We don't assume every household will pay for news. The engine screens total market households through US Census ACS 5-year data, evaluating localized indicators of civic stake, educational attainment, and community stability to establish a qualified Civic-Propensity Pool™. Scoring evaluates the capture rate required across this qualified pool to achieve operational breakeven.

Equity Focus Lens™: Standard census models often default to wealth proxies. When enabled, the Equity Focus Lens™ recalibrates the addressable pool and ARPU baselines to account for high-density renter and working-class communities, stress-testing viability without writing off historically underserved markets.

Market depth is not revenue. PressViable™ evaluates commercial enterprise density and local business depth via Census County Business Patterns (CBP). If an operating model relies meaningfully on commercial or sponsorship revenue without allocating dedicated commercial capacity, the engine automatically flags an Unstaffed Commercial Pillar™ and applies a structural execution penalty to the composite score.

Grants aren't free money — they come out of a finite local pool. PressViable™ sizes each county's total local giving from two IRS sources: grants paid by private foundations based there (Form 990-PF) and itemized charitable contributions by its residents (Statistics of Income). It then scores a plan by the share of that giving it would need to capture. A plan asking for more than a news organization could plausibly raise locally is flagged as requiring catalytic bridge capital — Press Forward, Pivot Fund, or equivalent — rather than local capacity.

Editorial sustainability requires sustainable compensation. Every roster is benchmarked against Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (BLS OEWS) state-level estimates for the market's state (May 2025): the reporter median (SOC 27-3023) for newsrooms and the all-occupations median for stations, ensuring newsrooms don't buy paper viability by underpaying journalists.

This metric informs acquisition pace and runway risk — it does not contribute a fourth score to the composite score™. The engine applies density-adjusted churn modeling to evaluate ongoing audience acquisition requirements, revealing how churn replacement compounds over time to stress-test market saturation and runway exhaustion.