Hours lost to assembly
Copying links, reformatting text, chasing images. Your editors are doing production work instead of editorial work.
VOL. I
·
ISSUE 01
·
THE PUBLISHER'S EDITION
SOFTWARE FOR LOCAL MEDIA
Built for local publishers
Your next issue. Ready in 15 minutes.
Connect your sources, build in your voice, and produce a newsletter your community actually reads. No production team required.
What is lightbreak
The publishing tool your newsroom has been missing.
Most local media newsletters look like an afterthought. Someone pulls links into an email, adds a logo, and hits send. Readers notice. Advertisers notice. Growth stalls.
lightbreak sits between your content and your email platform. Connect your sources once. Your team selects the stories that matter, the platform formats them in your voice, and the issue is ready in minutes, not hours.
The promise
We handle the three hours of production work that happens before you hit send.
From the publishers
— lightbreak team
The problem
The state of newsletter production
Newsletter production hasn't changed in fifteen years.
Your team is spending hours each week on work that should take minutes.
Inconsistent quality
Every issue looks slightly different depending on who built it. Your newsletter brand feels scattered, and readers disengage.
Strong content, weak presentation
You have great stories and real sources. The path from content to a polished issue is still a manual grind.
Sponsorship revenue slipping
Missed placements, double-booked slots, invoices tracked in spreadsheets. Every missed placement is money left on the table.
The result: fewer issues, lower quality, slower growth.
How it works
From source to send
Connect once. Publish consistently.
01
Step one
Connect your sources
Link your RSS feeds, YouTube channels, event calendars, and data sources. Fresh content flows in automatically, every day.
02
Step two
Set your templates
Build your publication's layout once. Sections, voice, and brand stay locked so every issue looks intentional.
03
Step three
Build the issue
Select the stories that matter. The platform writes summaries in your voice. Review, refine, done.
04
Step four
Publish to your platform
Export directly to Beehiiv, Mailchimp, Substack, or ConvertKit. Your subscribers stay exactly where they are.
Built for publishers
What's inside
Everything a working newsroom needs.
The four tools your team will actually use on a Thursday morning.
01 · Content sources
Every source your reporters already use.
RSS feeds, YouTube channels, event calendars, Zillow listings, Google Drive. Connect once, content flows in daily. No more copy-paste from a dozen browser tabs.
RSS
YouTube
Calendars
Zillow
Drive
→
lightbreak
02 · Sponsor management
Every placement, every dollar, in one ledger.
Track sponsors, booked dates, and creative assets in one place. See your full inventory at a glance. No double-booking, no missed deadlines, no spreadsheets.
Slot · Issue 142
Sponsor
Status
Rate
Top banner
First National Bank
Booked
$850
Mid-issue
Maple Ridge Dental
Booked
$400
Featured local
Hometown Realty
Sold out
$600
Classifieds
3 of 5 sold
Partial
$285
Bottom banner
Available · suggested $300
Open
—
Total booked · Issue 142
$2,135
03 · Templates
Brand consistency, every single issue.
Build your publication's templates once. Every issue your team produces matches your brand, whether it's your editor or a part-time contributor building that week's edition.
Hudson Local
SCHOOLS
Kingston Scoop
CIVIC DESK
Main & Walnut
FRONT PAGE
04 · Your existing platform
One click to your email tool.
lightbreak is where you build the issue. Your email platform is where you send it. We push directly to Beehiiv, Mailchimp, Substack, or ConvertKit. Your subscriber list stays put.
b
beehiiv
✓ One-click
M
Mailchimp
✓ One-click
S
Substack
✓ One-click
CK
ConvertKit
✓ One-click
No migration required
A direct upstream
Keep the platform you already use. Just add lightbreak.
We're not asking you to abandon your email platform. Your subscribers are there, your delivery history is there, your team already knows how to use it. lightbreak sits upstream.
The pipeline
Your sources → lightbreak → your email platform.
1
Your sources
The places your reporters and editors already file from, every day.
→
2
lightbreak
Build the issue. Place sponsors. Format in your voice. Ready for send in minutes.
→
3
Your email platform
Push to the tool you already pay for. Subscribers, history, deliverability — untouched.
In plain English
Your email platform handles delivery. lightbreak handles everything that comes before it.
From publishers using it
In their own words
The Thursday afternoon is back.
I used to block off my entire Thursday afternoon just to build our community newsletter. Now I'm done by lunch. The consistency alone is worth it.
MH
Mariah Hartberg
Belleville Gazette · 6,400 subs
I run three local publications and was about to drop two of them. lightbreak let me keep all three running. What used to take 2 to 3 hours per newsletter now takes about 30 minutes.
AG
Anita Gutierrez
Kingston Community Scoop · 9,200 subs
The sponsor CRM alone pays for itself. I was tracking everything in a spreadsheet and constantly worried about double-booking. Now I can see at a glance what's sold and what's available.
SB
Shane Brady
YourCity Today · 12,000 subs
Why we built this
From our own newsrooms
We're publishers too. We built the tool we needed.
lightbreak came out of our own newsrooms. We were running 20+ local publications with over 200,000 subscribers and couldn't find a tool that actually solved the production problem. So we built one.
Every feature here exists because we needed it on a Thursday morning at 7am, with two hours to deadline and a part-time contributor on the keyboard. If it didn't earn its place in our own newsroom, it didn't ship.
0
Publications on platform
0
Subscribers served
0min
Average issue build time
$0
Cost to migrate
Take this with you · The publisher's coupon
Your next issue could take 15 minutes.
See lightbreak with your own publications. We'll walk you through the setup and answer every question your team has.
Prefer to hand off production entirely? We also run a done-for-you newsletter service. Get in touch.