The Counteroffensive and State Affairs take different routes to the same model, turning original journalism into professional data products.

CASE STUDY 1 — The Counteroffensive: B2B built on creator rails Tim Mak launched The Counteroffensive in 2023 after being laid off by NPR. It now has more than 141,000 free and paid subscribers and charges $8 a month or $80 a year (driving a majority of revenues). The B2C product was a platform to B2B — not only as a marketing funnel, but as a live demand signal revealing which audiences, topics and needs could support a higher-priced professional product.

The stack: three products, three price points — (1) The Counteroffensive is the consumer product: human-centered reporting for readers who want to understand, and support journalism from, Ukraine. (2) The Arsenal repackages the same access and expertise for investors, defense companies and governments. Annual plans cost $1,750 for one user, $2,950 for five and $4,350 for ten; the single-user plan is nearly 22 times the consumer price. Customers get proprietary defense-tech data and intelligence — including a Ukrainian miltech database — while a separate consulting arm offers due diligence, field research and testing, and investor delegations. Journalists do not conduct the consulting. (3) Build Back Ukraine (latest product) extends the model into reconstruction, regulation, financing and EU integration — an adjacent professional market built from the same reporting base and with an eye to the end of the war.

The commercial logic — Mak previously built Politico Pro’s defense vertical; Politico co-founder Robert Allbritton has taken a minority stake. The consumer and professional products share a beat, reporting base and reputation, but serve different jobs: one helps readers understand the war; the other supports decisions involving capital, procurement and strategy. The playbook is to identify a market with broad public interest and underserved professional needs, then build distinct products for each audience.

CASE STUDY 2 — State Affairs: a Politico Pro challenger State Affairs has raised $70 million to build a national policy-intelligence platform on top of statehouse reporting. Its 186-person organization includes 76 editorial staff across 14 state capitals.

Original journalism is the proprietary input — Acquisitions and new bureaus have brought publications including the Arizona Capitol Times, Gongwer and NC Insider into the network. They contribute source relationships, archives, professional audiences and early intelligence from undercovered statehouses — not simply content. State Affairs says its newsrooms produce 35,000 original stories annually.

The data layer structures what the reporting uncovers — State Affairs processes 180K bills and transcribes 55K hours of hearings annually, mapping legislation, officials and original reporting into a knowledge graph organized around each customer’s issues. Reporting supplies context and early signals unavailable in the public record; AI makes that intelligence searchable, comparable and scalable.

The workflow product professionalizes the intelligence — Customers can assign bills, share field notes, coordinate positions and generate executive briefings in one workspace — replacing spreadsheet trackers, email chains and manual check-ins. It is not a government-affairs team in a box, but it removes much of the monitoring, assembly and coordination work, allowing a smaller team to cover more ground.

The commercial logic — Statehouse news starts at $600/yr ($50/mo), Pro tools at $2.3K/yr ($188/mo) and multi-state enterprise contracts can reach tens of thousands. Its news assets also reach more than 250K subscribers, including lawmakers, regulators and policy professionals. That creates three connected revenue streams: paid journalism; proprietary intelligence and tools; and access to a high-value audience through advertising, events and sponsored placements.

The playbook — Identify an information-poor market or fragmented professional workflow; invest in reporting that produces differentiated intelligence; structure it as reusable data; and embed it in how customers already work. The takeaway: original journalism creates the information advantage; workflow captures the enterprise value.

STRATEGIC FINDINGS The Dow Jones playbook in action: journalism → proprietary data → professional tools/workflow → events/community — Paid news builds reach, habit and trust; proprietary data, analysis and tools turn reporting into professional intelligence; events, community and services monetize access to the people around that market. One reporting engine can therefore support multiple products and revenue pools — but each needs its own audience, proposition and price.

Select new verticals using a three-gate test — Look for consumer passion and willingness to pay; a concentrated professional audience facing fragmented information, recurring work and costly decisions; and a clear right to win through brand adjacency, proprietary reporting and a shared information advantage that can support both audiences.

Use the consumer business as a B2B discovery engine — Audience scale and engagement reveal which verticals are resonating, while registration data, company domains and content behavior identify the smaller professional cohorts with higher willingness to pay. Dow Jones can then apply its B2B product capabilities, data infrastructure, enterprise sales and existing client relationships to turn that demand into professional subscriptions and enterprise contracts — a structural right to win that few competitors can match.

This is the logic behind WSJ’s Business of Sports expansion — WSJ can build the consumer franchise and audience around sport as an asset class; a professional tier can serve investors, owners and operators with ownership, transaction, media-rights, regulatory and benchmarking products. WSJ establishes the authority; Dow Jones turns the underlying intelligence into a recurring professional workflow.