Inside LINK: What does the CityBeat purchase mean for LINK nky?

On December 5, LINK Media, the parent company of LINK nky, bought CityBeat, the 31-year-old alternative weekly newspaper in Cincinnati. 

It was not a decision we came to lightly, and I wanted to take this opportunity to explain to (literally) everyone in Northern Kentucky why we did it. 

When we founded LINK in 2021, our mission was to bring news back to Northern Kentucky. The group of nonprofits, business leaders and community organizations who incubated and launched LINK recognized that Northern Kentucky was not being served by the news ecosystem that existed: a combination of large newsrooms across the river that only dipped into NKY when there was a car crash, a bridge fire or a shooting.  The small digital publications already here in NKY didn’t have the scale to cover everything that was happening in our community of 405,000 people. 

But in addition to our first priority of serving the NKY community, we also wanted to create a model for how local news could thrive in other places. We wanted to create something replicable and scalable, whether that meant someone taking our model and replicating it elsewhere, or us scaling into other markets as LINK. 

We spent four years building LINK nky into the community good that it is now – a newsroom serving all three counties of Northern Kentucky, covering absolutely as much as we possibly can, from high school sports to our complex elections. 

And in late October, when we were approached by the folks at CityBeat to see if we would be interested in buying their paper, we saw it as an opportunity to do several things:

• Save an important local voice. CityBeat has been around more than three decades, and has served an important role, covering news, arts, culture, music and food in a way that no one else did, and no one else is anymore. 
• Use our back office to support expanded local news. LINK has strong back office, sales and production staff who had capacity to support another publication. Rather than let CityBeat disappear, we are able to use our systems and processes to make it stronger than ever. 
• Provide financial resilience to LINK. A second publication means twice as much advertising to sell, without twice as much cost. That is important in ensuring LINK nky continues to be a sustainable source of news in our community into the future. 

But what does all that mean for you, a LINK reader? What will change for you? 

Not much. 

If you are a reader, LINK nky isn’t changing any of our coverage. We’ll still be attending city and county government meetings, covering the election in 2026, showing up at high school sporting events and telling the stories of our community. We will be able to pull in coverage from CityBeat now, which means we will have more arts and culture stories about Northern Kentucky. We still won’t be covering Cincinnati here at LINK nky.  

If you are a donor, first, THANK YOU for your support. LINK nky cannot survive without our donors. Second, any money donated to LINK nky through the NKY Community Journalism Fund STAYS in Northern Kentucky. Those dollars will not be used to support reporting in Cincinnati. We have a separate fund for that – the CityBeat Press Club Fund. 

If you are an advertiser, now you’ll be able to buy advertising for both LINK nky and CityBeat in one place. We have increased our sales team in order to handle selling in both publications, and we have great rates and packages to reach whichever audience you want – NKY, Cincinnati or the combined region. 

In short, what you see on the page or screen will stay the same, and what you don’t see (the behind the scenes revenue generation and production) will be able to take advantage of the economies of scale a second publication brings. 

As always, I’m happy to answer any and all questions you might have. Just email me at lacy@linknky.com.