Local Media Is Thriving in E-mail Newsletters

When I first moved to Brooklyn, in 2010, a small, stapled, glossy print product became my guide to my new neighborhood of Bushwick and beyond. The L Magazine covered the hipster-ridden stretch of the L train into Williamsburg, listing happy-hour deals, chronicling restaurant openings, and reviewing art exhibitions. Given out for free in streetside orange boxes and in stacks at cafés, The L was stylish and well-informed, highlighting locally famous names and haunts, and establishing a sense of shared community for the corridor. I even contributed a review or two of Williamsburg galleries before the publication folded, in 2015.

Recently, I moved back to Brooklyn after a years-long stint in Washington, D.C., to Boerum Hill, and this time around my guide to the neighborhood has not been a print magazine but an e-mail newsletter. The “Boerum Bulletin,” launched on Substack last year, is the very part-time work of Edward Dornblaser, a health-care-industry consultant, who jots down observations during dog walks. “Boerum Bulletin” has informed me about the beloved bar Montero being sold, the successor to a closed Blank Street Coffee location, and the price of a last-minute ticket to see Bruce Springsteen at Barclays Center. Dornblaser’s project started as an e-mailed list of recommendations for friends moving to Boerum Hill; now, as a newsletter, it has more than a thousand subscribers. The endeavor is “extremely no frills and very intentionally not built to scale,” Dornblaser told me. “If it can help an area feel more like a neighborhood, that’s worth it to me.”

“Boerum Bulletin” is one of many new local newsletters within the borough. Brooklyn readers can also subscribe to the “Court Street Journal,” the “Grand Army Gazette,” or “The Carroll Gardens Times”. Beyond New York City, there is “Catskill Crew,” upstate; “The Eastside Rag,” in Los Angeles; and “Wichita Life,” in Kansas, to name only a few. Some of these digital pamphlets provide terse, functional updates while others act as the successors to bygone alt-weeklies, covering cultural happenings and carrying out local-interest investigations. Several newsletter writers told me that they were inspired by “Feed Me,” Emily Sundberg’s popular New York newsletter, which has proved the vitality of local retail and night-life commentary. What these projects have in common is a desire to fight back against two forces: the disintegration of local media and the impersonality of the algorithmic internet, which aims content at the widest possible audience. As Dornblaser put it, “You’re more likely to be served restaurant recommendations for Paris or real-time updates on a Senate primary than relevant information about what is happening in your own neighborhood.”

The newsletters tend to be solo operations with small-scale followings, but, when your purview is geographically limited, you don’t need many subscribers to become an influential force. In 2023, Alexa Tietjen Dornagon launched “Court Street Journal,” an e-mail newsletter focussed on what she called “West Brooklyn,” the waterfront-abutting neighborhoods that Court Street traverses north to south. Dornagon had worked as a journalist covering beauty at Women’s Wear Daily; “Court Street Journal” was designed to feel like a “storybook,” Dornagon said, with watercolor-style illustrations of leafy city streets and independent storefronts that reflected the serene mood of Carroll Gardens, where Dornagon has now lived for six years. She and I met one recent morning at Le Petit Café, a neighborhood institution since 1999, with a replica of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” on the ceiling and cappuccinos served with a retro dusting of cinnamon. Outside buzzed the controversial Court Street bike lane, the subject of a recent lawsuit which Dornagon covered closely. “Court Street Journal” now has more than a thousand subscribers, nearly a hundred of them paying. Dornagon still holds a full-time job in retail conferences, but she considers “Court Street Journal” a success in helping her neighbors to “feel more connected to where they live.” She gave the newsletter its institutional-sounding name as an aspirational gesture: “I wanted it to feel like it was bigger than just me,” she said.