More than three months after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the Eastern coastline, causing billions of dollars of damage and displacing thousands from their homes, the storm is decidedly not the top story in today's 24-hour mainstream media news cycle.
But for Narratively, a new digital platform devoted to producing one in-depth story a day about New York City, assessing the storms over the successive three months aligns with the publication's editorial mission: find the untold story and illuminate the unique characters of a city when no one else is watching.
Narratively, the journalistic brainchild of Noah Rosenberg (LA '05) that launched in September 2012, did not cover the storm at all when it wreaked havoc back in October and was the top story in newspapers and magazines around the globe (including the one you're holding). But Rosenberg's site is devoting each of its five pieces this week to taking a 360-degree look at how individual New Yorkers are coping with the storm's aftermath.
On a recent Monday, for example, a reporter rode along with a group of unsung heroes in the Rockaways that spent the weeks after the hurricane pumping water out of their neighbors' basements at no cost.
"We could have had a field day covering Hurricane Sandy [in October], but everyone and their cousin was covering Hurricane Sandy," Rosenberg said last month over coffee in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, near the apartment where the 30-year-old lives with his girlfriend.
"Even outlets like The New Yorker magazine, which made their reputations doing epic 12,000-word-long pieces, were blogging and doing short little dispatches," he said. "Our mission is to let the big guys do what they do, and then to fill that void of stuff that's not being told."
Slowing down the news cycle
Narratively's editorial concept is simple and bold: produce one story Monday through Friday that ties into some sort of theme. Each story is produced in whatever manner the reporter and the site's editors deem most appropriate. Most of the platform's stories have included writing so far, but Narratively - the internet URL for the site is narrative.ly, to be precise - also publishes photo slideshows and short documentaries from an army of nearly 150 New York-based storytellers.
Narratively's pieces are assigned or pitched months in advance, and sometimes they are even products of years of reporting that never found a place in a more conventional media outlet, said Rosenberg. Themes usually leave some room for interpretation. For example, the site has so far spent a week profiling New York "hustlers." Subjects included a man who makes a living assembling Ikea items and another who roams the streets selling tickets to his own stand-up comedy show. Another week that revolved around the theme "Skin Deep" included both a story about a doctor doing pro-bono tattoo removal for ex-cons and a profile of an old-school furrier.
The unifying themes are that no piece is time-sensitive and that the content exists firmly outside of the 24-hour news cycle, which Rosenberg considers repetitive.
"It's all the same content, told in a different voice, different platform, different word count," he said. "We wanted to do something different. We wanted to uncover these hidden truths, unknown characters in a city."
The site's contributors comprise full-time journalists and storytellers who work or freelance elsewhere, but also people who have jobs outside of journalism and who contribute to work for Narratively because they believe in its editorial mission.
"I'll pitch an idea, and if they like it, then I can just go on and do the story the way it should be told, writing or video or audio slideshow with a lot of creative freedom," Emon Hassan, who has done freelance photography for The New York Times and The Atlantic magazine, and who produced a video for Narratively recently about a man who creates instruments of street objects, as part of the theme "Trash to Treasure."
Rosenberg is not the only Tufts grad involved in the project. Jessica Bal (LA '10), a former Arts editor for the Daily, has contributed photography to the site, including the photos that accompany the furrier piece. Bal contributes to Narratively part-time in addition to her day job working at The Metropolitan Opera Guild.
"They do a really good job of creating, even with so many people that they have contributing, a sense of community, a cool sharing of ideas," she said. "With something like a small start-up, where you're paying what you can or relying on volunteer work, making people really feel like what they are doing for you is appreciated."
Last fall, Bal worked on a story for Narratively in which she tracked down and photographed New Yorkers who live in homes where a murder or suicide took place, part of a weeklong series about death.
"One of the most exciting ones was when I went not too far from Lincoln Center, and the only thing I knew was that a teacher was murdered in the apartment," she said. "We were pretty sure that it took place on the third floor
and so I walked up and just pushed the doorbell, and said 'I'm researching someone who used to live here, do you know of him?' And he was yeah 'Yeah actually I helped find his body.' And then he let me in."
Building the site from the ground up
Rosenberg, who graduated from Tufts in 2005 as an English and Spanish double major and whose distinctive physical features include a scruffy bread and longish hair that he slicks into a bun, radiates the buoyant intensity of someone who is following his dreams as he details how exactly Narratively came to be.
It was back in 2008, when Rosenberg was working as a reporter at the Queens Courier, when he began to feel the itch that over the next few years would grow into Narratively. The time and space allotted to a reporter in a traditional newsroom left a gap in longform feature reporting, he thought. The gap was exacerbated by a financial crisis that was causing publications nationwide to slash reporting budgets.
"I was looking around and seeing legacy media outlets really struggling during the financial crisis, and I figured this kind of human-interest content, this rich feature reporting that can really get to the heart of what a city is all about, would continue to get thrown by the wayside," he said.
Rosenberg at first kept his idea -- that of a purely feature-reporting publication - to himself, sometimes waking up the middle of the night to jot down thoughts in a notebook he kept next to his bed. He started to reach out to another journalists about the idea in late 2010, after he had been to South Africa and written about the World Cup for the Wall Street Journal and GQ magazine and had started to freelance for The New York Times.
With more experience and connections under his belt, Rosenberg reached out to his friend Brendan Spiegel, also a freelancer for the Times, who now serves as Narratively's Managing Editor. Rosenberg, Spiegel and a handful of other New York-based journalists who were interested in devoting time and resources to long, in-depth feature pieces, began to meet informally at Wednesday "editorial soirees" to drink beer and further develop the idea.
"It's tough to go in-depth and get at the heart of a story when you only have so much room, so much limited space," Rosenberg said. "I was finding that a lot of these really talented journalists were hungry for an outlet that would allow them to do justice to some of these stories they had stumbled upon while on the beat for the breaking news stories they were covering."
With the basic idea for the site in place, Rosenberg remained unsure of how to transform his project into a sustainable business. In late 2011, he was accepted to the City of New York (CUNY) Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, an intensive four-month program that empowered him with the nuts and bolts of how to get Narratively off the ground.
"We worked closely throughout the term, and the idea went from being an interesting notion to into something he was ready to execute on, bring into reality," said Jeremy Caplan, Director of Education at the Tow-Knight Center.
Narratively launched in September 2012 and is still growing rapidly, both in audience and in editorial size. The biweekly contributor meetings have outgrown the bars where the team used to meet, and the group now gathers in a classroom at CUNY, Rosenberg said.
Rosenberg says he expects to publish pieces soon from places outside New York to test the waters for a potential expansion to other cities.
"While our stories take place in New York right now, they could take place anywhere. They resonate beyond the city limits," he said. "These are stories about interesting characters, places, unknown issues that just so happen to take place in New York City, but they could take place in Berlin, in Saigon, in Chicago, in Boston."
Not just compelling, but economically sustainable
Rosenberg and his team of editors decided in early 2012 to pursue funding for Narratively through a Kickstarter campaign that raised $56,000, or around $49,000 after fees, Rosenberg said. Narratively uses that money to pay its contributors, web developers and occasional legal fees, said Rosenberg, who added that he does not pay himself a salary yet.
The site has a multi-tiered business plan it plans to unveil in the coming months that includes, among other things, a potential yearly membership fee that would earn users access to special content and invitations to events. There are also plans in the works to produce clearly-marked sponsored content that is both editorially and commercially compelling.
"This sort of branded content can be interesting," Caplan, who says he still speaks with Rosenberg regularly about Narratively's business plan, said. "For example, if the Met or MoMA museum wanted to do an in-depth piece on one of their curators or a backstory of how a piece of art found its way into the MoMA: they might pay for it, but it might also be interesting."
Narratively also plans to release e-books in the near future and is working to sign syndication deals with other publications.
Caplan said that while he does not foresee Narratively making anyone rich, he does believe in its long-term business goals.
"I don't think it will be a billion dollar business on the order of a social network, but I do think that if they keep working at it, they will land a number of revenue streams that will sustain the site for a long period of time," he said. "[Rosenberg]'s not looking for a mass-scale audience
he needs a niche audience that cares about his content and wants to engage in the community, and I think he can be successful."
