The 51st team members celebrated one year of publishing last October, with a packed party at Kbird Bar. From left to right: Christina Sturdivant Sani, Eric Falquero, Teresa Frontado, Abigail Higgins, George Kevin Jordan, and Maddie Poore. (Rodney Choice)
Two years ago, I couldn’t sleep as I stressed over an email received the afternoon before announcing a vague all-staff Zoom meeting for WAMU. Our broadcast would be automated; no one should come into the office. All signs pointed to layoffs.
The next day, another media outlet announced the WAMU layoffs publicly before our all-staff meeting had even ended.
I won’t disclose what was said in the meeting, but it took less than 10 minutes. We were barred from cleaning out our own desks and told to either pay to ship our equipment back to WAMU or return it to AU’s campus police. That’s how DCist shut down in 2024. That’s how 16 journalists and business support staff stopped contributing to coverage of local D.C. news. It was an eerily similar process to what HUNDREDS of Washington Post employees experienced on February 4th.
That’s why we started The 51st — out of the ashes of DCist. We knew our community deserved more from local news, and we trusted you’d build it with us.
And you HAVE! Thanks to the infrastructure you've helped us build over the past 1.5 years, when one of the richest men in the world decided to gut The Post by firing over 300 journalists, we were ready to huddle as a team and see if we could retain any of that local talent as part of our plans to expand.
New members and donors started coming in even before we announced our campaign. (Thank you!!)
And you’re not alone. The chair of our Board of Trustees, Viyas Sundaram, has also stepped up, he' offering an $80,000 match toward this effort, starting today! That’s on top of a donation match offer from our friend Russ on Bluesky (you have to tell him how much you gave) That means any amount you give can be tripled!
If we meet our goal, we add three full-time journalists to our team. If we crush that goal ahead of time, we can hire a fourth journalist. Can you help us?
Eric is a co-founder of The 51st focused on community listening and collaboration. He has covered local D.C. for more than a decade, including creating the Homeless Crisis Reporting Project.
With your help, we pursue stories that hold leaders to account, demystify opaque city and civic processes, and celebrate the idiosyncrasies that make us proud to call D.C. home. Put simply, our mission is to make it easier — and more fun — to live in the District. Our members help keep local news free and independent for all:
