From the ashes of DCist…Help us launch The 51st!
February 2024 gave us all the worst kind of déjà vu when executives at WAMU abruptly shuttered DCist, fired 16 people, and took the site’s archive offline. Didn’t this all just happen? Didn’t it just come back? There’s literally still “DCist is back, baby” merch sitting on my desk.
Alas, DCist’s second life at WAMU met a fate that’s now all too familiar in local news. For years, the beloved outlet gave you award-winning investigations, weekly events roundups, breakdowns of D.C. Council drama, and funny tidbits — and we loved doing it. But sites are not cats, and they don’t have nine lives. So we want to do this again, but better.
Enter The 51st.
As we watched our supporters lament DCist’s loss in the weeks and months after the site was shut down, a team of alumni started scheming. What might it be like if we made a news source controlled by the journalists writing the stories? What if we finally got the chance to meaningfully engage with our readers and neighbors, creating journalism they really care about?
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