In the Substack era, local news gets a second life
Journalism is at a crossroads, and the CUNY program sits right in the middle of it
When I started the 100-day entrepreneurial journalism course at CUNY, I was expecting a crash course in launching a newsletter.
I did not expect to build community with a global cohort of mid-career journalists grappling with the same existential questions about this trade as me.
Many days, as we gathered on Zoom to hear from experts on digital membership programs and narrative podcasts, the underlying theme in the conversations was far more profound: What role did we as journalists play in the world of online content, where anyone can be a creator and the metrics for success are based on entertainment, not facts?
Why South Asians in New Jersey
My half-baked reason for joining the cohort was to launch a newsletter that would serve New Jersey’s South Asian community, a large group of people who nonetheless received cursory coverage in the local press — mostly because those understaffed newsrooms lack the diversity or resources to dive any deeper than to cover Diwali festivals, Indian restaurant reviews, and the occasional hate crime.
As a Pakistani American and lifelong reporter, I sensed a missed opportunity. My community is rich — full of stories about the immigrant experience, economic aspiration, hybrid identities, and cultural adaptation.
These are universally human stories that connect us to our neighbors in this state that is home to many immigrant communities. These narratives can serve as bridges for us to better understand one another. Instead, many Asian Americans in New Jersey say they feel invisible.
I’m thinking of topics like one I recently covered: immigrant farmers in New Jersey who are growing produce native to their diets as a way of accessing the tastes of home. But convincing editors that stories like this are worth covering is an uphill battle every time. It’s exhausting to repeatedly make the case that a community is worth covering.
Why not create space for and written by South Asians in New Jersey, and take the question of whether these stories are relevant to a “mainstream audience” out of the equation?
A more personal approach
The CUNY program helped me refine my idea and answer it in the form of Central Desi. It is also an answer to that more amorphous question of where lifelong journalists land in this new media paradigm.
As a journalist trained by mass media, I always set myself aside to report on the story. When I covered politics, I wrote about a congressman’s hearings on radical Islam and the rise of the Tea Party Movement — without ever acknowledging that, as a Muslim American, the topics being debated affected me personally. It felt like I wasn’t being truthful to myself or my readers.
When I transitioned to freelancing, I started breaking the mold and pitching more personal stories. I wrote reported essays on grappling with whether to tell my son he is Muslim, missing the communal way my South Asian parents raised me, and how my upbringing shaped my relationship with the outdoors.
It was more honest, but I did feel a bit alone, as if I was explaining myself to an outside audience, rather than sharing with others who understood. I was missing a sense of community.
Journalism’s role in communities
I was surprised when a few days into the CUNY course, people began discussing Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone. This seminal, turn-of-the-century book about the decline of community in the United States was a focal point when I went to J-school 15 years ago for a degree in new media journalism.
There were no “entrepreneurial journalism” courses back then, but we would talk about how journalism has traditionally built community and debate whether the internet was upending that (spoiler alert: it did!).
The 2022 answer to Putnam’s book is ventures like Central Desi. This niche digital channel is a place where I invite others to share in more personal storytelling. It’s a newsletter still grounded in fact and the mechanics of journalistic reporting, but that also seeks to be relevant to its audience by being in conversation with it — not unlike metro newspapers of yore. Recruiting other writers for the venture is central to my mission.
I feel lucky that the era of journalism entrepreneurship can enable a single person to launch such a venture, and that CUNY is offering the support career journalists like me need to reimagine ourselves as media creators and business owners.
We are still in the midst of the grand experiment of digital journalism, but I hope you’ll subscribe (it’s free!) and follow my journey.
Ambreen Ali is a freelance journalist and the founder of Central Desi, a newsletter about New Jersey’s South Asian community. You can follow her on Twitter @ambreenali.
