Initially, their coverage will focus on topics such as the cost of living in D.C. and how to navigate city services, as well as on accountability reporting.
The idea for the site first arose days after the unexpected closure of DCist, a beloved local news site that had been acquired by WAMU six years ago. When former staff gathered at a downtown restaurant to commiserate, the wake quickly turned into a business-development strategy session.
“Worker-run newsroom: When?” Maddie Poore asked her old co-workers that night, only half-joking. “When are we going to do this? We need this as a city.”
That pipe dream eventually led to a core group of six colleagues talking to local journalism start-up experts from around the country, drawing up business plans and filing legal paperwork.
On Tuesday, they will debut their project, along with a fundraising campaign that they hope will propel it into a sustainable future.
“All six of us have been working in a volunteer capacity putting just love, sweat and dreams into it,” Poore said. “We are spending our own money to stand this up, like we’re digging into our dwindling savings accounts.”
As local newspapers across the country have shriveled — victims of changing readership habits, an evaporating ad business and corporate cost-cutting — some enterprising journalists have attempted to keep coverage of their communities alive through independent start-ups.
“All these sites are trying to meet a community need,” said Amy Kovac-Ashley, executive director of the nonprofit Tiny News Collective, “and all these people raising their hands are seeing the needs in their own communities.”
Such an endeavor can be daunting, she said. “Local journalism is not something that is easy to scale.”
Tiny News Collective, which offers services to media start-ups such as guidance on how to establish a board and advice on how to navigate hiring and staffing, is serving as the 51st’s fiscal sponsor while it awaits the IRS nonprofit designation that will allow it to accept donations directly.
The 51st’s staffers hope to raise $250,000 in the next 30 days to fund their site for six months as they continue to apply for grants and seek donations.
It will be operated as a worker-run newsroom, a model followed by other media start-ups as well, such as New York’s Hell Gate and Defector, which are funded by subscriptions.
The 51st was also inspired by nonprofit newsrooms LA Public Press and the Outlier in Detroit — which, in addition to covering the ins and outs of local government, has also published practical guidance on getting your landlord to fix your toilet and other “how-to” pieces.
DCist covered the city budget, breaking news and other serious matters, as well as life-in-the-city amusements, such as overheard conversations on Metro trains. Founded as a blog in 2004, it was run by volunteers before it became a more professional operation with a staff editor and a fleet of freelance writers.
Along with sister site Gothamist, DCist was abruptly shut down in 2017 by its billionaire owner after unionization attempts. WAMU in Washington and New York’s WNYC, both nonprofit public radio stations, acquired the local sites, and WAMU eventually merged the DCist newsroom with its own.
At its peak, said former executive editor Teresa Frontado, DCist drew an average of 1.6 million readers a month — though that number dropped to 600,000 by the time it was shut down, which she attributed to earlier cutbacks. About 57,000 people subscribed to the DCist newsletter.
She pointed to those figures as evidence that there is an audience for the 51st. “There was a sadness [when DCist shut down]. We care deeply about what we do,” Frontado said. “But I saw an opportunity to contribute instead of just lamenting the end of a project.”
While the Beltway is home to several massive media organizations that cover federal institutions and national politics, local news operations in the area have experienced cutbacks, including the Metro staff of The Washington Post, news station WTOP and alt-weekly City Paper.
“We’re kind of in this unique position where it’s a city that is saturated with journalists — it has one of the highest concentrations of journalists of most cities — and yet there are very few resources to do local reporting,” said Abigail Higgins, a former DCist editor.
The 51st’s staffers say they aim to “co-create” journalism with residents by having regular, direct conversations about the kinds of coverage that locals want, Higgins said. “We want to make sure that D.C. residents are represented in our reporting, just like D.C. residents deserve representation in government.” They plan to host community listening sessions and hire freelancers in each of the city’s wards.
As former DCist managing editor Natalie Delgadillo put it: Instead of “reporting on D.C.,” they hope to think of themselves as “reporting for D.C., … and you can’t do that by sitting around and guessing or talking to your friends only. It takes a lot of effort and deep engagement.”
The worker-directed aspect, they said, will allow them to try experiments that may have been mired in corporate bureaucracy, such as distributing digital stories through printouts or sharing information via WhatsApp groups.
Although they say they aren’t trying to re-create DCist — and, in fact, passed on the idea of trying to obtain DCist’s archives from WAMU — they do want to preserve some of DCist’s irreverence, by publishing “pride of place” stories that highlight the quirkiness of D.C.’s neighborhoods.
“We were very intentional about not relaunching DCist,” said staffer Eric Falquero. “This is something new, of wanting to take the best pieces of what we did together there, and build upon that and expand.” He wants to reach DCist’s fans but also “look beyond the audiences we had there.”
“We’re in it for the long haul,” he said.
That is, if they get the support they need to pull it off.
