Hyperlocal New York City publications are having a moment

As media evolves, individual reporters are starting their own.

A burgeoning slate of hyperlocal publications — heavily focused on Brooklyn, at least for now — now offer straight-to-your-inbox local news dispatches that lack Reddit's toxicity and NextDoor's gossipy vibes, are more reliable than Facebook, and provide better context than Citizen.

They don’t have the snark that reigned supreme in many early 2000s blogs, or the over-edited quality with which many influencers present New York City-related updates on Instagram and TikTok. Instead, they’re earnest, reportorial and deeply committed to their respective corners of Kings County. Almost all of them have corresponding Instagram accounts and old-timey names.

The Carroll Gardens Times, Boerum Bulletin, Cobble Hill Collective, and Court Street Journal report along the borough's brownstone belt. In Brooklyn Heights, there’s Pineapple Street, in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, the DeKalb Dispatch. The areas surrounding Grand Army Plaza have the Grand Army Gazette. There’s also the East New York Times and The Rockaway Drop in Queens.

For many of those running the publications, reporting neighborhood news is a self-actualizing act of service that generates a sense of community and belonging. Some have a paid subscription tier and earn at least some revenue, but at least for now it’s clear that all are doing it primarily as a labor of love.

“It's been one of the most fun, rewarding and interesting jobs of my life,” said Amber Jamieson, a veteran journalist who started Bed-Stuy Stoop earlier this year after she was laid off from The Independent.

Since then, she’s covered the crumbling of a vegan empire, deed fraud and a collapsed tree. For the time being, she offers free subscriptions to legacy Bed-Stuy residents and donates 5% of monthly proceeds to a local organization, and generally tries to be very conscious of the neighborhood’s often contentious relationship with gentrification.

"Overall, people have been super positive and super excited," Jamieson said.

She also immediately racked up a solid following.

“I had 500 subscribers in, like, a day,” she said. “ It was very clear that people were super interested in knowing about their neighborhood and reading local reporting.”

Indeed, New York has maintained a relative wealth of media even as news deserts have swept the country and few publications retain the resources to deeply report on ground-level neighborhood shifts. There are hopeful upstarts, surviving blogs and legacy outlets — Hell Gate and The New York Groove, Greenpointers, and the Schneps publications, including amNY and the Brooklyn Paper — still diligently reporting on the boroughs, even as our local landscape has become littered with ghosts of fallen and traditional digital publications like the Village Voice, the Wall Street Journal’s Greater New York section, DNAinfo, and Bedford + Bowery.

But the hunger for neighborhood-specific media is high. With or without economic return, individual contributors are meeting that demand.

“People really care about what's going on around them and, you know, [since the pandemic] they spend most of the time where they live, in their home,” reflected Vivien Kwok, who runs three Brooklyn Substacks — Park Slope Pulse, Cobble Hill Collective and Clinton & Greene. “I think previously there may not have been as much local coverage, and now there is.”

Kwok started her mini media empire after moving to Park Slope in 2017. She fell in love with the neighborhood and decided to start a personal blog about it. After finding success promoting local businesses and bringing neighbors together, she decided to expand after a layoff. Kwok says her three Substacks currently have a combined 14,000 subscribers.

“ I think my mission is really to keep locals connected to where they live,” she said.

Aaron Tomey, a grad student, and Andrew Karpan, former editor-in-chief of the news site Bushwick Daily, run the North Brooklyn and Ridgewood-focused Grimes Square and see essayistic and hard news reporting as a bigger part of their coverage purview. As Tomey put it, “Grime Square leans toward granular, on-the-scene cultural coverage.”

Tomey closely monitors other Substacks to see what’s working elsewhere, but unlike many other publications, Grimes Square does not maintain an active reader group chat. Subscribers still get a sense of community and belonging from the publication in other ways, though, if only by feeling locally informed by it.

“I think our readership, based on what I've seen from our Instagram followers, are people who are transplants who are acutely aware of that, and potentially looking for a way to navigate that in their hearts and minds,” Tomey said.

Jamieson, of Bed-Stuy Stoop, agrees that while the jury is still out on whether neighborhood Substacks are a functional long-term financial model, they certainly supply both readers and publishers with an opportunity for hyperlocal civic engagement.

Her weekly newsletter is currently free, although she does have a paywall on certain stories, and feels that people are far more open to paying for news content than many in the industry may believe.

“I'm not saying that I, like, could afford to run a whole newsroom. Absolutely not. But can I afford to maybe have a day or two of childcare a week?” Much more likely, she said.

“I don't necessarily think it's, like, the future of all journalism, but I do think for people who are perhaps feeling incredibly disillusioned and tired and exhausted it's a great way to feel more connected to your community,” said Jamieson. “People want to know new stuff about what's happening down the street, you know?”