The Baltimore Brew: Interview with Fern Shen

One independent news source to another: our Eric Imhof has interviewed Fern Shen, creator of The Baltimore Brew. Partly a response to how large newspapers are laying off more and more staff, The Brew is an attempt to answer the question of what local journalism will look like in the 21st century.

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Eric: How did you start your project and what were the main motivating conceptual ideas?

Fern: I inherited the idea of creating a local news website for Baltimore from a friend, Doug Birch, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who is now the Moscow Bureau Chief for the Associated Press.

The initial scale of Baltimore Brew isn’t as big and broad as Doug’s original “Baltimore Bulldog” idea, but a lot of the basic concepts are the same. Great reporting, writing, and multi-media by professional journalists complemented by diverse and robust participation in the site by plugged-in site-users from the community—those two themes are perhaps the heart of this project.

The Brew is dedicated to becoming a next-generation hub for news, commentary, and information, a place where everyone can come together around common goals: improving and enjoying the city, and holding public officials accountable. The Brew will be a place for everything that rudderless, cash-strapped newspapers have jettisoned: context, wit, analysis, feisty investigations, stylish writing, and thorough reporting.

I liked this idea and was well situated to pursue it. I had just taken a buyout from The Washington Post after 17 years there. There ought be a way, I thought, to do something about the collapse of newspapers and local news reporting besides moaning and pontificating about it. The need for alternatives seemed pretty clear. With the Sun (like just about every other US paper) losing revenue and eyeballs to the Internet and shrinking in size and ambition, this town had become glutted with great uncovered stories and incredibly talented journalists who want to keep doing the work they love. At the same time, the web was making it possible for so many grassroots voices to be heard: small neighborhood blogs, crime blogs, public school teachers keeping online diaries of their experiences, Facebook pages for all sorts of causes. There ought to be a way to bring all these cool content producers together. And maybe even find a business model to support them.

So I started thinking about how to do it and what it might be called and how it might look. I looked all over the Internet at other local news websites and I got a fellowship to do a kind of New Media boot camp at UC Berkeley. I went onto Wordpress and started tinkering around, eventually hiring some folks to help me come up with a design. And I talked about it with everyone who would listen.

Eric: What kind of people submit writing to your site, and how do you collect posts?

Fern: So far, many of the regular contributors have been journalists who worked originally for newspapers, people like Joan Jacobson, Mark Reutter, Heather Dewar, Doug Donovan, Melody Simmons, and Ann LoLordo. Jennifer Bishop, the former City Paper photographer, has been writing and shooting photos for The Brew. We’ve had pieces from Tom Horton, Rafael Alvarez, and Mark Hyman. But we’ve also reached out to non-journalists with special expertise, like Gerry Neily, a former transportation planner for Baltimore city who has had his own blog and is now a prolific Brew writer covering transit, transportation, and urban planning. Jada Fletcher’s day job is with the city government, but for us she writes about how to find bargains on stylish clothing and other items you might want and be able to afford. The people who write for us are either people I know or folks who have sought me out because they’ve heard of The Brew and like what we’re doing. They email me their posts or sometimes post directly to the site. I write a fair number of items myself, some based on reporting, some more on linkage.

Eric: How do you advertise your site to otherwise un-knowing readers?

Fern: A lot has been word of mouth—we haven’t really done the big push yet to publicize the site, so it boggles my mind to see how many people have heard of us and read us regularly. Our publicity campaign so far has been limited to some emailing and Facebooking. We’ve gotten some publicity from press coverage about The Brew in various places: City Paper, Baltimore Business Journal, Urbanite. Likewise, when our writers are interviewed on their topics (like, when Mark Reuter goes on WYPR to talk about Sparrows Point pollution, for example) or when The Baltimore Sun or other mainstream media link to us, we get some traffic spiking off of that.

Eric: How big do you want your project to get, and what do you see as the short-term future for both your site and others like it?

Fern: Well, if you want me to fantasize, I can do that…. It would be great to have a big staff of smart, well-sourced, full-time, salaried writers on lots of topics, not just traditional news but also culture and the arts. Also, multimedia people to really integrate video, audio, and photography into the site and others who can help with some smart aggregation. Having a vast and diverse network of community contributors from across Baltimore’s neighborhoods would also be terrific: The Brew aims to be a sort of digital town square, wailing wall, and guerilla theater for Baltimore.

We’re going to be advertising-supported so, another part of the fantasy is a vast staff to bring in ad revenue, including hyperlocal ads, from mom-and-pop drycleaners and other small businesses.

What else? Partnerships with some other media and with academia. Community outreach to ensure that our reporting and readership really reflect the whole city, including those without access to computers. But all that is pretty blue-sky. I’ll be happy when, in the next few months, we get the wheels turning on just a few of these ideas: some ads coming in and some money going to support these hard-working contributors, for starters. The design tweaks we’ve been working on are going to help us get started taking the Brew to the next level.

I actually feel the short-term future for sites like ours is pretty bright. There may be some Darwinian weeding-out eventually—the quest for a business model is a life-and-death one. Still, I think we’re all going to be feasting for a while on the starved public’s appetite for local reporting and on small businesses’ need for affordable, effective advertising that reaches their customers in the place where they increasingly “live” now, the internet.

Eric: Are there any drawbacks to this kind of site, as opposed to say, a “regular” newspaper?

Fern: The obvious drawback is in resources. Newspapers are ailing and failing but they’re still paying people a full-time salary to report the news. News websites and bloggers can’t compete with that. What we have going for us is that we’re nimble and freer, able to jettison some journalistic conventions and retain others. We can weave some point-of-view and edge into our writing, experiment, crusade a bit. That freedom to poke around is what you need to find the magic formula, the kind of local news media model that has a chance of enduring.