Founding LINK nky CEO and Publisher Lacy Starling has agonized for months about deciding to leave the Northern Kentucky news organization she helped found four years ago.
“Leading LINK has been the proudest accomplishment of my career. But I'm at heart a startup entrepreneur,” she says. “LINK is at a point where the organization is stabilizing, and the next leader will be one who loves a steady organization and continued, incremental growth.”
Starling announced today that she’s leaving in December. She will stay on until her successor is in place.
“I just knew it was time for me to look for my next adventure, whatever that happens to be,” says the former University of Cincinnati business adjunct professor and president of Legion Logistics freight transportation firm.
Starling was at the helm when “two scrappy one-man” news operations — Covington’s River City News digital site founded by former Cincinnati Edition host Michael Monks and Mark Collier’s Fort Thomas Matters — merged to form LINK nky on Oct. 27, 2021. A weekly print edition was added a year later.
“No one truly expected us to succeed,” she says. “We have defied every trend in the industry, growing when others shrank, adding audience while others lost readership, and building a sustainable revenue pipeline when others said it was impossible in the current market.
“The work is by no means done. We still have a revenue gap we need to close," she says.
Starling praised Executive Editor Megan Goth — who had previously worked at WCPO-TV and the Cincinnati Enquirer — for doing “an incredible job overseeing all of our editorial product.”
The publisher’s job, she stressed, “is not an editorial position … This is a job for a business leader, someone who cares about the news, and loves Northern Kentucky and LINK in particular, and who can turn that love into advocacy for LINK's continued success. The ideal candidate will be someone intensely curious about technology and how it intersects with the news industry, someone with experience running and growing a business, someone used to working lean and scrappy (there are no expense accounts at LINK), and someone who can get on the phone and create revenue for an organization they care about.”
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