Two years ago, when Lisa Snowden and her small team were preparing to re-launch the Baltimore Beat, the whole team spent a few days together considering who they wanted their audience to be, the kind of stories that would best serve their audience and how to best reach them.
“I think those conversations served us well,” says Snowden, editor-in-chief and co-founder of the Beat. “I think the thing that has helped us be successful is being intentional about who we serve, what we’re covering, what we’re not covering and working within the constraint every other week puts on you.”
The Beat, at its core, is a paper for a majority minority city, in which Snowden and her team have always been intentional about telling Black stories.
“Journalism is a very white industry,” she says. “If we can think about the people who are the least of these, everybody gets served. Instead of thinking about the most monied, or the most attractive audience for donors or most advertisers. Another part of our audience I think about is we do still have the City Paper’s old audience. They brought an alternative view. They’re still looking for that view.”
That’s not all Snowden wants to expand. She sees the Beat as a way to establish not only a pipeline for Black journalists but as a way to reach an audience that might not be the age group reading newspapers: Young adults.
“Having a newspaper is a way of having people be very intentional about deciding what I want to read. The two audiences I’ve seen appreciate the paper is the audience who are very young and the audience who are very old. When we have Baltimore Beat parties, I’m among the oldest in attendance,” Snowden says with a chuckle. “We have DJs on the cover. We have young artists, up-and-coming thinkers and movers and shakers in the city. Having a print paper gives them seriousness and weight that sometimes online doesn’t do.”
Snowden knows the world is changing, and has changed, and she wants to keep making it better while making a name for the Beat.
“The easiest way to get a good story is to hire a good, experienced, well-trained journalist. The way the world works, unfortunately, there’s fewer Black journalists that can give you that story right now. Sometimes people trade off and say, ‘Well, I’ll hire whoever to write the story because I want that story, I need that story,’” she says. “We’re not fixing the problem of why there are fewer Black journalists that we can depend on to write this stuff. I’ve been out of college about 20 years now and a lot of the Black folks I went to school with, that I consider friends, they’re not in journalism now.”
Having conversations about race is painful and difficult, but they need to happen and they need to start somewhere, Snowden continues. That’s why newsrooms need more people of color in them, to push the issue forward and make sure those stories that would otherwise be overlooked are told.
“We need Black journalists. We need Indigenous journalists, we need Indian journalists, we need Latinx journalists. We need all of those people if we’re going to tell a complete story about the world we live in now. Too many newsrooms are trading off on what they want right now, that great content, and not building that pipeline.”
Lisa Snowden, editor-in-chief and cofounder of Baltimore Beat, discusses the importance of serving a diverse audience while developing the next generation of BIPOC journalists.
