Is Your Newsroom Plan Realistic? Find Out Before You Launch.
PressViable™ shows you the structural gap between your spreadsheet and local market reality—benchmarking staffing costs, revenue mix, and philanthropic capacity against actual Bureau of Labor Statistics wages and Census demographics.
How the guided model works
Three steps from a county to a fundable plan. Nothing here assumes a subsidy you have not secured.
Local Benchmark Grounding
Select your coverage county. The system pulls real Census median household income, local business establishment density, and county-level BLS reporter/editor wage medians.
Operating Gap Analysis
Enter your proposed FTE count and initial revenue assumptions (membership, local underwriting, local grant draw). The engine calculates your true break-even timeline and structural runway.
Funder-Ready Brief
Export an auditable feasibility scorecard ready to attach to fiscal sponsor applications, Press Forward local chapter pitches, and seed grant proposals.
Test the plan against the county’s own baseline
Pick your coverage county, size the team, and set what you think you can raise. Every figure is benchmarked to that county, not a national average.
Step 1 · Coverage county
Start with your coverage county
Search by county name or FIPS code. Everything else in the model — the wage baseline, the household count, the local giving capacity — calibrates to what you pick.
Built for sustainable journalism, not fantasy budgets.
Our models strip out speculative national grants and assume realistic local philanthropic capture rates, giving founders the unvarnished truth while there’s still time to adjust.