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.

There are strategic benefits to going narrow but deep. The e-mail newsletter platform Beehiiv has found that the so-called click-through rate for neighborhood newsletters is two and a half times higher than that of the average newsletter across the platform. Preeya Goenka, Beehiiv’s chief customer officer, told me, “The more hyper-local and hyper-niche you make your content, the more engaged your audience might be.” Many of the newsletter proprietors I spoke to sounded surprised by the enthusiasm with which readers paid for subscriptions, and by the hunger for neighborhood news. “It’s not like you need a huge apparatus to do this; you just need one person who’s on the ground talking to people,” John Fulton, the creator of “The Eastside Rag,” told me. Fulton covers sections of the city east of the 101 Freeway, writing voicey blurbs that collect upcoming events, intriguing real-estate listings, and niche celebrity gossip. (Did you know that Jacob Elordi, Austin Butler, and Jeremy Allen White all shop at Golden Age, a Silver Lake menswear boutique?) Fulton still works a job in entertainment marketing, writing at a coffee shop at 7 A.M. and on his lunch break, but “Eastside Rag” is a growing concern, with more than fifty-five hundred subscribers, a fifth of them paying; most newsletters get only five or ten per cent of free subscribers to pay.

Readers may feel invested because they have few other ways to learn the kind of relatively mundane but highly useful information that this new batch of newsletters cover. In decades past, publications such as Time Out and Flavorpill offered plentiful listings; now, if you try to Google local happenings, you’re likely to be met with automatic A.I.-generated answers or a mess of meaningless S.E.O. websites. There are many outlets in which to read an opinion about national politics; fewer about a corner bar. The local-newsletter genre is an old form of media, made new–as Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack, put it to me, “Reinventing the wheel is underrated.” Tasbeeh Herwees, the creator of another Los Angeles newsletter, “No Bad Days,” which has twenty-seven hundred subscribers, told me that she was inspired by the alt-weeklies she grew up reading–L.A. Weekly, L.A. Magazine. Herwees’s publication, which she maintains alongside full-time copywriting work, mingles culture features (including a recent investigation of dysfunction at the Los Angeles Review of Books) with more lowbrow city coverage, such as a running interview column called “The LA It Girl Index.”

In the era of atomized feeds and generative A.I., people often talk about craving “community” online, and what is a neighborhood if not a physical, unavoidable community? You engage with it every time you step outside. In that sense, perhaps collecting people who care deeply about the same places is a more promising digital model than trying to appeal to everyone everywhere. Isaac Rangaswami, a former tech-company copywriter, first grew a following around an Instagram account called @caffs_not_cafes, which highlighted historic, low-key, unheralded London canteens. From there he launched “Wooden City,” a Substack newsletter that covers less-than-hyped London spots. Recent entries include a list of “50 of the best pubs I’ve been to,” an impressive compendium of London’s used bookstores, and an essayistic guide to traversing the city on foot. “Wooden City” now has more than twelve thousand subscribers and sustains Rangaswami’s career as an independent writer. “There’s a desire for people to read writing where the writer has actually been to the place they’re writing about,” he told me. The newsletter “had to be very, very practical for people to pay for it—pure utility-first writing,” he added. For all of the internet’s voluminousness, it has neglected a very traditional role: that of the town crier, informing the populace block by block. ♦