Spirited Media, Avoriaz merge to accelerate local news expansion; Billy Penn, Denverite and The Incline join forces
Spirited Media, the parent company of Billy Penn and The Incline, and Avoriaz, the parent company of Denverite, announced today they will merge operations to accelerate the growth of their local news ambitions.
The combined company will retain the name Spirited Media, and Spirited Media CEO Jim Brady will continue in that role in the combined company. Gordon Crovitz — an investor in Denverite, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and an early investor in Business Insider — will invest in Spirited Media and join its board. Kevin Ryan, founder of Business Insider, MongoDB, Gilt, Zola, and other successful startups, will also extend his original investment in Denverite now to become an investor and key advisor to Spirited Media.
“Spirited Media and Avoriaz share a vision: We are local companies with national aspirations,” Brady said. “We each respected what the other was doing, so we decided putting the companies together to form the presumptive leader in the space made a ton of sense. So we’ll now charge forward together on building a sustainable model for local news, based on a diversified revenue model of events, advertising and membership.”
A third Denverite investor, Jim Friedlich, the executive director of the not-for-profit Lenfest Institute for Journalism, will not be actively involved with Spirited Media. “I am focusing all of my efforts on the Institute’s journalism mission and am no longer an active angel investor,” Friedlich said. Dave Burdick, who has built an intimate and engaging editorial voice for Denverite, remains the site’s editor, and Denverite’s entire staff will join Spirited Media.
Spirited Media now employs 27 people across three markets — Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Denver — with a combined population of more than 10 million.
Founded by Jim and Joan Brady in 2014, Spirited Media launched its first site — Billy Penn — in Philadelphia in October of that year. Fueled by a 2016 investment from Gannett, Spirited Media launched The Incline in Pittsburgh last September. Denverite launched in Denver in June 2016.
“All of us are driven by the opportunity to create a large and valuable business,” Crovitz said. “But we also recognize that local journalism has been the most decimated part of the journalism industry as legacy business models such as print advertising have come under enormous pressure. Our mission is to find new business models to support local journalism by providing news and information in the new ways readers expect.”
Said Joanne Lipman, Spirited Media board member and Gannett’s chief content officer: “Gannett is a champion of local news, and these two vibrant companies are a testament to its continued importance, and to the power of connecting with local communities.”
All three operations will have local newsrooms, local revenue teams and authentic local voices, but will benefit from increased product, technology and back-office scale and access within one company to best practices.
While the company’s immediate focus will be on integrating the operations of the three sites, Spirited Media hopes to expand into a fourth city by the end of 2017. The company will begin its Series A fundraising round in mid-March.
Said Crovitz: “There have been several digital publishing ventures that have become businesses worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars and more, such as BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Business Insider and Bleacher Report. The missing part of the media landscape in terms of successful digital businesses has been local — and we aim to change that.”
“It’s crucially important to us that each local market have its own unique name and feel,” Brady said. “But we also know that scaling the parts of the business that don’t need to be local will be key to our eventual success.”
About Spirited Media
Spirited Media owns and operates three local news sites: Billy Penn in Philadelphia, Denverite in Denver and The Incline in Pittsburgh. The company — founded by Jim and Joan Brady in 2014 — employs veterans of The Washington Post, the Denver Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Digital First Media, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Bleacher Report and The Huffington Post. The company received a seven-figure investment from Gannett in March 2016.
Contact: Jim Brady, CEO & Founder, Spirited Media
- Phone: 571–723–4813
- E-Mail: jim@spiritedmedia.com
- Twitter: @jimbrady
