When DCist was shuttered for a second time earlier this year, several of its laid-off workers gathered for a mourning dinner.
But the mood wasn’t completely despondent. Former DCist reporter Colleen Grablick remembers fellow DCist coworker Maddie Poore asking: “Local news co-op, when?”
“It’s something I had been thinking about and wishing existed in D.C. because I’m such a fan of Hell Gate in New York and Defector,” Grablick said. “After that, it kind of organically sprouted.”
She, Higgins, Poore, and three others who had all worked for DCist in some capacity over the past 8 years — Natalie Delgadillo, Teresa Frontado, and Eric Falquero — became cofounders of The 51st, a worker-led cooperative newsroom taking “the best pieces” of DCist and making something new.
With an estimated launch date in the fall, the six co-founders have been crowdfunding for $250,000 to cover payment for writers and editors and set up the infrastructure for The 51st’s newsletter, website, and community events. They’ve also been holding pop-ups to understand D.C. locals’ news needs.
“I’m…really excited by building a democratic newsroom and thinking about how to build cooperative structures,” Higgins, also an organizer at the National Writers’ Union, said.
I spoke with cofounders Colleen Grablick and Abigail Higgins about making something new from DCist’s ashes, covering D.C.’s majority-Black population, and figuring out who The 51st is looking to serve.
This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.
James Salanga: For both of you, what are some of the best pieces of DCist — especially considering all the co-founders worked in different departments — and how are you incorporating those things into a worker-led space?
We want to maintain that snappy, and irreverent, and “Let’s make fun of the mayor!”, story idea in The 51st. Also, being a news-you-can-use source.
I think a lot of people relied on DCist for basic things — we’d had a weekly series called Track Work, where every week, we would post what metro lines were down when they were down. And those are really helpful for people beyond just events roundups. We were resource-rich, I would say, on … covering things you need to know about just getting around the city.
We want to keep that and expand it into like, you know, “This is how you can apply for this government benefit, because they don’t make it easy to find online” or “Did you know that…if you’re receiving SNAP, you can get Metro rides for all 50% off?” That’s another relic of DCist, is this…genuinely useful information put into this new product that’s in the form of a newsletter and not a blog.
Something I was really impressed about as a reader [of DCist] before I became an editor, is [DCist’s] really thoughtful and critical and humane coverage of crime and of gun violence and thinking about like, how do you cover crime in a city without relying solely on police narratives? How do you cover crime in a city in a way that centers the people who are most impacted by that crime, not just the people who are loudest about it, or the most … publicly afraid about it?
There is a real tendency in a lot of corporate media to sort of be like, “Housing. Some people think everyone should have it, and some people don’t. Let’s have the two sides fight it out.” That’s not the kind of coverage that we want to do. We really want to operate from a place that journalism should make people’s lives better. So how do we cover the city from the perspective of its residents, and how do we make sure we’re really … reporting for them, not on them?
Salanga: How about things you’d like to see change from DCist?
All of us are all too familiar with what happens when a bunch of consultants come into a newsroom and assess how the newsroom could be more profitable. And those decisions are not always what makes for the best journalism, or what makes for the best lives of the workers at the organization … It’s important for us to have a less hierarchical setup than a lot of newsrooms — to think creatively about how we can make decisions collectively and democratically, and how we can make sure we’re making decisions with our community too.
We really want journalism to be more circular. We want our story ideas to come from the community … and we also want to hear from them after we publish our stories. we want to think really creatively about distribution, experimenting with things like a WhatsApp channel to distribute stories, particularly to D.C.’s immigrant communities — can we print out hard copies [of stories]? Can we make zines … for elders who don’t necessarily have smartphones or email access? We really hope to be a deeply community-rooted publication in a way that not a lot of media is.
Salanga: Speaking of community service journalism, you’ve been doing several pop-ups to hear what D.C. community members want. Tell me a little about what you’ve learned.
There is a lot of D.C. pride. That’s something that’s come up in a lot of our conversations, and it’s just not highlighted to the degree that crime is, for example. Another large critique that has come up when folks are telling us what they want … is less sensationalized crime coverage and more positive stories about all the vibrant offerings in D.C. communities. And I think that was something that we did well at DCist, and then, unfortunately, they laid off, like, six of the reporters that did those stories. It was really nice to see that so many folks would come up and, you know, specifically write down, “We want positive news about east of the river.”
Higgins: Seeing things like Nextdoor and being on some neighborhood WhatsApp groups, I was really worried that everybody was going to be like, “Crime, crime, like, crime’s out of control in the city, and you need to cover it.” And we’ve heard very little of that. People have said that they are worried about crime in the city because they’re worried about their, you know, families and neighbors and friends being in danger, and they’re worried about people not having resources, like housing and substance use services and that kind of stuff. But I think, so often, audiences and readers are so much more thoughtful than we give them credit for as journalists.
Salanga: What are some of the more surprising things you’ve heard?
Higgins: I’ve been really struck by how many people said they missed DCist’s events roundup. I wouldn’t have necessarily guessed that local news has diminished to that degree that it is really hard for people to even figure out what they want to do over the weekend. It’s increasingly difficult for them to just get information about what small businesses are having an event, or like, where a party is being hosted, or what new bookstore is opening. Whatever it is. It’s easy to forget how much those basic community resources are really, really important to people.
And [I was surprised by] the ways in which crime did come up in conversations. It was never called crime. It was called violence, and it was in conversations that had to do with how we’re treating our kids in the city and what they need and what they’re not being given right now…The way that kids are talked about in general right now is so messed up, but especially in D.C….the only coverage of kids in DC is how it relates to crime.
But on Sunday, folks wrote down [that they’re interested in coverage of] stopping the violence with kids and, you know, making more extracurriculars that are affordable and easy to access and don’t require cars to get to for kids. And it was just a more thoughtful conversation than you would think is happening if you just pulled up one of the top three stories on Fox 5 or something.
[That said], we have had a much wider net of people who have contributed to what we’ve done so far than are represented as co-founders right now. Not everyone was able, for understandable reasons, to volunteer for four months, and do this work unpaid. Part of why it was important to us to do a fundraiser before we started publishing, [is] because we really felt, with the team that we had, we couldn’t cover the city in a representative or equitable way.
I really feel like we need to come up with some holistic solutions for how journalism is funded. We’re never going to have sustained representative journalism, if so much journalism requires people working for free, or taking unpaid internships, or bootstrapping these cooperatives, because that’s often self-selecting broadly who is going to be able to afford to do that.
Grablick: We also have plans to hire what we call “information organizers” in some of our messaging, or community connector[s]. … Whether it’s tenant organizing, foodservice workers, even parents of kids in these neighborhoods in Ward 7, we are going to pay people who will be connected in those communities and also connected to us, to let us know what’s going on, or bring us into a workshop or a panel or just casual conversation with community members who have story ideas, who have issues with D.C., have issues with local news, so that we can have those conversations and start building trust. … So that’s another form of expansion that we’re looking for.
That’s why it’s so important to us that we have a worker-run newsroom and that we have a cooperative newsroom, where…anyone who comes onto the team also has an equitable voice in decision-making and coverage areas and deciding the future of the newsroom.
Salanga: What other coverage gaps or staff gaps are you thinking about and talking about as you’re gearing up to start publication?
We’re always having to balance these things, big dreams, with the realities of, you know, a small budget that we’re hoping to grow. So I don’t think these are things that we’ll be able to do immediately, but they’re things that are really important to the kind of coverage that we want to do. And we have two Spanish speakers on our team, which is a really exciting head start to doing that work.
Certainly [with] our stories that particularly impact communities that speak other languages, and thinking about how we can translate those and distribute them in-person is one big area — it’s language differences, but it’s also just different information networks too, right? Especially today, when our information networks are so fractured by technology and also by physical things like redlining, it’s so much harder to cross those information lines. And so we really want to be thoughtful about how we’re making sure that we can be in direct conversation with as many folks as possible.
We know the DCist folks who were online to the chronic point, are going to be clamoring for something to fill the DCists gap, but we’re trying to think of what gaps there were a lot of at DCist, and who weren’t we reaching? And why? And I think more in-person events can help answer some of those questions and set us up for really creative methods of distribution that aren’t solely digital.
Salanga: As folks who have moved to D.C. but didn’t necessarily grow up there, what have you learned about the importance of covering it as not just the nation’s capital, but a place where people have lived for generations?
And D.C., obviously, was a city before the White House was here, and it continues to be a city outside of national politics. It’s also a city that’s deeply impacted by national politics, right? D.C. doesn’t have statehood, which is obviously what our name is a nod to, which means that D.C. residents still really have to fight for representation in government, and also a lot of self determination in their own lives.
It was something that, personally, when I moved here, I was really struck by, and I think we have a really interesting situation in D.C., where it’s a city that has a massive concentration of journalists, but the majority of those journalists are not reporting on what impacts the lives of D.C. residents. It’s something that we really feel like is a gap that The 51st exists to try and at least help fill.
They don’t get to know D.C., and sometimes I think this could just be the way [those] people operate, and they don’t get to know any city they’re living in very well. We would love to reach them, but when we think of residents with roots, we think of the people who grew up here, [or] the people who are naturally predisposed to move to a place and be curious, in a very organic way, about why things are the way they are, and what’s the history of this, and who’s my council member, and are going to be more civically engaged, and hopefully pull in other people that are civically engaged.
Salanga: To close it out, what other local D.C. outlets do you enjoy reading, and what gives you D.C. pride?
There are so many passionate people here — whether that’s with their work, their school, their tenant’s union, their local coffee shop’s union drive — that it’s easy to find your niche if you look for it. It’s such a vibrant city full of people who really care about the place they live.
So many things make me proud to live in D.C. People who live here are fiercely protective of the city, in part because it gets a bad rap from outsiders who conflate it with Beltway politics, or with conservative disinformation campaigns about crime.
It’s a town where people deeply, deeply care about things. Whether it’s their federal job, their tenant’s union, their local park, a nonprofit they started — D.C. residents are so passionate about whatever they spend their life doing. It’s an incredible place to launch a local news outlet because people always want to know more about the world around them. It’s a town full of nerds.
D.C.’s lack of statehood and the often negative impacts of the federal government on the lives of residents has created a deep spirit of resistance and civic engagement here. People understand intimately how politics impacts the lives of everyday people, and they very often want to be a part of changing it for the better.
James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective, where this post was originally published, and the podcast producer at The Sick Times.
