Axios Finish Line

July 30, 2025
Welcome back! Axios' Natalie Daher is your host this evening, writing about a surprising revival of print journalism.
- Smart Brevity™ count: 437 words ... 1½ min. Copy edited by Sheryl Miller.
1 big thing: Your neighborhood news
Few pieces of surprise mail have delighted me quite like the Calvert Street Loop, a print quarterly spearheaded by my D.C. neighbors who had a quirky idea, Natalie Daher writes.
- Zoom in: We at Axios are fans of local journalism, but this publication is hyperlocal. Its circulation includes the doormats and mailboxes of residences on just three streets in my charming Adams Morgan neighborhood.
🏘️ Catch up quick: The Calvert Street Loop founders are a bunch of 20-somethings living in group houses who wanted to feel more connected to their community, The Washington Post reported in a recent profile.
- Only one of the publication's creators is a working journalist, whose tweet about the project instantly went viral. In true anti-Zoom spirit, these entrepreneurial Gen Zers threw an in-person party at a park in tandem with the inaugural edition.
🔭 The big picture: The quarterly print publication has put out two issues so far.
- They've included a letter from the editor, a news story or two, a recipe, an advice column, recommendations, poems, a crossword, and classifieds (fake and real).
- It required very little money, advertising or marketing — and it's a hit. I can't wait for the next edition.
Zoom in: The latest issue had reporting on the history of our local Walter Pierce Park, which was once an African American and Quaker cemetery.
- There was also a weekend itinerary pointing to coffee shops and restaurants unlikely to be on any trendy list, and a convenient schedule showing meeting times and places for local pickleball, tennis, volleyball and running groups.
🗞️ The intrigue: Young people may be keeping the spirit of print media alive.
- Another project, The Ditch Weekly, is run by teens and does seasonal coverage of Montauk in the Hamptons, The New York Times recently reported.
- The paper's staff has grown for its second summer of publishing, with the goal to distribute "2,000 copies of the paper a week through Labor Day, funded entirely by ad sales."
The money quote: "When you're on your phone, it gets boring after a while," Dylan Centalonza, a teen writer for the paper, told the NYT. "This is something you have to put work into."
🇭🇷 Parting shot!

Here's a shot reader Victoria Bailey took while having lunch a few weeks ago at Bowa Restaurant on Šipan Island, near Dubrovnik, Croatia. The restaurant is famously only reachable by boat.
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