What was widely recognized as a national tragedy was also a local one.
When leadership at The Washington Post laid off more than 300 journalists last month, Post Local was among the hardest-hit sections. Successive rounds of cuts had already shrunk the section down to around 40 reporters and editors. (In the early 2000s, the metro department had around 200 journalists.) But the latest layoffs left the section with around a dozen journalists, a severe blow to an institution that had remained home to some of D.C.’s most impactful local reporting. Cuts to other sections, like arts and sports, also diminished local coverage. Executive editor Matt Murray told remaining staffers, “We’re not a paper of record; there’s no such thing anymore in today’s world,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
Almost immediately, local news upstarts in D.C. and just beyond announced expansions that will attempt to fill parts of the new coverage void, including The 51st, City Cast, Axios, and The Baltimore Banner. The journalists at these organizations also have some of the clearest perspective about the magnitude of reporting power the city has lost.
D.C. is no news desert; these expanding outlets are just a few of the orgs that have carved out local news niches in the metro area of six million and city of 700,000. The city’s Black newspaper, The Washington Informer, has published for more than 60 years; El Tiempo Latino has provided local Spanish-language news since 1991. More recent entries include Ethiopique, founded in 2022, which provides Amharic-language reporting for the DMV area’s large Ethiopian community. The alt-weekly Washington City Paper reportedly offered to buy the Post’s local and sports sections before the layoffs. Scott Brodbeck owns and operates for-profit local news websites in three Northern Virginia suburbs.
Despite all this local media activity, “the Post was always the thousand-pound gorilla in local reporting,” said Andrew Beaujon, senior editor at Washingtonian. “It’s a question of resources: Smaller outlets don’t have, typically, the kind of person power required to really dig in on reporting-intensive stories.” The Post could afford to assign reporters to take big investigative swings, even if they came to nothing; “that was something that the Post could absorb. The rest of us just really can’t — we can’t put people on a big investigation and hope it works out.”
Though the paper was best known under owner Jeff Bezos for its national ambitions, Beaujon said, “there’s nowhere in town that could cover local stuff the way the Post did.”
City Cast CEO David Plotz said that after the cuts were announced, his team sat down to try to calculate the percentage of D.C.-area stories that originated in The Washington Post and were picked up by other outlets. Six months to a year ago, “the Post was the ‘Mother Earth’ for 75% of local stories,” he estimated.
“Even people who weren’t [directly] consuming Post Local news were consuming it — they just didn’t realize it,” he said. Now “that ecosystem has to reset — there’s been a fire, and new species have to come in and build up.”
I spoke with leaders at a few of the organizations seizing this moment to expand local coverage. Their models — a nonprofit worker-led co-op born of another institution’s layoffs, a for-profit outlet that’s part of a national network, and a powerhouse regional nonprofit — reflect the patchwork range of news orgs attempting to take up the mantle of local coverage when metro dailies buckle. (That range is also on display in Los Angeles.)
On the one hand, Beaujon observed, D.C. is such a nationally oriented city that some of its residents let local engagement slide. “I had a boss who used to say that Washington had the best-educated low-information voters in the country,” he said. “There are a lot of people who don’t really particularly care about city council races.” But, he said, there’s also “a really big contingent of people who are not going anywhere here, and who need to know what’s going on in their communities.”
“I honestly don’t know if there’s any way to make money off of that [need],” he said. “We had, supposedly, the biggest business geniuses in the world trying to figure out how to pay for it, and they came up empty.”
The 51st: Ambitions to “triple” reporting capacity and an uptick in paying members
Two years ago, a different news organization’s cuts made headlines in D.C. In February 2024, WAMU executives shut down the DCist website, resulting in layoffs of 16 journalists and other staffers; that followed buyouts at the Post that had already shrunk the Metro section, and layoffs at Washington City Paper. From DCist’s ashes rose The 51st, a worker-run nonprofit co-op launched that same year by laid-off staffers.
When asked in 2024 what other D.C. local news she reads, The 51st co-founder and editor-at-large Colleen Grablick named Post Local along with daily newsletter 730DC, Washington City Paper, and Street Sense, a newspaper covering homelessness and inequality.
Abigail Higgins, The 51st’s president and CEO, told me she especially valued Post Local’s big investigations and longer-term projects, pointing to its coverage scrutinizing the city’s anti-violence interventions and a multimedia story showing the lasting impact of the surge in federal officers on a Southeast D.C. neighborhood.
“What we’re losing is very, very scary, and very sad,” Higgins said. “The resources that The Washington Post commanded, and still commands, are incomparable, and the kind of accountability reporting and investigations and daily coverage that The Washington Post is able to do, not just for D.C., but for the entire country, is irreplaceable.”
The 51st’s team lacks the resources to fill that void. But “at the same time, it’s really important to us at The 51st to think about what an alternative could look like to our current media landscape,” Higgins said, specifically one “that isn’t controlled by billionaires.”
The team believes reader support, which provides almost 70% of The 51st’s funding, is a key building block for that alternative. The organization has worked to build reader feedback into its DNA from the outset, especially through community connector events.
In the first three days following the Post layoffs, The 51st gained more than 710 new paying members; it’s since surpassed 1,100 new paid members, out of almost 4,400 paid members. (It has more than 15,500 total subscribers including its free tier.)
The co-op employs four full-time staffers and eight contractors. Even as the team is clear-eyed about the impossibility of replacing dozens of Post reporters and their associated infrastructure, the organization has a specific expansion goal: It wants to hire three more full-time staffers, which would “triple” its reporting capacity. The 51st aims to raise $375,000 by March 13 to convert a part-time editor to full-time, hire one longtime freelancer, and hire a third reporter, whom the team hopes will be a laid-off Post journalist. (The tagline: “When Bezos fires, we hire.”) At the time this article was published, they’d raised more than $257,000. The campaign accepts individual one-time and recurring donations; business sponsorships and group subscriptions also contribute.
“We have big ambitions: to be D.C.’s go-to source for local news — one where residents of all eight wards can feel seen, heard, and connected,” the campaign page states. “It’s a mission that has always felt urgent, but after the Post’s executives abandoned our city, we know we need to kick it into high gear.”
Higgins believes the future of D.C. journalism has to include large-scale public funding to be sustainable. She pointed to local legislation under consideration that would allow residents to decide which news outlets should receive public grants using “news coupons.”
Today, in a reality of “too many stories and too few journalists to tell them,” Higgins sees collaboration among local publications as a necessity. “I think D.C. deserves a vibrant local news ecosystem where there are a bunch of different thriving publications who are not having to fight over scraps,” she said. “We really want to be a part of building a future where that’s the case.”
Higgins hopes this is an opportunity to build better local news. “But also,” she added, “I wish that we weren’t having to build something better out of so much wreckage.”
City Cast: An expansion to original reporting
City Cast’s David Plotz is a D.C. local who’s read the Post since the third grade. To him, sports and local coverage are intertwined, and he sees cuts to both as losses for D.C. residents. He pointed to the Post’s All-Met feature celebrating high school athletes, saying since his own childhood, it’s been “iconic” for local kids; now, it’s gone.
D.C. is one of 13 cities where the local media company that launched as a podcast network operates. Plotz has previously told me City Cast is best positioned for success in cities that already have strong local media ecosystems — its teams spend a lot of time surfacing and discussing original reporting from other outlets, and other local journalists often appear as guests on City Cast’s podcasts. But in the wake of the Post cuts, Plotz decided City Cast D.C. had a bigger role to play in original local reporting. To do that, the team plans to hire at least four reporters (it has just hired one, Emma Uber, a laid-off Post local breaking news reporter). City Cast D.C. also just announced the hire of an executive editor, and is still hiring a managing editor.
Plotz said he envisions multi-platform journalists appearing across City Cast’s newsletters, social channels, and podcasts. (City Cast is more broadly pursuing a social-first strategy these days.) “We envision a series of newsletters around topics that we feel are urgent and important,” with one newsletter per journalist, he said, adding that the company is reconfiguring its website to feature more original reporting. The team is looking to cover local politics, elections, and government; local business and development; where to eat and things to do; and the “tabloid beat — the story everyone is talking about.” It also aims to dig into “D.C. data” for stories.
Plotz said he’s always envisioned City Cast adding reporting capacity over time. “We think this would be a next evolution for City Cast anyway,” he said. In D.C., “for reasons both historic and corporate and opportunistic, it made sense to really accelerate that.”
City Cast is owned by Graham Holdings Company — the same Grahams who stewarded the Post for generations before selling the publication to Bezos more than a decade ago. The company still owns other businesses in the D.C. area. Plotz said the parent company is supporting the expansion financially, but declined to say how much they’re investing. “It’s an important cause close to their heart, and they think it’s a great business opportunity,” he said. “They are very invested in the health of D.C. as a corporation, and they’re very invested in the health of D.C. because this family has been based there and has been…good citizens of D.C. for so long.”
Among the various local orgs expanding, Plotz said it remains to be seen how different outlets will fill new coverage gaps, and whether one will emerge as the dominant outlet. But he thinks “we’ll do a good job collectively” filling the void created by the Post Local cuts.
At its peak, the Post had historically high rates of market penetration. In the mid-80s, for instance, daily primary market household penetration was 54% while Sunday penetration was 73%, “the highest of any major market newspaper.” The same 1985 annual report claimed, “The Post’s readership in Washington and the immediately surrounding counties is the highest of any major metropolitan newspaper in its home territory.”
That reach, Plotz reflected, is almost unfathomable now. “If you told me that we could get 40% of those households, I would buy myself a yacht,” he said. “I don’t think it’s likely that any of us is going to get to 40% of households in this metro area with our coverage. But we don’t have to get to 40% for it to be an amazing opportunity, and for us to be amazing servants to that community.”
In an educated, wealthy, media-savvy and “media hungry” metro area, “there is a demand for this, and we have to find the right ways to meet that demand.”
The (Baltimore) Banner: Prince George’s County and D.C. sports
Could another multimillionaire-backed news organization step up where the Post is ceding ground?
In 2022, Maryland businessman Stewart Bainum pledged $50 million to The Baltimore Banner over four years. On the back of that investment, the nonprofit has grown into the state’s largest newsroom and won its first Pulitzer Prize. A domain change last summer from thebaltimorebanner.com to thebanner.com laid the groundwork for the outlet to expand beyond Baltimore, as it did last fall by launching a news bureau in Montgomery County, Maryland’s most populous county and part of the northern Washington suburbs.
Immediately following the Post layoffs, Banner CEO Bob Cohn announced the organization was “accelerating” a planned expansion to neighboring Prince George’s County, where it aims to have reporters covering education, local government, and community by April.
“We did that because of the opportunity and, really, obligation to us presented by the Post’s decision to disinvest in local news,” Cohn told me. He said the Banner would have been “highly likely” to proceed with this expansion anyway later this year, but the original plan had been to wait “about a year, until we had good data on our Montgomery efforts.”
The early-stage data the Banner already has from Montgomery is promising; the news org has grown the county’s paid subscribers from 2,000 when it launched in September to about 9,000 now. The Banner plans to bring short-form video to Prince George’s from day one, as it did in Montgomery. While these two expansions have been announced and framed as county-level initiatives, Cohn said the Banner has learned in Montgomery County that meeting local news needs really means organizing coverage around the city level.
“We talk about our move here in terms of going into the county, but if you’re a resident in these [two] counties…it’s more about the city, the place you live, rather than the overall county,” he said, despite the local government having a county-level structure.
The week after announcing the Prince George’s County expansion, the Banner announced it would also hire reporters to cover D.C. sports, including “beat coverage of the Nationals and Commanders as well as enterprise reporting across the region.”
Unlike the Prince George’s County expansion, this is not an acceleration of an existing plan; it’s an opportunistic move in direct response to the Post axing its sports section. The Banner didn’t receive many subscriber requests for coverage of Washington sports teams prior to those cuts. “I think that the audience interest materialized because of what happened a few weeks ago,” Cohn said.
From the Baltimore region, the Banner knows that “sports can be a real magnet for audience interest” — its coverage of the Ravens and Orioles, in particular, is “really popular and really important to our readership.” Cohn thinks about sports as “an important piece of the puzzle” of providing local news. “We are trying to increase the value proposition to our Maryland readers, and we know that many of our Maryland readers are diehard fans of the Washington sports teams,” he said. (The Banner has also seen a lot of interest in high school sports, and thinks that’s “an opportunity,” but is prioritizing the Prince George’s and D.C. sports expansions for now.)
The Banner saw “two very strong weeks of new subscriber activity” in the wake of these two expansion announcements, Cohn said.
When I asked if the Banner would consider further expanding into D.C., Cohn said “there are no plans” to do that right now. Still — Status has reported that the Banner registered the domain names dcbanner.com and thedcbanner.com.
Adobe Stock
An editing error misrepresented The 51st’s total subscriber numbers. The piece now includes the correct numbers. The 51st is also a worker-led nonprofit, not a worker-owned co-op.
