In April, the journalist-turned-venture capital entrepreneur Katherine Boyle penned a widely-read essay that really lit a fire under me at the right time.
A reporter at The Washington Post when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos purchased the newspaper, Boyle has had a front-row seat at the convergence of media and technology in the early 21st century.
She’s now a general partner at Andreesen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley VC firm started by Marc Andreesen, the web browser pioneer behind Mosaic and Netscape.
Boyle has made the leap of many journalists going into something else over the last two decades, as our profession and various media industries have been in major transformation if not rapid decline.
In her piece for the Common Sense newsletter founded by Bari Weiss, a former columnist at The New York Times, Boyle concluded that American dynamism is lagging primarily because we’re just not all that serious about building for the future.
She takes aim at the massive institutional decay and warped priorities that have marked our times. Yet she strikes a tone of optimism in closing when she writes that “We do not need aging institutions to pave the way for American dynamism. But we need American will.”
I nodded my head often while reading this blunt, but hopeful argument. This paragraph from Boyle in particular I want to shoot straight into my veins:
“Building is an action, a choice, a decision to create and move. It is shovels in the dirt with a motley crew of doers who get the job done because no one else will. Building is the only certainty. The only thing we can control. When the projects we believed were Teflon strong are fraying like the history they toppled, the only thing to do is to make something new again.”
I’m among the journalists who couldn’t imagine doing anything else but the news, and that’s what prompted me to start East Cobb News. The idea was to bootstrap it for a couple of years, then ramp up the editorial and business side.
In March 2020, just as I was seeking office space and lining up freelancers, the COVID-19 pandemic was declared, and we all know what happened next. I buckled up to cover a story unlike anything else in my 40 years as a professional journalist.
Building something from scratch is hard enough, but carrying on during such a surreal time was something I never imagined.
There were days when I literally did not know what day it was, or if I would ever write something that wasn’t about COVID.
As I’ve noted previously, we got major increases in web traffic due to extensive coverage of the local COVID response, which affected people in every aspect of their daily lives.
That was a silver lining, to know how valuable your product has become to others, and I’ve tried to identify others as we appear to have put the worst of the pandemic behind us.
As another Labor Day holiday approaches, I feel very gratified to have made it this far, re-energized and grateful to the community that we’re serving.
I hear from readers frequently about how they appreciate what they read at East Cobb News, and I can’t overstate how much that means to me. I get some complaints, too, and try to address them in the same way as the compliments.
It was 14 years ago this week that I left the newspaper business, when I took a buyout at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I was taken aback this week to read that the place that nourished my career over 18 years appears to be ending daily print editions, publishing a newspaper only on the weekend.
This scenario isn’t all that surprising, and other newspapers are likely to follow suit.
The ink-stained wretches in my profession have been nostalgic about the old days for years. While I will always love what newspapers have been (for the most part), the news isn’t about a delivery system. It’s not about the feel of a newspaper in your hands with your morning coffee.
Tactile pleasures aside, it’s about the news, and the best way to provide it and deliver it to a readership. That’s why it’s imperative to keep building outlets that meet their readers and advertisers where they are.
The slogan under my masthead is “Local News for the Way You Live Today,” and that’s my the premise of my building project.
I’ve watched my own industry evaporate in front of my eyes, and chronicled the last couple years of death and loss during a pandemic, tearing and burning things down, the ripping apart of the social fabric and the public trust. All I want to do is keep building, keep making this site the best it can be for a community that nurtured me.
It’s not on a scale of the tech companies or a larger news media entity. I’ve planted a seed where I am, and want to cultivate it.
Most of all, I want to build something that will outlast me. A former colleague at Patch who started her own news site and magazine in Walton County has sold them to the local newspaper.
Her example and determination helped inspire me to start East Cobb News. Cynthia Rozzo, the founder of the EAST COBBER, recently sold the magazine to her advertising manager, Laren Brown, who is carrying the publication into its third decade.
That’s remarkable staying power, something I hope to realize some day. But there’s still a lot of building to do. I’m unpacking the results of a recent reader survey, and plotting out editorial and business objectives for the rest of the year.
For the first time in a long time, however, I’m going to take a couple days away from the screen, Sunday and Monday—barring major breaking news—and absorb the true meaning of Labor Day.
I hope you will too, and I encourage you to stay in touch.
Related:
- Editor’s Note: Why we’re keeping reader comments—for now
- Editor’s Note: East Cobb News is Alive at Five and primed for more
- Editor’s Note: Community and the East Cobb Cityhood saga
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