D.C. Journalists Launch Worker-Led Site to Help Close Local News Gap

As challenges continue for building sustainable newsrooms to provide crucial local coverage, a group of D.C. journalists plans to launch a worker-led site, the 51st, to provide in-depth journalism about the nation’s capital. After the closure of DCist, a local news site affiliated with NPR affiliate WAMU, the group has launched a fundraising drive to stand up the new project sometime this fall. The drive hit its initial $250,000 goal on Tuesday. Spotlight spoke recently with two members of the 51st’s management team, Eric Falquero and Maddie Poore. The transcript of that conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

So, why the 51st?

Eric Falquero: We had been seeing a gap in local news for a long time, right? We’ve seen cuts at the Washington Post, at Washington City Paper and Street Sense—the list goes on and on. And that’s just in the last year or two. If you look at the last 10 years, the local media landscape has been in retreat for some time. So, when our former employer became a big part of that, and I was part of that layoff at WAMU, what was already a pretty dire situation became that much worse. And we were very motivated to help fill that gap.

And what do you want this to look like? How will this be different from what you were doing at DCist? In terms of coverage, what’s your sort of North Star?

Maddie Poore: I think we all share a value of community informed journalism, so we’re really going to be working with the community and listening and creating journalism with and for people who live in D.C. We have four main coverage areas. The first will look at affordability, as this is an incredibly expensive city to live and thrive in. The second will be service journalism and helping get people answers to problems and questions that they’re having. The third will be investigative reporting pieces that really hold power to account. And then the fourth will be why DC is such a wonderful place to live—the arts, culture, things for readers to do.

And the plan is to launch in the fall?

That is correct.

Any date in particular at this point?

No, we’re keeping that open. We’re a small team, so we don’t want to publicly have a date that we don’t make the deadline on. But we are aiming for mid-fall.

I read in one of the stories announcing the launch that one of the publications that you sort of take inspiration from is the work that Sarah Alvarez has done with Outlier Media in Detroit and the innovations they have brought in terms of direct-service journalism. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit.

Falquero: I’d say we’re bringing that ethos to our work from day one in that throughout this campaign we’ve been popping up at markets and around town just to introduce ourselves, but also asking the question, what do you want or need from local news? We’ve been trying to use community input as our North Star from day one. But we intend to do more focused work with smaller subsets of community as well as to host town halls and more engaging events beyond the pop-ups we’ve been doing thus far.

Another example we point to is the LA Public Press, as they are very similar to a lot of what we’re trying to build. One of the things they produced was a guide, an explainer of how to get your landlord to provide basic maintenance and other things that they’re responsible for if they’re not doing so. While they were doing the reporting, the community members they talked to said, how do I get this info? I’m not online, the website’s not going do anything for me. So, they made it a zine—it was an article on their website, but they also made it a printed, fully illustrated publication that they could give out and distribute to folks.

You mentioned Sarah Alvarez and Outlier, and they have pioneered the use of text messaging to provide direct information to folks. We’d love to get there, but that is an expensive and time-consuming process. That’s not a type of service that we can offer from the get-go, but the takeaways that we have there are listening to what folks need and how to provide that information.

And it will be employee owned, correct?

Poore: Well, we’re a nonprofit, so it will be employee led.

And is the plan to take philanthropic funding as well?

Yes, definitely. The budget that we have written out accounts for support philanthropically and then also reader support through membership program.

And the staff will be roughly how big when you launch?

Falquero: As of now, we’re six co-founders and we’re hoping to expand to one or two other staff members. And so, the answer to your question ultimately depends on how successful we are with the current crowdfunding campaign, as well as with grants and donors, mid-level, and major donors. We want to build something sustainably.

And in the listening sessions that you’ve done, and obviously you guys have done this work for a long time, are people aware of the dearth of local news about their communities? Is that the feedback that you’re getting?

Poore: I also want to say that we haven’t done in-depth listening sessions, but more popping up and talking with people. But what we hear over and over again is how much people miss the DCist, how much the Washington Post’s local coverage has been cut, and just what has been taken away from people and what they’re missing. And I’m also hearing people saying that they don’t know where to go to find what’s going on in the community.

Falquero: Something we’ve heard again and again at these pop-ups is what people need and want to know. They want to know what’s going on on their block, in their neighborhood, that hyperlocal level of coverage.

And Eric, will you be trying to build in some of your Street Sense heritage as well into reaching into some of those communities?

Absolutely. I think Maddie mentioned one of our big areas of coverage is affordability and that does go back to my work at Street Sense on homelessness and poverty and intersects with health care, housing, employment opportunities, basic income, and education. So, from a topic standpoint, absolutely. But also, part of this vision we have for working with community will be informed from my experience with Street Sense, where you had roughly a hundred people directly affected by the issues that we covered coming in and out of the office on a weekly basis. That’s not necessarily exactly how our newsroom is going to look, but that ethos is what we’re trying to achieve so far as staying in conversation with the residents that we’re serving and reporting with D.C. residents, not just about them.

And what was this decision to launch this like personally having just come out of a layoff? This project has its own element of risk and was that something that people thought twice about in your group?

Falquero: I can say personally that coming out of that layoff, this is one of the few things that was really a bright spot to keep me in journalism as opposed to looking elsewhere. And I was doing a lot of searching and reflection at the time. I think a big part of it too is that DCist was successful. And I’d love to pass it over to Maddie to speak more to that.

Poore: I was the membership person at DCist, so I launched and ran DCist membership through 2021, and then I left in 2021 and was never replaced. The newsrooms were sort of folded in together, but that was never really made clear on the fundraising side. So, people were donating and supporting the service they really relied on, but then management up top was saying, DCist isn’t financially sustainable. Its membership program had shrunk—but it had actually been abandoned. So, I think we have a belief that there’s an audience that wants this work and is willing to support it.

We’re aiming to build something that is sustainable, and not just in the financial sense, but also for the people working on the project. We want to take into consideration the burnout that is such an issue in journalism and work to keep this project as something that’s energizing and feels like a bright spot.

And Maddie, is there anything specifically that you’re planning to do to try to guard against burnout?

I think we have a lot of ideas around that. We are committed to building this together democratically where the folks doing the work all have a say in designing these systems. A lot of this feels like we’re experimenting, and when we have a system in place, there will be pretty immediate feedback on how it’s working once we’re doing it for a while. It’s about creating an atmosphere where we can share what’s working and what isn’t working for us, and having the work divided amongst us.

I also want to shout out people we’re learning from on that account. One is BCI, which is Beloved Community Incubator, who help incubate co-ops in the D.C. region. And so, they’re helping us think through the legal and business side of things, and then also democratic decision making and meeting structure and responsibilities. And then the other is The Appeal, which has done an incredible job transitioning into a worker-led outlet and have also been very generous in sharing out their learnings to the journalism community.

Falquero: One thing I had wanted to make sure to add when you asked about what our team is going to look like is that we’re certainly also going to be working with freelancers and that’s both in terms of contract freelancers doing reporting and, and photos but also doing community outreach through folks. So, separate from reporting, we’ll be hiring what we’re calling information organizers to build relationships with neighborhoods that we want to serve.

And is that something that’s been done successfully in other publications?

Falquero: I think it’s very novel for our area. Nothing that we’re doing is completely new; we’re kind of pulling the best from everything that we see. I know there are a couple places that have done this but the only name that’s coming to mind in this moment is Signal Ohio, which has a community ambassador program.

 

Eric Falquero is a co-founder of the 51st.

 

 

Maddie Poore is a co-founder of the 51st.