There is a notion in the zeitgeist that the media is the enemy of the people, that journalists are hucksters, peddling lies from an ivory tower of deceit. If any of this is true (none of this is true), someone forgot to tell the soon-to-be revived Baltimore Beat.

“We want to serve the community,” said Lisa Snowden-McCray, the once and future editor-in-chief of the Baltimore Beat. “We want to tell stories, but we also want people to know what’s going on and how it affects them.”

On March 6, exactly one year after its initial shuttering, the Beat will relaunch. Founded in 2018 by Snowden-McCray and Brandon Soderberg, both former staff members of City Paper, the Beat functioned as a spiritual successor, of sorts, to the historic alt-weekly, which was shut down the year prior. Although it only lasted four months, the first Beat—the anacrusis, if you will—quickly established itself in the local media scene with its unique perspective.

“Back at City Paper,” said Snowden-McCray, “I remember I went to the opening of a police station that was paid for, in part, by Under Armour. Most of the reporting was just, like, ‘Look at this nice new building,’ but the piece we published in City Paper was ‘Isn’t it kind of weird that Under Armour is paying for a police station?’”

It is this cocktail of serious and unserious that defined the Beat; reviews of marijuana (“Cherry Pie’s high comes fast and strong and stays for hours—also good for reggae listening”) were placed alongside award-winning coverage of the misdoings and corruption of the Baltimore Police Department (“Grave Concerns: Will Detective Suiter’s Death Bring Commissioner Davis Down?”). Even after a year-long hiatus, its ethos will remain the same, focusing on hyper-local issues that larger publications, such as The Baltimore Sun tend to ignore.

“We need to start treating issues that other places don’t see as enough to be a whole major investigative story,” said Soderberg, the Beat’s cofounder, “as if they’re beats that you need to cover. One of our readers told us that he wished someone consistently reported on lead—lead in schools, lead in housing, lead in our communities. There’s no way you could convince a corporate entity to pay someone to report on it consistently; it’s not particularly attractive, but it’s something that’s important and we have the ability and freedom to cover issues like that.”

Beyond the Beat’s irreverent tone and commitment to Baltimore minutiae—“the nuts and bolts,” as Snowden-McCray dubs it—the paper will differ from establishment media in another important way: it will be a digital-only publication. Granted, this is hardly a log gleefully lobbed at print media’s ashen funeral pyre; rather, it is a stark reminder of the financial restriction that the website faces.

In addition to eschewing printing, the Beat will also forego office space and advertising revenue. It will be a nonprofit publication, supported by private donations (its Patreon has 254 backers collectively pledging about $1,200 a month) and the Baltimore Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ), a foundation that Soderberg helped begin in 2017.

While the decision not to accept advertising money is financially limiting, it’s creatively freeing. Any executive with a baseball-sized windsor knot and a hankering for more listicles and quizzes will kindly be told to get lost.

“As a nonprofit,” said Soderberg, “our metrics aren’t hits or pageviews where people pay to advertise on those pages and expect something in particular. Our metrics are who’s donating and, then, how we can use that money. It gives us flexibility to try new and exciting things.”

In fact, Snowden-McCray and Soderberg will not have to listen to anyone besides themselves—since they’re the only staff members. Eventually, the Beat plans on establishing a deep bullpen of freelancers who, together, can capture the totality of the city, from the arts to the city council.

“I contributed to a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review,” said Snowden-McCray,“and they were looking at the number of people of color in newsrooms and the numbers are still very bad. I really want to be intentional about reimagining how we find writers, how we get talent. I want to be intentional about who we hire.”

And yet, there’s no guarantee that any of this can or will last. Media outlets at all levels—especially on the local one—are struggling to turn a profit; the industry on the whole has shrunk 23 percent since 2008. The Beat hopes to be an antidote to this trend, delivering old-school beat reporting via a unique financial structure.

“These structures that we’ve had in place for decades just aren’t working anymore,” Snowden-McCray said about the state of journalism, but, really, the world at large. “It feels more important to try than to be scared.”

Four months ago, a new alt-weekly paper arrived on the scene just as City Paper was departing. Baltimore Beat, headed by editor-in-chief Lisa Snowden-McCray and managing editor Brandon Soderberg, formerly of City Paper, declared that it would not be “City Paper part two,” but a fresh, new take on the under-reported news in Baltimore.

However, after facing similar problems as its predecessor, the Beat—as it was affectionately known—announced via Facebook that it would be shuttering its doors effective immediately.   

“We launched the Baltimore Beat in November 2017 in an effort to provide a new alternative, independent journalistic voice to the city,” the post read. “We’re proud of the work we’ve done but, unfortunately, advertising support hasn’t been sufficient to sustain us. . . We’re grateful for the opportunity and regret that we are unable to continue.”

Snowden-McCray followed up the announcement with a simple tweet to her followers: “We did really great work in a short time with very limited resources.” She also followed up by  applauding the hard work of her team and other contributors, as well as the support she got from readers.

“I found out I’m damn good at running the editorial side of a paper,” she wrote. “The amount of love, support for this paper, and talent that we were able to put on our pages was insane and the best part.”

For now, the paper will still remain alive online, but there will be no final issue according to Soderberg, who took to Twitter to express his anger and frustration about the decision.

“I went through all this only because I believed we had the backing to build and grow,” he tweeted. “I wanted to change the media landscape here. I thought our publisher felt the same way. There is no last issue, we heard yesterday morning as we were finishing up the next issue and [was] told to stop.”

The Beat’s publisher Kevin Naff from Brown Naff Pitts Omnimedia (BNP), which also oversees the Washington Blade—the oldest LGBT newspaper in the country—and the Los Angeles Blade, said he doesn’t have “anything further than what we released” to offer as comment. 

Since opening a few months ago, the publication has tackled gun violence, teacher strikes in West Virginia, police commissioner Kevin Davis’ firing, and several op-ed’s that showcase “community voices.”

There has been no official word on whether the staff will try crowdfunding to raise money to stay open, but Soderberg is planning a fundraiser with his partner in writing Baynard Woods through their journalism nonprofit, BINJ, to support investigative journalism in the city. 

“[Baltimore Beat] was special and I maintain that it would make a lot of money too,” Soderberg said on Twitter. “Don’t let this deter anyone else from trying. I am glad we tried, and we will see what we want to do next.”

You moved to The Sun after it was announced they were closing the City Paper. Then you jumped back into the alt-weekly world with the Beat?
Brandon Soderberg (former City Paper editor and new Beat managing editor) hustled for months to find a purchaser for the City Paper or start something similar. When he finally found one, he said he wanted to turn it over to me. I didn’t jump. I had to think about it. The Sun was a stable job, I liked my co-workers—who do an amazing job—but we need more outlets in the city. It’s a gamble, but journalism is a gamble everywhere these days. 

You’ve said the Beat will not be City Paper 2.0.
There was really nothing wrong with the City Paper. Other than the behind-the-scenes business decisions. People still loved the product. What is a priority to me, is to keep pushing to get new voices into the paper, and give people a platform for stories that aren’t being told anywhere else. 

Ultimately, Baltimore resident Kevin Naff and Brown Naff Pitts Omnimedia, which publishes the Washington Blade, the oldest LGBT newspaper in the country, stepped up as publisher.
The Blade runs like clockwork. The fact that Kevin believes we can make money—he wouldn’t invest his money otherwise—is important. The Blade, in D.C., got ad calls the first day the launch of the Beat was announced. We’ll share resources—printing, circulation, sales, marketing—as well as some edit and photography coverage. The Blade has been breaking LGBT stories in Baltimore for years. 

You’re starting with a full-time edit team of three—City Paper had 10. That’s tough.
It’s daunting, but not new. Ever since I’ve been a journalist, we’ve had to learn how to do more with the less. Brandon [Soderberg], arts and culture editor/deputy Maura Callahan, and myself will be doing a lot of writing, initially. [Former City Paper editor] Baynard Woods and the Real News Network, whose downtown building we use, will contribute. We also have a small freelance budget.

What about your online presence?
We will put everything on our website Tuesday night before the print issue comes out. And we’re planning to partner with some local podcasts and Dr. Kaye Whitehead [Loyola University professor of communications and African-American studies], who has a daily show working with WEAA. We will try a lot of different things. The way I operate is that I try to steal from everybody, figure it out, and make it my own. 

Where do you see the Beat fitting in the city’s news landscape?
We can’t compete with The Sun in breaking daily news. But I think there are a lot of smaller places such as the Baltimore Brew, the Afro, Baltimore magazine—though not small as those others—that make up the journalism ecology in the city. I think there is room for us in that ecology. The fact that we are getting press releases and story pitches already shows me there is space for us. 

What City Paper items are migrating to the Beat, in terms of content? You mentioned Baynard Woods—I’m assuming you were referencing his “Democracy in Crisis” column?
Yes. His column. Also [UMBC professor] Kate Drabinski’s “Field Tripping” column. We won’t have the “Power Rankings,” but something similar. Baynard and Brandon will continue to do weed reviews. Our arts and events calendar was really important to readers and Maura will continue to produce a comprehensive, diverse music and arts calendar, but it will be more curated. We intend to do long-form, investigative cover stories. I wish we could bring [former City Paper photo editor] Joe Giordano over to the Beat, but we can’t afford a full-time photo editor to start.

Where can we find the Beat? The Sun has repurposed the old City Paper news boxes for its new weekend entertainment paper.
I do want to say that we feel it is important to have a print issue because not everyone in this city has a smartphone with an unlimited data plan or regular WiFi access. And we do want to push into parts of West and East Baltimore that traditionally have been left out in the past. Boxes are very expensive, so you can find us in small businesses, convenience stores, libraries, gyms—anywhere else they’ll let us [distribute], basically—across the city. 

The last issue of City Paper was practically still warm from its final press run when it was announced on Thursday that a new alt-weekly would be launching. The Baltimore Beat will publish its first paper on November 15 with Lisa Snowden-McCray—former community coordinator at The Sun—as editor-in-chief, and City Paper’s Brandon Soderberg as managing editor.

Baltimore Beat will feature print and digital content, as well as classified and display ads. The free, weekly newspaper will share similarities to predecessor in terms of art and music coverage, but plans to highlight new voices throughout the city.

“We’re not trying to be City Paper part two,” said Snowden-McCray. “I want to make sure we are hitting the group of people and areas that are usually overlooked. I want to hand the mic to people who historically haven’t had the chance to have a say on things that are going on in the city.”

The new publication is owned by Brown Naff Pitts Omnimedia (BNP), which also oversees the Washington Blade—the oldest LGBT newspaper in the country—and the Los Angeles Blade.

Soderberg and publisher Kevin Naff handpicked Snowden-McCray for the editor-in-chief position. They wanted to find a voice that was representative and passionate about the city with the experience to match.

Naff says that the fact that Snowden-McCray is one of the only African-American women in charge of a newspaper in a predominantly black city like Baltimore is something that should be celebrated. For her part, Snowden-McCray is eager to break down the barriers in a white, male-dominated industry.

“I am always talking about the need for diversity in journalism,” she said. “The fact that there aren’t enough people of color, the fact that there aren’t enough women in editorial positions—I felt like I had to take the job.” 

BNP will handle all of the back-office operations while the staff of four gains traction, including associate publisher Jennifer Marsh, who previously worked at both The Sun and City Paper. With just Snowden-McCray and Soderberg on the editorial staff, the Beat will draw a lot of its content from fellow Blade publications, freelancers, and staff of The Real News Network (the paper’s current officemate). 

In a time where alt-weeklies are dying out due to declining ad sales and revenue, Naff says that he’s not worried.

“If I didn’t think this was profitable, I wouldn’t be going into it,” he said. “We put together a really great, experienced team. I’m confident in Lisa and her abilities.”

Marsh has already begun gathering advertisers for the paper, saying this is the chance to give Baltimore “the alternative newspaper it deserves,” so she’s working hard to make sure the Beat will thrive.

“This opportunity kind of fell out of the sky and it’s a chance to do everything right,” she says. “Even though we’re just a staff of four, it’s more powerful because we’re all doing it for the love of the medium.”

The first print edition of Baltimore Beat will be available on November 15 at hundreds of local bars, restaurants, gyms, and stores. Street boxes, which will not be the same yellow ones that City Paper was available in, will be coming soon.

“We’re here to celebrate with you,” Snowden-McCray said. “There are amazing things happening in Baltimore, and we want to talk about each and every one.”

This summer, the Baltimore Sun Media Group announced that it would be closing City Paper after 40 years. Since that announcement and subsequent layoffs, the alt-weekly’s downtown offices have become increasingly deserted, with empty cubicles and piles of old newspapers.

While the remaining editorial staff are hard at work on the last four issues, City Paper photographer and co-host of photojournalism podcast 10 Frames Per Second Joe Giordano is documenting his “last days in paper city” on Instagram, giving his followers a sense of what it’s like when a publication shutters.

“I’m not trying to flood my Instagram with depressing pictures,” he told Baltimore recently. “But I want to use well-crafted photos that show what’s going on now.” 

From photos of City Paper’s art director, Athena Towery, to a mini Divine perched upon an empty bookcase, Giordano promises to update his Instagram series until the release of the paper’s final issue on November 1. Here, he reflects on some of his favorites so far. 

“Athena has been at the paper for quite a while—since [the publication’s offices were on] Park Avenue. This photo really represents the bridge between the old City Paper and the new City Paper. I put Athena in front of the roller girls, one because of the composition, and two because she seemed to fit with that era of City Paper—’90s to the early 2000s.”

“Reggie came to us as an intern and he’s skyrocketed up there. . . . Those are his clips behind him. I’m immensely proud of everything that he’s done. He represents how I see the paper as mentoring young photographers and journalist—giving them the space they need to go on and do great things.”

“That was in our former ad exec’s office—he’d been there for maybe 20 years, I think. That’s old-school City Paper—it represents what City Paper is about. They’re in a pretty conservative building, so the fact that he has Divine, the boob, and the butt plug all on one shelf, it represents sticking your tongue out to the establishment. I couldn’t stop looking at this arrangement.”

“The crumpled American flag represents journalism right now. It’s a flag with corporate symbols on it instead of stars, if you look closely. Without getting too deep—with everything that’s going on in the country right now—this crumpled flag, discarded and thrown in the corner, caught my eye. It was just a very potent symbol for journalism.”

Last month, the Baltimore news world said goodbye to WEAA’s The Marc Steiner Show after 24 years. Shortly after, City Paper announced its closure at the end of the year, leaving a void for alternative news in the city.

A new nonprofit founded by two City Paper editors—Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg—along with Marc Steiner started a new affiliate based on the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ). Baltimore BINJ launched on August 11 with the introduction of an IndieGoGo crowd-funding page with a goal of $25,000 to fund local journalism projects. All donations will fund projects that will be published at existing media outlets.

While the Baltimore-based outfit isn’t directly connected to its Boston predecessor, the model and logo were borrowed with the permission of Boston’s founder Chris Faraone, who is a longtime friend of Woods. The nonprofit is operating under the fiscal sponsorship of Steiner’s Center for Emerging Media.

Woods, the editorial director for the local BINJ and editor-at-large for City Paper, said that the purpose of the organization is not meant to replace the alt-weekly or Steiner’s show, but will become a way for journalists to provide local news for residents without a connection to a corporate entity.

“It’s not a thing that’s directly affiliated with City Paper, but it’s definitely coming out of the world of alternative news weeklies,” he says. “The tagline we’re using is ‘A guerrilla newsroom raiding the ruins of corporate media.’ We’re fighting against the encroachment of media deserts here.”

With that goal in mind, to start, BINJ plans to fund three very specific projects, including working with local nonprofit Writers in Baltimore Schools to encourage students to write profiles.

 “We thought that being able to help fund the writing of young journalist in Baltimore would be something that we really want to do,” Woods says.

The other two projects include a feature on the culture of street basketball in Baltimore by Reginald Thomas—who recently chronicled Baltimore Polytechnic’s basketball season in a photo essay for City Paper—and an extremely timely investigative piece on white supremacy in law enforcement.

Multimedia journalism is also something extremely important to BINJ. So far, they have developed a daily news podcast called Baltimore Binge that is released Monday through Friday. The show provides news, hot topics, and politics in less than 15 minutes.

“We thought that there really needs to be a daily news show,” says Woods. “There was a need for something really short, ‘off the cuff,’ and as honest as possible, addressing Baltimore news each day.”

Although the nonprofit is less than a week old—and the founders are still juggling journalistic responsibilities of their day jobs—its founders have high ambitions for the future.

“We’re going to have several different meet-ups where we’ll have a lot of opportunities for people who want to be involved—writers, producers, web designers,” Woods said. “Ultimately, we would like to fund beats, a high school reporter, and even fund translation of existing stories into Spanish.”

Currently, the team is meeting with local independent news organizations that would be interested in publishing their content as they continue to raise money to fund future projects. So far, the group has raised $3,718 with 22 days left to reach its $25,000 goal.

“Someone asked the other day, ‘What if you don’t meet the goal?’” Woods says. “The answer is, ‘So what?’ At that point, we have already funded one story just by raising the first $1,000. Every new project that we can help exist is a better day in journalism than it was the day before.”

Due to declining ad sales, the Baltimore Sun Media Group (BSMG) announced it will close City Paper at the end of the year.

“Like many alternative weeklies across the country, declining ad revenue at City Paper continues to be a challenge,” said BSMG’s director of marketing Renee Mutchnik in a statement. “It became clear to us this past fall that we would cease publishing City Paper sometime in 2017.”

Although a specific date for the closure and future of the employees is still being finalized, the editorial staff at City Paper learned of the news in June.

“We were trying to hold off announcing it because, well, it’s very sad, but also because I’m not sure about how this is all going to play out,” said City Paper editor Brandon Soderberg in a statement. “I’m half-convinced this won’t be the end of the paper and someone will swoop in and buy us.”

Soderberg and his staff started an Indiegogo campaign, asking supporters to fund the paper’s future journalistic endeavors. However, BSMG asked him to remove the page.

“It was removed because it’s not really the way for a for-profit paper under Tronc to make money, which makes sense,” he said. “It potentially introduces some ethical concerns . . . So I refunded the money we’d made after 12 hours—almost 900 bucks!—and deleted the campaign.”

Founded in 1977 as City Squeeze, the free, unapologetic alt-weekly paper targets a younger audience attracted to a more contemporary style of news coverage. In 2014, the BSMG (under parent company Tribune Publishing, or Tronc) purchased City Paper from Times-Shamrock Communications, which had owned the weekly for more than 20 years.

Just this year, the paper’s editorial coverage has been lauded, winning several MDDC Press Association awards, and being named a finalist for two Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN) awards.

Despite the closing, Soderberg is determined to maintain the paper’s coverage of news, arts, and politics as long as it has the means. But severe cuts to the freelance budget will force the editorial staff of 10—eight full-time, two part-time—to carry a heavier load.

“What bums me out is not being able to have those voices in the paper,” he said in an email. “The paper was always bigger than its staff, you know?”

City Paper blogs editor Brandon Weigel said that, while he understands the difficulty of journalism as a business, it still shocks him that the paper is closing.

“The outpouring of support shows that people still care about what we do and will miss it,” he said in an email. “We have never had the resources of some of the bigger outlets in town, but we’ve always covered stories with depth, voice, and passion. And we’ve written about things other places didn’t, or at least in a way they wouldn’t.”

The paper was not only an outlet for progressive news in Baltimore, but also a place for novice writers to wet their feet in the sea of journalism. Soderberg says that it was City Paper that gave him his first professional writing job in 2007.

“I wrote for the paper for seven years until I got hired. It was some extra money for me,” he said. “It was also being part of the tradition, affecting that tradition, adding to it.”

Morgan State University journalism professor Milton Kent said that it is unfortunate that the city is losing another media outlet, especially one that has been instrumental in grooming new journalists.

“City Paper has been really good about providing internships for my students, so having that outlet disappear is not encouraging,” Kent said. “Every city needs a news organization that covers areas of a city that the mainstream doesn’t cover. That’s what their mission has always been.”

Like many print publications in recent years, City Paper has experienced declines in classified print advertising sales, and was forced to rely on online revenue to make up the difference. Other news outlets like Philadelphia City Paper and Baltimore-based SmartCEO magazine have shuttered their doors for similar reasons.

“I’m not sure what will come next or when,” Weigel said. “But I can walk out of here knowing I got some amazing opportunities and worked with incredible people.”

Of course, the repercussions of losing an alternative weekly in a major city go well beyond the current staff and will have a long-term ripple effect on the media landscape as a whole. 

“Specifically, it means one less progressive voice,” Soderberg said. “We’re inching towards a media desert here. Where will writers learn and find their voice without us around?” 

When The Sun announced its purchase of the alt-weekly City Paper in February, it felt like when a major label scoops up your favorite indie band.

Launched as City Squeeze in 1977 by Russ Smith, who grew up on Long Island reading the Village Voice, and Alan Hirsch, who worked with Smith at the Johns Hopkins News-Letter, the paper’s mission initially was to stay afloat. But it was also personal and City Paper’s modus operandi—harsh critiques of politicians, vigorous arts coverage, narrative storytelling—grew out of Smith’s contrarian nature. “I didn’t want my stories cut by editors who didn’t know what I was doing,” says Smith, who sold City Paper for about $4 million in 1987 and also launched the Washington City Paper and New York Press. “[I] wanted control of how a paper looked.”

Now that control is up in the air, as City Paper editor Evan Serpick (a former Baltimore senior editor) admits, “We don’t know exactly how this will play out.” The early signs are mixed. Staffers were at least buoyed by the fact that Jennifer Marsh—a Sun niche products director, who worked for decades at City Paper—has been named the publication’s general manager.

But, the first changes came a week after the deal’s announcement, as eight City Paper employees were fired, including creative director Joe MacLeod, who worked at the paper for 25 years. Then came a censorship blowup that played out in the national media after City Paper’s previous owners, Times-Shamrock, spiked several stories. Still, Tiffany Shackelford, executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, says all is not necessarily lost with the purchase of an alt-weekly by a city’s major daily. She points to the Chicago Reader, which was purchased by the Chicago Sun-Times and is thriving thanks to additional resources.

Smith, however, true to form, remains skeptical: “There’s no best-case scenario, save for the people who at least get to keep their jobs.”