Finding my way into The New York Groove
The hardest part of setting out to fill a hole in the local journalism market of New York City was not doing any journalism at all.
The journalism part I had down already. My career has thrust me into a variety pack of reporting experiences, from chasing down a grisly murder in the swamps of South Carolina to banging on townhouse doors in the West Village to hunt for ghosts. I blogged, I edited, I researched, I filled notebooks with my own shorthand and kept an ever-growing document of story ideas I thought New Yorkers would get a kick out of.
Those were the easy parts. But in the past few years, I realized I was staring at my laptop, ingesting streams of information about how the city was struggling during the pandemic, wondering how to help. As the pandemic wound down and things settled back into a new normalcy, I talked to neighbors and friends and realized they felt disconnected and lost, their compasses twisted by years in lockdown. They craved something brand new that spoke to the changed city.
To truly create something new that would fill the gaps, I realized I had to put down my notebook, and learn how to do this right.
I’ve been in journalism long enough to sour on it, but I just can’t quit. I’ve felt the effects of the changing industry personally: layoffs that decimated newsrooms around me, cutbacks that flash-froze freelance budgets, friends who lost jobs to chimerical billionaires or scorched-earth union-busting campaigns, precious reporting dollars allocated to cover national circuses while our local (much more interesting, imo) carnival got starved for attention. It’s enough to break your heart, if you let it.
But I love this city, and covering it, too much to let the heartbreak sink in. So the only choice left was to start something new, along with a few colleagues who are equal parts addicted to local journalism and patriotic about New York City. We made a plan to cook up something that would be helpful and fun, marinated in the casual tone of talking to your neighbors but baked in an oven of get-off-your-ass reporting, centering real New Yorkers in all of our conversations.
We wanted to create a news site that people could turn to when they needed help navigating the big beautiful mess of a city, could trust for service journalism that would show them how to get and give help, and would turn to when they wanted reminders that fun is a core New York City value. We saw the struggles over basic information during the pandemic (the confusion over how to get a simple COVID test alone is an example of basic information breakdowns that is burned into our brains). We saw people emerge cautiously during reopening, finding themselves out of touch with their neighbors and feeling powerless to help shape the future of the city (voter participation actually dropping in the city following the massive 2020 racial justice protests is another example burned into our brains). Our city deserved better; New Yorkers deserved more.
We had a site in mind: We wanted to build something lithe and responsive, human-scale but ready to scrap on big stories. To do it right, we wanted to make it sustainable and long-lasting; something that could exist independently. Our city, our site.
And we had a name: The New York Groove. Yes, the name is an homage to an incredible glam rock song — one I, not coincidentally, fantasized about playing from my the largest speaker I could attach to my bike while cruising the streets the day COVID lockdowns ended. It’s also the song the Mets play when they actually win a home game (LGM).
The Groove is something bigger than that: It summons the intangible spirit of the city you need to lock into to survive and thrive here. It is the “why” that answers all the questions about why people continue to live here, despite the rent and the trash on the sidewalks and piercing sirens and the rise of $20 cocktails. It’s a dance party in the summer rain, it’s hearing five different languages on your train car, it’s the community fridges filled by local restaurants, it’s the little nod you do when squeezing by someone in a crowded grocery store aisle. It takes effort to be here, but it’s worth it. Baby, you’d better believe.
I put the notebook down and set out to learn the business side of things. That’s always been the most intimidating part to me; I can make words dance, but numbers in budgets and the like always sat rigid for me. I used to run a blog called Brokelyn, which people still tell me they miss. We had a dedicated community, a strong voice and endless enthusiasm rallying around our motto, “Living big on small change.” But we didn’t know how to convert that all into something that could grow and sustain itself long term.
That’s when I found out about the CUNY’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program, basically exactly the guide rails I was looking for. I needed something that would give me the business bootcamp to make this last. I needed lessons in the tools that make reaching an audience easier than ever before. I needed to shake some yellowing newspaper-era notions of content, audience and collaboration from my head and learn how to build a community, even a movement, through local journalism. The EJCP provided all of that in ways that smacked awake the sleepy, autopilot parts of my brain and introduced me to a hopeful landscape of small creators and niche entrepreneurs who are making it work in whole new ways.
The thing I needed most I didn’t even have on my checklist when the course started: I needed to be inspired. I had been feeling the pull of doing The New York Groove for a few years already, and saw clearly its spot on the local media landscape. But joining EJCP tossed me in with a batch of incredible creators from around the world, who taught me as much with their experiences as they did with their enthusiasm and their passion for their own private battles of journalism, solving problems for their own unique slice of readers around the globe. The energy my cohort brought to their projects and our discussions, from Texas to Alaska, Myanmar to Nigeria and lots of places in between, put my own work here in New York into perspective.
I won’t minimize the coursework to reduce it to a single slogan, but the refrain that echoed in my mind throughout the course was that building community was the most important thing. Money and reach and esteem all follow, but you’ve got to find your community first, and speak to them. I was lucky to have the chance to grow a community of other entrepreneurs across the world, each tackling the problem of independent journalism in different ways. It fills me with hope for the future of the industry and shines an optimistic light on how the power of a dedicated community that believes good journalism will always have its place.
By the end of the 100-day course, we refined The New York Groove into a membership-backed outlet that will provide a two-way street for our readers’ concerns matched with our reporting and knowledge of the city. We posted a landing page, and are preparing to soft launch with some weekly emails soon. We interviewed New Yorkers from across the boroughs to find out what their needs are, and what they are missing in their local media diet. We commissioned an ace logo that we hope will let New Yorkers know we’re creating a supportive community of engaged, active New Yorkers—everyone together in The New York Groove.
And now with the EJCP in the past, it’s time to pick back up the notebook and get to work.
