Local Media Is Dead. But Not in the Bay Area.
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. There's a new indie sensibility coursing through the Bay Area's media scene. There's a realm of new publications that look to the alt-weeklies of yore rather than the big metro dailies or other mainstream media. In just the last month, four new publications have announced themselves.

Coyote, The Bay Area Current, The Oakland Review of Books, and The Approach. Each has a distinct vision and set of contributors. We'll find out what they're about and why this moment has seen so much creative ferment. That's all coming up next right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. The Bay Area's tradition in publishing is not that we're the biggest or the most popular, but that we've always had an indie radical edge in our publications. That was true in the 1960s and in the early days of internet publishing, too. For a lot of writers, though, the media environment has wildly deteriorated over the years. In

In the 2010s, there was at least some hope that digital media would provide the kind of real jobs and interesting work that magazines and other publications used to. But that didn't really happen to the extent that anyone hoped, and much of the money has fled media for greener pastures. So now, a new lot of editors are creating a different kind of media, having learned some of the tough lessons of our current environment.

We'll hear this morning about four of them, all of which are in the process of launching. And we'll hear not just about the editorial vision, but how they see their business models tracking with their goals. I'd argue that we're returning to our Bay Area roots in some ways, and it's a weirdly exciting time. We're joined this morning by Lauren Markham, writer, reporter, and founder of The Approach, also the author of Immemorial and also A Map of Future Ruins. Welcome, Lauren. Oh.

Thanks so much. It's so nice to be here. Yeah, so nice to have you. We're also joined by Soleil Ho, who's founder, one of the founders of Coyote, an independent online newsroom focusing on investigative reporting, arts and culture, and opinion pieces. Ho is a former columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Thanks. Thanks.

Welcome, Erin. Hey, nice to be here. And we've got Justin Gilmore, editor of Bay Area Current, which covers working class life and culture across the Bay Area. Welcome.

Stoked to be here. Yes. Member of the editorial board, I should say. Yeah, I get it right. So, so let's start with you. Coyote Media, collective of journalists, right? Including, you know, veterans of KQED like Alan Chazara. What's the focus? What kind of hole are you looking to fill in the media environment here?

So a lot of us came from the Alt Weekly ecosystem and we miss them. Some folks wrote for SF Weekly, The Bay Guardian, and other publications similar to that. I grew up reading The Village Voice in New York. And we've watched the Alt Weeklys diminish over time. Some were closed outright. Some were just sort of zombified. And we want to bring that back. We want to bring a

Alt-weekly aesthetic to a digital publication and cover arts, culture, the weird stuff about the Bay Area that we think is just not quote unquote important enough for legacy media. Yeah, we were doing a show recently on burritos and I found like a 1990s SF weekly investigation into where the Mission Burrito started. And it's both totally absurd and overwritten in the way that only alt-weeklies could do, but...

deep, deep investigation. That's probably like a 30-story story, you know? And that's the kind of thing that you wouldn't really see in a newspaper, you wouldn't really see in a magazine anymore, but that would be maybe not that particular story, but that's kind of the sensibility you're hoping for. Yeah, I mean, so I had this idea for a column or a series that all of us could pitch into, all 11 of us,

called What's the Deal? And we would investigate these minor mysteries of the Bay Area. For instance, there is a cyber truck that drives around the Bay Area that has a custom wrap that depicts a Palestinian keffiyeh.

And I want to interview this person. What is your deal? What are your politics? What's going on? And that kind of thing where it's like low stakes, but also highly interesting and very local. Aaron, let's come over to Orb, Oakland Review of Books. How do you see your publication and where is it sort of where its roots? Where does it come from?

Well, we're very much in Oakland. And I think that's the funny thing about being in the conversation with these people is that we have so many of the same ideas. Like we're really coming out of a lot of the same moment. We have versions of what Soleil just said. And I think that is the case across the board. But we are very much...

an intervention into stories about Oakland and the discourse about Oakland and an effort to speak from Oakland and to really defiantly champion our position in this place that is so often, you know, Oakland is no there there, right? Like that is both an old story and it is kind of how people think of the place. But then, you know, if you step back a little bit,

Oakland is exemplary for what most of the Bay Area is, which is not San Francisco. And so we're really trying to start from that position and think about like, what can we lavishly overwrite? What mysteries can we solve that are important for Oakland in Oakland? And then what does the world look like from Oakland? Lauren, how about you? I mean, the approach...

What is the approach? What is the approach? We are talking about the approach as a newspaper meets literary magazine meets kind of like underground organizing pamphlet and all of the approaches articles. It's less covering, you know, local news. But it's really thinking about all of the pieces here from different from different angles and in different ways are really focused on how we can approach autocracy, which, of course, is swelling here in the United States and around the

the globe and it's only in print. So while we have a lot of Bay Area contributors and while it's kind of born here in the Bay, it is more of like a nationally focused publication. I have to say, I'm just like totally salivating hearing all of my co-panelists here talking about their amazing work. But the idea kind of comes from, you know, this, I think, feeling a lot of people are having in the wake of the second Trump administration where they're just kind of like letting their human rights abuses and their autocratic leanings really rip.

And a lot of people are sort of like, well, what do we do? What do we do? And I think, you know, there was this real sense of like American exceptionalism among many that like, well, autocracy can't happen here because, you know, balances of power, et cetera. And I think then there's this sort of like shadow American exceptionalism idea that like, oh no, now that it's finally happening here, like we have to invent totally new ways to fight autocracy. And I think to some degree that's true, but the approach is really grounded in this idea that like,

Autocracy has swelled and fallen before, and we're kind of looking to the past and looking elsewhere across borders and looking to other thinkers and other kind of ways of thinking to figure out how to approach this moment.

And do you think like the Bay Area has a special role to play there? I mean, just as a place hanging on the edge of the continent kind of vibe? Definitely. I mean, we've always been at the forefront of social change and at the forefront of sort of progressive politics. And

I would say kind of like out there ideas that actually over time and often over not that much time, like become completely mainstream. I mean, like I'm thinking not of this as an out there idea, but, you know, to so many, the idea of legalizing gay marriage was sort of a complete pipe dream when it passed in San Francisco. And now, you know, the vast majority of people in the United States support that. Right. But I'm also thinking of like the hippies and even like

The murderous gold rush era is this time of sort of like this... The Bay Area is a place where there has always been like invention and reinvention. Justin Gilmore at Bay Area Current. What kind of publication is this going to be? You know, there are... There's such a great tradition of like workers' papers. Is it kind of in that mold or are you thinking something different? Yeah, you really hit it on the head. I think for us, for people at Bay Area Current, our...

objective and our lineage are kind of the same. There's a rich tradition, as you mentioned, of bottom-up, rank-and-file, working-class publications in the history, not only of the Bay, but of the entire country. So I'm thinking of something like The Daily Worker or The Socialist Call.

but also like the Black Panther Party newspaper, for example. And I mean, I would just call this like partisan reporting and partisan journalism. And, you know, the right wing has gotten really good at doing this. They are not scared of putting their perspective out there. They're not scared of saying what their position is. Choose your issue. And, you know, for us, we just think it's about time that the left kind of does the same.

And you all have a quite interesting sort of model, right? You're funded by like DSA members in the East Bay, is that right?

Yeah, so the project comes out of, I'm a member of the Democratic Socialists of America in East Bay, but we have support from people that are not, you know, members of the organization. But, you know, they are our financial sponsor. They're our probably biggest contributor financially. And that money comes from dues-paying members. East Bay DSA, as with any DSA, doesn't get money from foundations and stuff like this. It gets money from their membership.

And I just think that's really important because, you know, what DSA is at its core are organizers. And, you know, for Bay Area Current, we see ourselves as a publication by and for organizers who are doing this work in their workplace and their building and their neighborhood and so on and so forth. So, like, you all also have a different business model. You're worker collective, right? Tell us more about it.

Sure. We're organized as a cooperative. And I just want to note, right, there is a bit of a history of worker-owned publications nationally, but also in the Bay Area.

We have Slingshot and Berkeley and the new Substrate arts media outlet that is all about arts criticism and event coverage. But we're the first, at least to my knowledge, right? Digital first, worker owned, alt weekly style. I'm putting a lot of qualifiers on it because I don't want to step on anyone who has a different story, which is great. I hope there are people that come out of the woodwork and tell me more about their worker cooperatives. But are you also selling pizza? Also a proud tradition of co-ops.

in the worker-owned pizza realm. Maybe one day. That's year five. So, yes, we are made up of dues-paying members as well. You know, there's 11 of us. We pay in for equity, and we all have an equal share and equal rights because we're democratically controlled. And we aim to be reader-supported first and foremost. And so as part of that, we've been selling, pre-selling subscriptions to readers and potential readers through our crowdfunding campaign, which is

shockingly gone very well. Yeah. How much you've raised now? We've raised about $85,000 and we're actually going to stretch it today. So... To a new goal. Yeah. Because, you know, I think that will be $180,000.

We came up with the 80,000 because there's so much happening right now. People's detentions are so divided. There's so many huge major things competing for everyone's wallets and hearts and minds. And we thought, okay, we can skate by with 80 and not humiliate ourselves by failing that goal. And then we made it in a week. And we're like, oh, okay. It was a huge show of faith from the community. And we're definitely going to treasure that and see how...

Yeah. Dream about making this a sustainable business beyond, you know, just the next couple months. We're talking about four new independent publications have joined the media scene. Orb, that's the Oakland Review of Books, or just Oakland Review of Books. The Approach, Coyote, and Bay Area Current. Joined by the founders of the pubs, Aaron Beatty from Orb, Justin Gilmore, Bay Area Current, Soleil Ho, Coyote, and Lauren Markham, The Approach.

approach. Of course, we want to hear from you. What do you think these new publications should be covering? Or maybe it's more, how do you think these publications should be covering our local world here? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. Forum at kqed.org. Blue Sky, Instagram, Discord, etc. We're KQED Forum. We'll be back with more right after the break.

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities.

where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education, and where students bring innovation, ethics, and entrepreneurial leadership to a planet in need.

The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment. They wield the power of the law to protect people's health, preserve magnificent places and wildlife, and advance clean energy to combat climate change. Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking about four new independent publications that have joined the local media scene here. Bay Area Current, Coyote, The Approach, and Orb were joined by people from each of those publications. Joining, of course, are local ranks of publications here. You know, one listener writes in, so you're just going to ignore the amazing 48 Hills and Mission Local? No, we're not. Now we have shouted them out. 48 Hills and Mission Local, of course, live.

longtime publications independent here in the Bay Area. One of the things that I wanted to ask each of you is sort of a story that you've published or are working on that really shows the way that you're going about doing this work. And maybe let's start with Lauren.

All right. We have our first issue comes out in a couple of days, actually. And I should say our paper is going to be free. So you just have to find it. But you can also support our crowdfunding Kickstarter. Okay, but I'll now actually answer the question. One of we have some amazing stories coming out in this first issue. But one of the pieces that really, really

resonates with me and I think it's actually connected to this conversation around like worker-owned cooperatives and you know supporting these publications with their own dollars is a piece by Chris Feliciano Arnold which is about the weaponization of the dollar and the idea that under capitalism the dollar is a weapon how we spend our dollars how we don't spend our dollars where we spend our dollars

impacts both like our own moral complicity and complexity, but also impacts the way the world functions because the world functions on dollars. And so it's this kind of really incisive, um,

kind of delving into that. But again, I think what it's encouraging everyone to do is really think carefully and critically about how we spend our money. And honestly, right now, one of the places we need to be spending our money is in the arts with the, you know, felling of the National Endowment of the Arts and on our media landscape. I remember back in like, I don't know when this was, 10, 15 years ago, when everyone was all up in arms because like the New York Times was going to start charging people to read it online. And it was like, what?

And I think what we realized that like either we have publications that are owned by Jeff Bezos, right? Or we have publications that we ourselves as a community have to support. So Chris Feliciano-Arnold on the weaponization of the dollar. Aaron, do you want to go next? Well, we have a...

One of the things I explain to people when I'm trying to get our vibe across is that we want to have a package that is both a provocation and a very serious argument that Oakland should annex Piedmont. And, you know, and it's one of those things where if you know, you know, and you immediately understand what we're talking about. But also, what if we took that more seriously? What if we actually, what does that, what would it mean? How did it not get annexed? And what would it mean for the city to do so? And what are the actual concrete steps?

At the moment, you know, that's more aspirational. We haven't figured out exactly how to approach that. But we are mostly right now, what we're doing is we have a weekly calendar of events in Oakland, literary and non-literary.

And then we publish short vibe reports from those events so as to kind of both remind people of what's going on so they can go to them and then make those events live on afterwards. So an exemplary one would be one we had on...

a documentary at the Oakland Museum about the Hintill School that was a wonderful documentary. The Hintill School was this native school in the 70s primarily that almost everyone who was a preschooler then or...

there were a lot of people who were preschoolers then who came and it sort of turned into this family reunion. And it was this very beautiful event, both about this thing that happened. And then, and then there was this moment where the audience started filing out and all the people who had been, uh,

who had gone to that school sort of migrated up to the stage and you were watching this beautiful family reunion that was depicted in the documentary happen. And there are these little moments like that where it's like if you were there, you find yourself telling the story like this is what it was like. And we want to capture that moment and encourage people to be outdoors in Oakland in a way that I think print media can help out with. Yeah.

Producer Grace Wan just suggests Annex Piedmont could be one of your early t-shirts, the merch-based funding model for... That is an outstanding idea. Would buy, would buy. Justin Gilmore, how about Bay Area Current? What is something you've published or are thinking about publishing that you think typifies the approach? Yeah, well, first of all, let's Annex Piedmont. But yeah, so...

so hard to choose. We have so many that are up on the website right now that I think really exemplify our approach. But just to, I suppose if I have to narrow it down to one, we have one by Simon Brown, who is a teacher who wrote about what teachers are doing in the public schools in Oakland to deal with ice coming into our communities and, and,

doing the things that everyone knows ICE does right now. So, you know, that piece, what it really, I think, does for the reader and why I think it's really important is that it shows that a lot of the initiative that came from the current efforts that are happening there to deal with ICE came from like normal workers, not really from union officials, nor from, let's say, like the city officials. And what they're doing is getting together and they started a working group and they started saying,

Basically a hotline to deal with some of the issues around the hotline that exists right now in Alameda. The current hotline is only open, I think, from 9 to 5. It's not open on the weekend. It's not open, you know...

It has business hours. ICE doesn't have business hours. So, you know, what we did is Simon went out, talked to these workers, many of which are DSA members, and kind of got the story about how they came together and what they're doing about this. So they're starting a hotline, and they've raised a significant amount of money to basically ensure that people that do get abducted by ICE are able to get actual legal representation. I think it's a great piece. You should check it out, BayAreaCurrent.com. Yeah.

And Soleil, before we go to the phones for a little bit here, how about Coyote? I think it's a little earlier in its trajectory, but anything in the hopper yet? Nothing concrete, but I have this idea that I am going to force us to publish where I

Unnamed restaurant. I'm not going to name it here, but it was the most bizarre, shocking, freakish encounter I've had in a restaurant from the staff. It's an all-you-can-eat place, hot pot and sushi. And you get into this twilight zone where you don't know what you ordered. You don't know what they're bringing. You don't know what size of food they're bringing you. And

It ends up at the end, after you pay your check, the staff come out and they point at every full plate of food on the table and they say, that's a penalty, that's a penalty, that's a penalty. And they say, well, you wasted a lot of food. So we're gonna have to charge you extra. And my idea is I wanna suggest ways in which they can,

punch it up a little bit. They can wear robes. They can ring a bell every time they point at a place. Medieval Times style thing. Yes. It can be a whole experience. If you want to sub out and be punished for being an awful pig, that is the place you want to go. This would be great for their model. So yes, Coyote would be a mix of that silliness, but also investigations. I'm probably going to be more on the silly side of things. Yeah.

We are talking with four new independent publications. We've got Soleil Ho, who's one of the founders of Coyote, an independent online newsroom. We've got Lauren Markham from The Approach, Aaron Beatty from Orb, which is Oakland Review of Books, and Justin Gilmore, editor of Bay Area Current, which covers working class life and culture across the Bay Area. Taking your calls and comments on sort of what's going on

what you think our Bay Area media scene needs. 866-733-6786. Forum at kqed.org. Social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, et cetera. We are KQED Forum. Let's bring in Jessica in Petaluma with a suggestion. Hey there. I'm super excited to hear about these new publications. I would like to pitch that you guys consider covering comedy. I think there is a...

Not a lot of coverage of comedy and so much of it just covers the edgelords and the folks quote unquote pushing the envelope, which I find actually really boring. And I'd love to hear more about, you know, some of the great comedy in the Bay Area. We've got amazing comics like NATO Green, a lot of

comedians who came out of the Bay Area like Amy Miller and I just think it's a rich landscape to talk about and I'm pretty biased working at a local comedy record label but I think there's some cool stuff out there to cover. Soleil is nodding and so unfortunately has volunteered themselves to answer this one. Oh yeah.

I mean, part of the impetus for Coyote was that local journalism has just, you know, there are wonderful local outlets that are micro regional, but they're not funny. And that's not that they're wrong. They're not wrong for not being funny, but it could be funnier. So, yes, I agree.

Yeah, it's interesting. Arts coverage in general, I think, is something that people, you know, like if you have a theater show and it's like incredibly difficult to get attention for, you know, a new theater show, say, in a new place, it doesn't already have an email list to drive people there. And then let's say something is really awesome. How would you even find out about it? Right. And I think comedy is in that same realm. It's almost like you have to know someone in order to know who's good and what to what to go to.

And we feel that the random person you run into at the random place in Oakland is the funniest person you've ever met. This is an interesting one here.

Stephen writes, have you formulated strategies to differentiate your new publications from the onslaught of AI slop articles and to make it easy to identify yourselves and your work products as journalism created by genuine humans? Also, I'd love to see articles from your new pubs start appearing in my Google and Apple newsfeeds.

And where I want to take this question actually is to the why now that there seems to be so many different publications coming out. Aaron, you've noted that it seems like there's a common root stock among these publications at least that are launching.

Lauren, do you want to take a crack at both why now and maybe the way that voice and I mean, you're, for example, just a paper completely offline. Exactly. I was going to say print. And we're also illustrated by humans. So it's very much like human hand made in your human hands. But in terms of the why now, I mean, you know, I spoke to it a little bit in the beginning with the kind of idea where the approach came from, this kind of attempt to

focus us on what's possible, not just the bewilderment of what's happening, but on what's possible to thwart, sabotage, upend, you know, survive what's happening. But I think, I mean, listen, our media landscape is not in good shape. And I don't mean in the Bay Area. I mean, you know, nationally. We have lost like 2,900 newspapers in the U.S. since 2005 alone, by one estimation, like 2,000

23 lost 130 papers. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Elon Musk is running Twitter, where I have to say I used to get a lot of my news because I would follow journalists and journalist outlets there. So it's like we are in kind of a crisis of media coverage. As anyone who's done long-form reporting, as I have done, knows the local reporting, any big national story generally starts from the dogged, intrepid local reporters. And it goes from there. And it's

really kind of, it's very devastating and also sinister, the notion that all the stories that are going undertold and untold. And this notion that like social media or citizen journalism is somehow going to replace that is actually, I think, somewhat false, right? I mean, I think citizen journalism has a great role to play, but so does fact check.

right? When we're talking about, Hey, like, so does making sure that there's some, um, you know, real due diligence paid to the journalistic integrity of the work and that citizen journalism kind of moves into a space, um, you know, it was like metabolized through some degree of journalistic integrity. So that's kind of my sense of why now that we really need it. Justin, what do you think? This is a great question. Um, I think that for us here in the Bay and I'll just speak for Bay area current, like what we're facing right now is, uh,

Life here in the Bay is almost like a laboratory for people in big tech and in real estate to experiment with new ways of managing society and extracting vast amounts of wealth out of the people that work here, out of normal everyday people and making

marry that to the fact that, you know, in the national scene, things are very bad politically. There's just obviously so much going on, but there's so much energy and so much desire to break through from the status quo that

You know, marry those two things together. And I think it's really important right now to look at the seemingly innocuous things that everyday working class people do to deal with this situation. I tell people that don't live in the Bay all the time that they should read what we're doing and pay attention to the Bay because it happens here first and then it's going to happen to you later.

I think that's probably also why some of us are, you know, kind of rooted in Oakland, but looking at San Francisco, because even at the micro scale, you see things happen in San Francisco, Waymo's, for example, or Uber penetrating from San Francisco into Oakland and the rest of the East Bay.

And these things have disastrous consequences for normal, everyday people. So we want to really highlight the fight back and the struggle that people stage against these things and really kind of project from where we're at a narrative that is critical of these various really bad phenomena. I've been totally...

fascinated and sort of horrified that the 2010s discourse around like housing and working homeless people here in the Bay Area is now in Hawaii and in Atlanta and in Boise. And you can see that exact spread that you're talking about there. Let's bring in Sean in San Jose. Hey, Sean, welcome. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, sure can. Go ahead.

Sorry. Sorry. Yeah, Santa Cruz County is also part of Silicon Valley. If the only people who can afford to live in Santa Cruz, Capitola, and even way out in Aptos and Watsonville, you know, work and went to school in Silicon Valley and send their kids to Silicon Valley and own companies and are officers in Silicon Valley, they're

then that's a look on belly of a distant place uh... the other thing is uh... people with disabilities twenty six out of a hundred people in america that is no small percentage at the big uh... voting group uh... a big uh... financial group where we're we're we're not a niche market uh...

And we're never going to see progressive change and take back what we are currently losing without the disability vote. Sean, appreciate both of those perspectives. You know, Aaron, I think I'm going to come to you on this. Like, what would the orb approach be to covering disability, for example? Well, I mean, I think one of the things about disability is that, you know,

it's not an abstract concept, right? It's a lived, tangible texture of life in the world. And, you know, I don't know that we have... I don't know that we have

as a publication an answer to that question exactly but that's what we're interested in is like what is it like to occupy space what is it like to be in a space what is it like to move through a space what do spaces in Oakland allow you to do what do they prevent you from doing there's a lot of times that I think you don't you know it's like the saying like you're

Everyone is disabled, just maybe not yet, right? Like, you know, you're gonna experience what it's like to be locked out from spaces, right? And until you experience that, you don't know what it's like. And so I think as a part of a broader project, we wanna think about like, what does Oakland allow you to do? What do events allow you to do? What are these spaces that we go into? You know, what kind of life does that make for people with different needs? - Yeah, that makes sense.

We've got a bunch of comments here. One, Gene writes and say, another important publication in the Bay Area is the Phoenix Project, an online publication produced by investigative journalists, which focuses on the growing network of special interest groups such as Neighbors for a Better San Francisco and the newly reorganized Blueprint for a Better San Francisco. These organizations are funded by a handful of tech and real estate billionaires who are working to further their agenda that privileges corporations at the expense of

working at San Franciscan. Sounds like a future partnership for Bay Area Current. Another listener writes, I'm curious about the diversity of voices that will be in these pubs. As English language forward pubs, I hope they'll spend time in all communities around the Bay and consider translating their work if that is feasible.

We are talking about four new independent publications that have joined the local media scene. Oakland Review of Books, a.k.a. Orb, The Approach, Coyote, and Bay Area Current. We've got Lauren Markin from The Approach, Soleil Ho, founder of Coyote, independent online newsroom. Aaron Beatty from Orb, and Justin Gilmore from Bay Area Current.

We'd love you to join the conversation as well. We'll take some more of your calls. But what stories or issues you think these new publications should be covering? What you think is missing from the local media landscape? You know the number. It's 866-733-6786. Forum at KQED.org. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities. Where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education.

and where students bring innovation, ethics, and entrepreneurial leadership to a planet in need.

The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment. They wield the power of the law to protect people's health, preserve magnificent places and wildlife, and advance clean energy to combat climate change. Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.

Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking about new independent publications. Four of them have announced themselves in just the last month. We've got Lauren Markham, writer, reporter, and founder of The Approach. Aaron Beatty, founder of Orb, the Oakland Review of Books. Sol Leho, founder of Coyote. And Justin Gilmore, editor at Bay Area Current, which covers working class life. Also an assistant professor of political science at Cal State Stanislaus.

I didn't know that. So one thing we should get to is where people are going to read your publications or encounter the work that you're doing. Lauren has told us the approach is going to be print. Does that mean it's going to be distributed around? People are going to be mailed it. You're going to find it in the back of the record store. Yeah.

So you can subscribe to the approach and have it mailed to you that we're going to have four issues a year, or you can seek it out in the actual world. Part of what we want from this newspaper is to get people reading physical things in the actual physical world. And so a lot of this, yes, it can be mailed to you, but also you can go find it in the world. And that's coming a couple of days now.

Yeah, it'll be printed on Friday. So in the world, I don't know, whenever we start putting it out, Sunday, Monday. Justin, how about you? People, where do they find Bay Recurrent? As of now, the Internet, unfortunately. But, you know, most we thought a lot about this. People's reading habits have changed. Unfortunately, most most of us are glued to our phones. So we have everything on our Web site.

But we do plan on doing strategic prints. This is inspired by, I don't know if any of you guys know about this, the New York war crimes. It's like a little publication people were doing primarily in New York where they do like strategic prints around like Palestine demonstrations and stuff like this, pro-Palestine demonstrations. So we're going to do like strategic prints as like movements happen and as stuff happens.

So, Leigh?

So we are going to be digital first, of course. And we are cooking up some collaborations strategically with smaller publications that exist in the Bay Area. I don't want to name any names yet because we're still negotiating. But there's also a group of folks who want to start a worker cooperative newsroom in the South Bay that I want to help out. And maybe we can do some story swaps because I think experience

extending our reach into the South Bay and also bringing South Bay stories to us would be really amazing. And is Coyote going to be largely the written word or are there going to be other formats that are part of the collective? There will be other formats. We really want to do some cool video versions of stories as well. That's cool. Aaron? Orb? Another self-hating digital only publication. But we have aspirations to...

In our focus, we're focusing on IRL, analog, tactile. But we're thinking to be sort of project-based, right? When we announce that we're annexing Piedmont, there will probably be a print component to that. But it'll be tied not to a quarterly schedule or whatever, but a sort of sense of...

you know, like what moment we're producing in that moment. Exactly. Like a decree that you're nailing to everyone's doors. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. All the Piedmont listeners are like, Hey, Hey, um, there are people who want to talk a little bit about, um, the way that people should pay or support the publications. Um,

Coyote's got a Give Butter. Is that what it is? Yeah, it's really humiliating. It's like Kickstarter, but not Kickstarter. Okay, we've got that. What about Bay Area Current? Have people wanted to support it?

Yeah. So we accept gladly, happily, and with open arms, uh, people supporting us financially because we do pay writers. Um, our editors are not paid, uh, where, you know, we all have day jobs of various sorts. Uh, but you could become a sustaining member or a supporter as we like to call it on the website, Bay area, current.com. Um, and we're going to have some cool swag, uh,

I don't want to give it away, but it has to do with Waymos and driving them off the Bay Bridge, theoretically speaking. Theoretically. So check it out. We really need support. We want to pay writers to get more material out and so on. Yeah. Lauren, I think you mentioned too that you already have a way to support y'all.

Yeah, we're raising money on Kickstarter right now. And also subscribing is really great. The idea with the subscription model is that it's not very expensive. It's $25 for four issues mailed to your house. But, you know, we're printing on newsprint. So it allows us that that funding allows us to actually print some free ones to stash in community locations so that finances aren't a barrier. I want to turn a little bit to sort of why now because it is interesting.

There's probably a lot of answers to this question. Aaron, you have a theory that the pandemic at least played a role in this or that that's a part of what's been going on. Yeah, I think we're in the long recovery psychologically, socially, culturally from the pandemic in lots of ways. And

One of the reasons one of the ways I've made sense of this efflorescence of new publications as we've kind of discovered each other and we the San Francisco review of whatever is one of our one of our comrades we shouldn't mention or we shouldn't forget to mention but you know that there is this there is this long kind of rediscovery of what.

What is the life we're all trying to go back to that I think offers a lot of utopian possibilities? And also, I think we learned a lot during the pandemic about who our people are and what our place is and what the limitations in our current networks are and our current support systems. And so I think for me and I think for many of the people in the orbit, which is our name for Orbeez, right?

You know, we're really, that's a big part of why we're so resolutely hyperlocal is that we sort of came to recognize suddenly like, oh, this is a real concrete physical place we all live in. And we've become alienated from that. And I think the pandemic revealed that and the pseudo end of the pandemic has produced a time when we can, we can,

rediscover it and I think that's that's where a lot of that energy is coming for coming from for all of us but especially for Orb. Yeah. I had a slightly more depressing theory that it just has become so impossible for writers to make a living in the traditional ways that freelance writers made a living and

that the idea of starting your own thing, the opportunity cost has essentially gone to zero. So now everyone's like, might as well do it ourselves, right? If we're not going to make any money, let's not make any money on our own terms, you know? Maybe that's too depressing. Anyone want to address that? I mean, I'd agree with that. This is Lauren. I'd agree with that and also say, like, I do think all of these projects are born from an enthusiasm and maybe that's sort of like,

You know, I think of that Ilya Kaminsky line, like we lived happily during the war, you know, or this sort of notion of like dancing on the graves. Like there's this way that collapse can give way to kind of like an exuberant abundance. And I feel I feel that very strongly with the approach. And I won't speak for other folks, but that's the vibe I get from you all.

Yeah, I remember during the financial collapse in 2008 and the early going, Bruce Sterling called it the dark euphoria. Like the possibilities of the world seemed to open up because everything was collapsing. And it seems like there's a little bit of that here too. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Josette writes in to say, as a longtime Oakland resident and retired bookseller, I'm delighted to hear about these new publications. I'd love to see more coverage of life as a low-income senior in the Bay Area. It seems like a mostly silent population that needs to be seen and heard more. I want to just...

Yeah, emphasize that as well. I mean, some of our most memorable calls have been from people who are in just absolutely impossible situations on fixed income at like 80 years old and losing their housing. And you just think like, God, where is coverage of that? Justin, how are you all thinking about that? Yeah, I mean...

first of all, pitch us. We'd love to hear from you. I just think that, you know, I find it touching, frankly, that there are people that still live in the Bay Area who are not, you know, working for a tech firm or, you know,

are independently wealthy or had the strange misfortune of having a relative pass away and you inherit a piece of property or something. So I, you know, for us at Current, we want to, we really want to show how people really live in the Bay. And this really doesn't get, it doesn't get covered. It's not considered news really. And so for us, like it's, this is exactly, I think the kind of thing we're interested in. And honestly, I think it's related to the previous conversation about

You know, the pandemic and social isolation and alienation. Unfortunately, you know, the pandemic did have this effect of making people feel

atomized, alienated, you know, a destroyed community. But honestly, it was already threadbare going into the pandemic. There's lots of studies that show that people in general, previous to, you know, well before this and before the internet since the 1970s have become increasingly, you know, isolated and in their own bubble. And this produces an effect where, you know, people just become invisible. And we want to try to, you know, reverse that to the degree that we can.

Yeah, it's one of those strange things, right? You know, media does turn out to play a big role in making scenes visible to themselves, scenes visible to each other and different communities. And until it was gone, I didn't really necessarily think about that. But, you know, if you go back and you look at old newspapers and you see they're like...

about like birthday parties of like community elders or something, you go like, oh man, they were doing this work of knitting the community together, but it wasn't one of the things that necessarily we thought about as being what they did. Let's bring in Ivan in San Leandro. Welcome, Ivan.

I'd like to congratulate Lauren in the approach for having a print publication and offer a couple of suggestions. First of all, this is a collectible, you know, unlike an online publication. So you could differentiate yourself by putting things that are hard to find in the Bay Area. For example, watchmakers or an eyeglass repair place, that sort of thing. Yeah.

I love that. I mean, I think, Lauren, I imagine what you'll say is, you know, you're distributing across the country, so that might not be exactly what you do, but...

Yeah, that we are. But I really like this idea of like using print in the kind of analog nature of print to kind of gesture at, you know, back to the weaponization of the dollar idea gesture toward like the actual businesses in our community that are quite analog and also need our dollars to stay afloat. Yeah. Yes.

And a lot of the, you know, going back to the pandemic point to a lot of those businesses that were hanging on, like the place you could go to get your beard trimmer repaired, which used to be on Telegraph by the place where you could get.

I guess, bee supplies, beekeeping supplies. Those places are gone, you know, and like there used to be a thing. And of course, when those places are gone, it drives you online. It drives you to the large retailer online that shall not be named. And, you know, it is. It's part of the loss of the fabric of the community. So love that. Yeah. And then your beard trimmer goes in the trash, you know, to top it all off. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Monica writes in to say, on the topic of independent press, I have a suggestion based on my experience as a record store owner. We regularly collect and post flyers of local theaters, performance venues, one-off events, and often find people stopping, looking at them, taking photos, discussing what they're seeing. It occurred to me over time that we are really lacking a central printed audience.

for a calendar or events, even just the simple act of categorizing events by venues for people to scan in one place and make decisions about how they spend their entertainment dollars and time is helpful. I'm going to let Aaron talk about this in a second, and I know also you all have plans for this too, Soleil.

But let's just recall the days of Alt Weeklys where you could open up an Alt Weekly and see all the movies that were playing, all the shows that were going on, musical shows, all the theater. Everything was right there. But Willamette Week was what I was reading in Portland. It was pretty incredible and a major loss as well. Aaron, I know that you all are working on this and then you're up after that. Yeah, I mean, I think we were talking in the break about how

Once you start looking for it, there is so much going on. And so then the effort and the work for us is just trying to figure out how to take it and package it and represent it. And so, you know, there are ways that you can find out what events are in an algorithmic sense.

on the internet. And we're trying to not do that. We're trying to produce a writerly, opinionated sense of like, here is what we think about these things that are going on. Here is what we think would be good. Here is what we don't know about these things. And actually...

I think bring people into that. We have the same questions about what an event will be like. And we want to encourage people to go to those events and then find out and tell us and write for us, right? And sort of have that kind of experience. Because like you're saying, it's not just the information about where things are happening and what they are that people miss. I think it's that sense of like,

Finding what your people are looking for, what your kind of thing is, requires a level of attitude and interest and even critical distance. Soleil?

So the two, yes, we're going to have words on a website, right? That is like a core thing for Coyote. But we also want to hearken to the Alt Weekly by having an event calendar and also doing a Miss Connections board for people to submit to, which will be very fun.

But I remember being a kid growing up in Brooklyn and just scanning the back pages right of the village voice And it wasn't even about going to things. I was a nerd I didn't go to anything but just it made me feel like I lived in a place lived in a city And I have so many friends who are musicians and artists here who have so much frustration with the ways in which they get the word out because it's all Instagram and you only see things that are happening five days after they've happened and

And as a restaurant critic, the food pop-up situation, which blew up during lockdown, right, continues to suffer under the yoke of Instagram and its algorithms. So we're going to put those on the calendar as well so that everyone who wants a very expensive cheesecake out of like a trash can in an alley can go find it and will know when to line up. Finally. Yeah.

Here are just, you know, free tips from readers here on things you all might want to cover. You know, one listener writes, very near and dear to my heart, the marine industry is vast here. I swear this isn't a listener, Alexis Madrigal, with many different aspects, boats, repairs, boat yards, all the blue collar skills that support, couldn't agree more.

Susan writes, one critical thing that seems to be missing in most current Bay Area media is addressing the environment. This is something that affects everyone and we need so much information about what's happening, what can be done by real people every day. Tara writes, I'd love to see coverage on teacher turnover or teachers needing second jobs to afford living costs in communities they serve. It's a real issue that's

touched on but I've yet to see deep investigations and it benefits us all also a few listeners are just excited about things one listener on discord writes shrieked with glee when I saw the list of folks involved with coyote perfect name too so I I

Steve on Discord writes, I know nothing about any of these new outlets, but just the news of them brings me joy. And Noel writes, the more co-ops, the better. It's time to try that model in this economy. Um...

Last thing, and maybe we'll go to Barry Kern on this. George wants to know, where's the pleasure reading of your publication? Nothing wrong with feel-good stories. Do you anticipate that? That there'll be, you know, pleasure reading? Pleasure reading? Well...

as an avid reader, I think it's all pleasurable, but I can understand that I'm a freak in this respect. Um, yeah, you know, we're going to have, uh, so far it's been pretty serious. We just launched. Um, and you know, we launched amid these, this big, you know, movement against, um, the ice rays in LA. So it felt kind of self-serious, but we have some stuff in the pipeline that I think will be really fun to read. Um,

I'll just highlight one thing and shout out to a previous caller from Santa Cruz. We're going to have some party reporting from the People's Disco in Santa Cruz, which is a huge thing. Stay tuned for that. Oh, that sounds fun. We have been talking with editors from four new independent publications. Solejo from Coyote. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Aaron Beatty from Orb. Thank you. Thank you. Lauren Markham from The Approach. Thank you. Thank you so much. And Justin Gilmore from Bay Area Current. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Go read these new publications. Support the indie firmament. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Form Ahead with Mina Kim.

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