Your Friendly Neighborhood Newsletter

When I archetypal moved to Brooklyn, successful 2010, a small, stapled, glossy people merchandise became my usher to my caller vicinity of Bushwick and beyond. The L Magazine covered the hipster-ridden agelong of the L bid into Williamsburg, listing happy-hour deals, chronicling edifice openings, and reviewing creation exhibitions. Given retired for escaped successful streetside orangish boxes and successful stacks astatine cafés, The L was stylish and well-informed, highlighting locally celebrated names and haunts, and establishing a consciousness of shared assemblage for the corridor. I adjacent contributed a reappraisal oregon 2 of Williamsburg galleries earlier the work folded, successful 2015.

Recently, I moved backmost to Brooklyn aft a years-long stint successful Washington, D.C., to Boerum Hill, and this clip astir my usher to the vicinity has not been a people mag but an email newsletter. The “Boerum Bulletin,” launched connected Substack past year, is the precise part-time enactment of Edward Dornblaser, a health-care-industry consultant, who jots down observations during canine walks. “Boerum Bulletin” has informed maine astir the beloved barroom Montero being sold, the successor to a closed Blank Street Coffee location, and the terms of a last-minute summons to spot Bruce Springsteen astatine Barclays Center. Dornblaser’s task started arsenic an e-mailed database of recommendations for friends moving to Boerum Hill; now, arsenic a newsletter, it has much than a 1000 subscribers. The endeavor is “extremely nary frills and precise intentionally not built to scale,” Dornblaser told me. “If it tin assistance an country consciousness much similar a neighborhood, that’s worthy it to me.”

“Boerum Bulletin” is 1 of galore caller section newsletters wrong the borough. Brooklyn readers tin besides subscribe to the “Court Street Journal,” the “Grand Army Gazette,” oregon “The Carroll Gardens Times”. Beyond New York City, determination is “Catskill Crew,” upstate; “The Eastside Rag,” successful Los Angeles; and “Wichita Life,” successful Kansas, to sanction lone a few. Some of these integer pamphlets supply terse, functional updates portion others enactment arsenic the successors to bygone alt-weeklies, covering taste happenings and carrying retired local-interest investigations. Several newsletter writers told maine that they were inspired by “Feed Me,” Emily Sundberg’s fashionable New York newsletter, which has proved the vitality of section retail and night-life commentary. What these projects person successful communal is simply a tendency to combat backmost against 2 forces: the disintegration of section media and the impersonality of the algorithmic internet, which aims contented astatine the widest imaginable audience. As Dornblaser enactment it, “You’re much apt to beryllium served edifice recommendations for Paris oregon real-time updates connected a Senate superior than applicable accusation astir what is happening successful your ain neighborhood.”

The newsletters thin to beryllium solo operations with small-scale followings, but, erstwhile your purview is geographically limited, you don’t request galore subscribers to go an influential force. In 2023, Alexa Tietjen Dornagon launched “Court Street Journal,” an email newsletter focussed connected what she called “West Brooklyn,” the waterfront-abutting neighborhoods that Court Street traverses northbound to south. Dornagon had worked arsenic a writer covering quality astatine Women’s Wear Daily; “Court Street Journal” was designed to consciousness similar a “storybook,” Dornagon said, with watercolor-style illustrations of leafy metropolis streets and autarkic storefronts that reflected the serene temper of Carroll Gardens, wherever Dornagon has present lived for six years. She and I met 1 caller greeting astatine Le Petit Café, a vicinity instauration since 1999, with a replica of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” connected the ceiling and cappuccinos served with a retro dusting of cinnamon. Outside buzzed the arguable Court Street motorcycle lane, the taxable of a caller suit which Dornagon covered closely. “Court Street Journal” present has much than a 1000 subscribers, astir a 100 of them paying. Dornagon inactive holds a full-time occupation successful retail conferences, but she considers “Court Street Journal” a occurrence successful helping her neighbors to “feel much connected to wherever they live.” She gave the newsletter its institutional-sounding sanction arsenic an aspirational gesture: “I wanted it to consciousness similar it was bigger than conscionable me,” she said.