The following piece was published in Urban Compass last August on MassLive.com. Recent conversations compel me to run it again as food for thought.
A recent Smart City Radio interview (mp3) with Brian Boyle, of Issue Media Group (PDF), was so terribly compelling that I raced to transcribe it for Urban Compass readers.
In the interview, Boyle talks about his three online publications serving three distinct cities: Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Grand Rapids, respectively called Model D, Pop City, and Rapid Growth. The publications are heavy on photography and offer an alternative form of journalism sorely needed in today’s urban environments.
Model D masthead
Boyle’s onto something clever, and is looking to be acquired, already spreading to other cities in Michigan thanks to cooperation on the state level. Read on for the interview.
Smart City Radio August 17: Living the Good Life
Interview with Brian Boyle of Issue Media Group
Carol Coletta: Why is the time right for a publication aimed at urban readers in cities like Detroit or Pittsburgh?
Brian Boyle: Historically, traditional media, based on their mission, does a really great job every day, telling you five or six reasons to disinvest from cities. The narratives that traditional media creates around cities is really focused on crime, blight, abandonment. For urban enthusiasts, and people who really want to be engaged in thinking about cities, it’s hard to find localized information about what’s going on in the city, and connecting a community of people who are taking a thoughtful approach about the future of the city.
Why do you think urban newspapers—that have an investment in cities being successful—why do you think they’re stuck on that narrative?
I don’t know. I spent a significant amount of my background with traditional media. There is a hierarchy of things that get front page coverage in a newspaper, or that your all-news stations—TV or radio—focus on. And it starts with rape, and then it’s murder, and then it’s armed robbery. Their mission is to tell you what hapened today, and to get your attention around it. And their belief is that the things that are going to get people’s attention, and the themes that you want to build frequency around, are things that are bad.
I find it interesting because, to me, the transformation of cities and economies, where do we go, is a much more interesting content area to play in than what they want to focus on.
But much tougher to cover.
Well, it takes a lot more energy and research. It seems to be a more sophisticated conversation than what they want to have. There are some really good reporters out there that do it really, really well. Again, I don’t want to slight newspapers and what they do. I read newspapers a lot, for specific reasons. I engage in online media and in conversations around topics for other reasons.
When you began the Issue Media Group, were you thinking there was a gap in the market in terms of content, in terms of style, or in terms of the medium?
I think people in a region want to see their city do well. For people that are interested in cities, I think there’s a tremendous gap, particularly when it comes to development, and where people are investing money and making money, and at the neighborhood level. When you go into any city, you’ll inevitably have people talk about what a unique, authentic place the city is. But no one’s developing stories around that. So I think our content model is distinct in how we’ve organized it into themes that we focus on. Secondly, I think our content model complements a number of disconnected efforts that are going on in cities and regions.
Tell me about your publications. Who are you trying to reach, and what content are you providing?
Every week we feature a new masthead. We’ve got really great photographers in each of our markets, whose mission is to go out and from a fresh perspective, capture Detroit. When you open the publication and see the masthead, you go, wow, that’s Detroit?
Every week, we offer two or three original stories. The mission of the feature stories—we’re looking to hone in on that alternative narrative, highlighting remarkable people, remarkable place, development activities, neighborhood transformation, you know, really cover that alternative narrative with original content and original photography.
And you are in which markets?
Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The names of the publicaitons in each of those?
Model D, Pop City (Andy Warhol influence, and really making Pittsburgh "pop"), and Rapid Growth.
Pop City masthead
Why those three markets?
I’m from Detroit, and so it seemed like a good place to start. One of Richard Florida‘s consultants …who’s done some work in the Michigan governor’s office on a Cool Cities program, was introduced to Model D and contacted us about introducing us to some people in Pittsburgh. He was our entree into a number of stakeholders in Pittsburgh.
The state of Michigan, particularly the housing authority in the state, has become a big supporter and advertiser of ours, and they’re interested in initially highlighting Michigan and Grand Rapids, and creating really focused guides to understanding neighborhoods in those cities. We’re currently engaged with them in an expanded scope of work that will eventually get us into a number of key Michigan cities.
Rapid Growth masthead
How is the publication different from market to market?
All of the intellectual thinking comes out of local publications. All of the content, all the writers, all the photographers, are bringing a uniquely local perspective to everything that we do. It’s interesting because most cities believe that there are misconceptions about the city. And the misconceptions that Detroit feels it has, versus Grand Rapids, versus Pittsburgh, are very different. So we focus on different themes and different myths to break down, and really get an understanding of how a city wants to position itself.
In Grand Rapids, much of our content has been focused on sustainable design and green building, because they really feel like they’re uniquely positioned there. Pittsburgh is really focusing on neighborhoods as an asset, and wants to get at kind of authentic coffee houses and much of the authenticity going on in Pittsburgh, and they’re bringing much more of a new economy perspective to what we’re doing there. So we’re spending more time and energy in Pittsburgh mining out job diversification story and new economy growth story as the focus of what we’re doing. And Detroit, we’re really focused on creating a buzz about "place," and getting people connected to all the cool stuff going on in Detroit. Because it’s a different city to kind of navigate and understand than other cities.
And why do you say that? What’s different about Detroit?
Well, if you’re of this creative class, and you land in Atlanta or Washington, DC—in Atlanta you immediately know to go to the Little Five Points neighborhood—there’s certain neighborhoods in Atlanta or DC, Denver or Chicago where this creative class tends to migrate. Detroit’s creative community is really fragmented. So if you just get off the bus in Detroit and look around, it’s a really difficult city to navigate.
But if you get the right tour guide, all of a sudden you understand, wow, there’s a lot of interesting pockets of things going on in Detroit, that can only happen in Detroit. So much of what we’re trying to do is raise the profile of those assets so the creative class understands how to navigate Detroit, and understands where to get plugged into a community of people that they "get."
When a story lands in one of your publications, does it have a particular vibe?
It does. We’re writing specifically for what we call "the eight percent." In every city, part of what makes the publication unique is who we’re writing to. We’re writing about and for influencers—people who are going to be the first people to move into neighborhoods, and regentrify neighborhoods, people that are going to be entrepreneurs, people that are going to innovate, and want to be on the edge. You know, these early adopters. Part of our mission is to raise the profile of what they’re doing, to create this sense of density of people who are innovating, and use that as a mechanism to drive the wider market faster.
Each publication is a weekly. How many people are you reaching weekly?
In Detroit, we’ve been reaching 150,000 unique visitors every week. We’ve grown about 25% every month, consistently. The Pittsburgh publication has been live since March, experiencing the same growth pattern. It started with a much bigger database, so we’re curently through five months, reaching about 50,000 unique visitors. Grand Rapids has been live since April; we’re reaching about 25,000 unique visitors per month. My background is in online publishing for the last 3-4 years, with Viacom, before establishing the Issue Media Group. The metrics on the publications: people are spending an average of about 14 minutes with each publication, and they’re going an average of ten to eleven pages deep. So the relationship, and kind of the need for the kind of content—there is a real need for it.
You’re doing publications now in three cities. You are a native of Detroit. Is there anything you’ve discovered about the three cities, including your home town, by doing these publications, that you did not previously know, and that has surprised you?
I left the state after graduating from college. I lived in Boston, Chicago, Denver, and Atlanta. One of the things that I’m continually amazed and surprised by is how unique the organic vibe and culture of each city is. Having people understand that if you’re interested, and you go to cities and your mission is to explore the authenticity and the unique organic vibe and culture every city has, it makes the experience of traveling and exploring that much better.
I’ve been really surprised by the regional conversation about the city of Detroit, and the conversation you have with people that are involved with Detroit every day—it’s so different. People that really "get" Detroit don’t want to change the city, and love Eastern Market, and love Corktown, and love the fact that only authentic people are in Detroit. Regional conversation is, "Boy, we’d better change Detroit." It’s so interesting to get involved in any of these cities, and start to understand the people that are in the cities—that people think need to change and evolve—love it. For what it is, and for very different reasons.
But does that create a situation, Brian, where people are in fact resistant to change, when they need to change?
I think that’s a really good question. I know there is some small fragment of people in Detroit that fight the advancement of the city. I love Detroit—I love it the way it is. I want to see it improve. I think there’s a small segment of really hard-core Detroit loyalists that don’t want to see the city change. I think it creates resistance to exploring things like transit, and exploring ways to really focus on tipping a neighborhood, or really focusing on investing in certain areas of the city, and understanding that we really can’t improve everything in a city. So I think it creates some resistance to change that’s not healthy.
How do you build your mailing list?
We are working with any organization in the cities that has a direct or tangential mission of advancing the city, and that inevitably has a database that they need to get engaged in positive information about the city. So our marketing efforts to date have been largely focused on engaging existing stakeholders, young professional organizations, the convention bureau, universities, venture capitalists and entrepreneurial facilities—organizations that are connected to this influential audience that we’re looking to reach. And finding a variety of ways to get our content or our publication into their database.
What’s been the attitude of daily newspapers toward the publications?
Detroit News and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette did good features on us. It’s difficult to answer that question. We can track, based on URL, who’s reading the publication, and the traditional news organizations are some of our most avid readers. So they are engaged in the publication, and we’ve had a lot of people suggest to us that things that the [traditional media] are doing are in kind of response to what we’re doing. So it’s been interesting, anecdotally, to try and understand, are we having an impact on how those papers portray the city, and how they write.
And you think that they aren’t doing what you’re doing because they’re simply stuck in another narrative?
Journalists come to work every day and are looking to dig up big stories. And generally the big stories are someone doing something wrong. Or they need to make sure that their point of view is balanced, and whenever you’re dealing with the issue being a city, the negative side of that balance is really easy to find. So the mission and the perspective of what they’re covering is very different than what we’re covering. We are shameless advocates for the city, we have a very strong point of view, we’re really writing about future. So everything we write has more of a forward-looking point of view, and we’re really coming at things related to city issues from a position of power. Meaning, we’re always framing up solutions, and things that can be done. So the mission in the editorial voice—it’s just different, and it’s really hard to get journalists to take a different approach to what they do.
How have politicians responded to the publications?
My biggest surprise to date: the policy audience and getting their attention around the importance of cities, and how to advance cities from the perspective of the next generation workforce, was a really important part of what we wanted to do. We also thought we’d have to work pretty hard to do it. The policy audience has been our most avid and early readers. The policy community who is looking to advance city issues, it’s been really exciting to watch how they’ve leveraged the publications, to start getting some traction around issues that are important to them.
But you don’t cover politics. Why?
It’s hard to cover politics and advance our mission. Politics divide. We’re not looking to divide, we’re looking to constantly build a bigger audience around important themes. And we don’t understand how to cover politics and not marginalize what we’re doing.
But things also get done in cities through politics.
They do. I think part of the benefit of what we’re doing, from a politician’s point of view, is that we give them ammunition to talk about what they’re doing and why it’s important. So I’m not suggesting that we’re not apolitical. The evolution of cities, and all these issues and themes around cities, it’s not a Democrat or Republican thing; it’s an advancing-the-city thing, and I think the more we can do to arm politicians of any political persuasion with access to stories and information they need to advance their agenda, is a good thing.
Do you invite reader response to stories?
It is a really important part of where we want to go. We’ve had lots of conversations around how do we generate user content and start advancing two-way dialogues around key issues and themes. So I think in the next three or four months, you’ll see comment opportunities and blog opportunities extending off of stories in certain sections of the site.
But you’re not there yet.
We’re not there yet.
Did you see where CNN is making it very easy for viewers to submit content online—photographs, videos, etc.—to supplement CNN programming?
Isn’t that great?
It’s a different world, isn’t it?
Our partner in Pittsburgh’s husband is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and he was talking to me about a research paper he read that suggested that Wikipedia content—the notion that a communtiy of people are much smarter than any expert. At the academic level, it got all of these experts thinking, geez, what do we do with that?
Ah, yes, "the wisdom of crowds."
It’s been really exciting for me to see how big traditional media brands are understanding how to leverage the Internet in interesting ways.
Are you looking to expand?
We are.
What kinds of cities?
There’s a couple of initial opportunities for us. In growth markets—you think about Las Vegas or Denver or Phoenix—my sense is that the conversation out there is all about, "How do we grow smart?" And then you’ve got a different conversation and urgency in what are considered traditional Rust Belt cities. The conversation there is, "How do we transform ourselves and reinvent ourselves to the new economy?" So I think it’s important that we get quickly into a growth market and try to figure out how the content or voice or product might be different, and are we filling the same kind of information void that exists in the older cities?
I believe the global talent conversation is going to become much bigger over the next four or five years. I think the people at the national policy level are going to start to get their minds around immigration policy, and our most talented people are leaving this country, and the smart people who used to come here aren’t coming here anymore. How do we reposition major cities as a huge asset to attract global talent?
I think our concept and approach—40 cities in this country having a Model D that talks about its authenticity and its assets in a way that this new economy workforce understands—I think it’s going to become more and more important.
With these publications, and with ones you may create in the future, do you want to change cities, or are you simply packaging a particular urban ethos?
I want to change city narrative. I think the word "urban" has become equated as bad. I think leadership with regard to cities or states has lost sight of how absolutely critical cities are in creating sustainable communities and environments and positioning states and regions for new economies and opportunities.
I want people to fundamentally understand where cities need to be prioritized in conversations with regard to "How do we advance?" To do that you need a mechanism to create what we call the "sustainable weekly buzz," that celebrates cities as unique, authentic place, and raises the profile of cities in conversations with regard to where we’re going to spend money, and are we going to build new infrastructure, or are we going to invest in existing infrastructure. What are we going to do with sprawl? If cities aren’t appropriately positioned in those conversations, I think society suffers.
Amen.
We’re really looking to reframe the current urban narrative, and get people to realize, this kind of stuff can only happen in cities, and we’d better preserve and take care of our cities.
