times once we switched our strategy mid-year.

The next year, in 2022, we expanded to TikTok and saw similar success. We brought on local influencers and our staff now produce presenter-led explainer content to break down complex topics. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised with how well our Instagram page does—few state news outlets format their news for IG, but our team has accumulated 22,000 followers and garnered 5.3 million views there last year.

On both platforms, we were also reaching many younger Iowans. We’ve heard personally from many young Iowans that Starting Line was their first source for Iowa political news. That included Avery, who now works for Starting Line and makes excellent social content.

All in all, for 2023, our four-person staff generated 51.3 million impressions, 22.4 million video views and 3.7 million engagements across our social media profiles. That is… a lot. 

We are already at 13.8 million video views for 2025.

Short video clips are how many Americans like to view their news these days. Others prefer infographics or an Instagram carousel. Some like podcasts. The audience for each of these social platforms varies, so it’s key to be present on each with specifically-formatted content for them.

Perhaps most importantly, it is largely Iowans who are engaging on these platforms. We de-emphasized our Twitter/X usage, as when things go viral there, it largely goes straight up into the national liberal bubble. We have consistently seen in our data that when content blows up on our TikTok, Instagram and Facebook feeds, it goes wide instead of high, reaching people in Iowa. 

There is one other graph that I think is illustrative of this approach. Below is the number of public Facebook engagements that the four main online political news outlets in Iowa have received in the first three months of 2025. 

And this is the comparison for all of 2024:

I have shown versions of these graphs to Iowa liberal activists in recent years, and many of them simply cannot believe it. They and all their political friends regularly read and discuss in-depth Iowa analysis pieces that we don’t do much of anymore. So how does Starting Line have so much more engagement?

But therein lies one of my points: Many of the highly-engaged, highly-educated liberals in Iowa do not realize just how small the online bubble they exist in is. How they consume their news is significantly different from how most Iowans do, which can explain at least some of why recent electoral results have disappointed them (I mean, it’s also ’cause more people here believe in conservative ideas than we’d like to admit).

Some of it, though, is because this news and information simply isn’t reaching enough Iowans.

That’s the problem we’ve been trying to solve. How do you break out of the liberal bubble and get in front of non-activist Iowans? It’s the same problem as at the outset of Starting Line’s run, the solution is just doing it in a direct, mass-audience approach.

Other new projects of ours include more personality-focused reporting. Amie’s email newsletters are downright hilarious at times and are always an engaging way to read Iowa news (really, you should sign up for them if you haven’t). Zach’s video dispatches from the Capitol are becoming must-watch content on our feeds.

This fits the new media strategy of “people trust people.” Brands are less important online these days, with many people placing their faith in individual creators.

We’re constantly adapting and changing our strategy each year to the new realities of the day. I’ve certainly made mistakes over the years, but we always endeavored to not often repeat them, and to not keep doing the same thing, over and over again, just because that’s what’s always done. 

So, I hope talking through how we have done frequent self-reflection, adaptation, and strategy retooling can be of use to others in their work.

And by the way—rant incoming—that is not simply advice for journalists or Democratic organizations or candidates. Everyone would do well to consider it. 

What frustrated me most after Donald Trump’s 2024 victory was watching everyone—be it party officials, suburban liberals, online commentators, lefty activists, consultants, MSNBC-watchers, centrist Democrats—all react in the exact way you could predict beforehand. Doubling down, tripling down, quadrupling down on their previously-held beliefs, that had only everyone listened to them, it wouldn’t have happened.

And as long as people stay in their own little bubbles, whether it be their social feeds or text-message groups, it means you are always right while everyone else is always wrong. Liberals/progressives like to think social media only negatively manipulates those on the right—they’re wrong. And the problem of the algorithm pushing us into smaller bubbles and echo chambers is only getting worse and making it that much harder for anything to change.

The hard truth is this: Everyone is screwing up. Everyone. All in their own, unique ways. 

And you cannot demand nor expect Democratic leaders to change if you yourself can’t reevaluate whether what you’re doing is actually effective or not. 

Anyway, rant over. Sorry about that.

Now, if you appreciate Starting Line’s mission and constant efforts to better ourselves, please donate to our newsroom. If you’re the type that’s able to give large amounts, consider writing a larger check (reach out to [email protected] and we’ll get you connected with the right person).

Starting Line has come a long way since we were just scrapping by in our early years (funded in no small part by me going into crippling personal credit card debt). However, while we’ve had a strong 10 years, there’s never a guarantee we have an 11th without your help. We pay full-time salaries here for talented journalists, and it’s crucial we have in-state financial support.

Finally, on a personal note, yesterday was my last day at COURIER Newsroom and Iowa Starting Line, at least for a long while. I am taking a much-needed break from work and (gestures broadly) all of this, through at least the end of 2025. I pulled 60-80 hour weeks for the first six and a half years straight of Starting Line, with barely any breaks, and I never really recovered. I’m finally taking some time to spend with my family, travel, reconnect with friends who got used to never seeing me, and just try to get healthy overall. I’ll then see if I want to jump back in—I still have plenty of ideas, just no energy to implement them.

It’s been a wild ride the past decade, and I hope this news outlet that a dozen friends and I brainstormed upstairs at the Red Monk bar in late 2014 has been of some benefit to you and your Iowa neighbors. 

I am truly too tired to properly thank everyone that’s been a part of this journey, just please rest assured I really did appreciate everyone’s help, support and hard work over the years. Whether you chased presidential candidates around as part of our 2019 caucus team, or simply shared an Instagram story of ours with your friends, it really did matter. We’ve built up an important community that has stood up for Iowans and delivered important news to those who need it.

Best of luck to those who continue on with the work.

(Also, yes, after writing that people don’t read 2,000-word stories, I’ve made this article exactly 2,000 words to mock myself. We don’t take ourselves too seriously here.)