Public Intellectual with Jessa Crispin · Jessa Crispin

"Long Live the Altweekly" (w/ Brandon Soderberg)

March 7, 2019·1 hr 2 min·5 clips

The Baltimore City Paper was making a profit when it was closed - it just wasn't making a large enough profit.

The setup is blunt. A host asking for Patreon money turns to the wreckage of media, where outlets close, writers get laid off, and pressure keeps coming from the president and the right. Then Baltimore enters. The guest is helping bring back the Baltimore Beat, a new version of the alt-weekly after papers like The Village Voice have disappeared. Nostalgia is beside the point. The case is practical: a small paper matters when it catches stories a city's bigger institutions, habits, and racial blind spots keep missing. Baltimore's media scene sounds thin. The guest describes a real lack of diversity, especially Black voices, and ties that absence to his own uneasy past writing about politics, race, and rap music. That self-indictment gives the conversation its hardest edge. He says he realized too late that he should not have had one of those assignments. City Paper becomes the test. When he arrived there, the paper knew how white it was, knew it needed to change, and was still facing the same problem years later. The discomfort stays in the room. The sharpest claim is that Baltimore lacks working-class Black voices, meaning people reporting from inside neglected everyday realities, not just broader representation. A crime story shows the damage. The guest points to a widely absorbed panhandler narrative that later fell apart when the woman's husband was identified as the killer. Local knowledge mattered. To him, the details looked wrong from the start because the location and behavior did not fit how that part of the city works. That is the alt-weekly case. With only a few people, the sane editorial question is what has not been covered and what needs covering. Less romance, more necessity.

As heard by us

A clear case for why small newspapers still matter.

Jessa Crispin and Brandon Soderberg make a plain argument for what an alt-weekly still has to do now: stay small enough to answer to the city that reads it, and stubborn enough to keep going when the wider media climate gets harsher and noisier.

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Why you'd press play

When the alt-weekly fades, this episode asks what it takes to start one back up.

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