Technical.ly Membership is here. Join us for the tech news Baltimore deserves

When someone asks why Baltimore was the first expansion market for Technical.ly, I say it’s because the community asked.

Sometime in 2011, entrepreneur, technologist and city booster Mike Subelsky mentioned in a presentation he was giving that if Baltimore’s tech community was going to grow faster, it needed someone to tell its story and ask real questions. Someone, he said, like this group called Technical.ly that was doing interesting work in Philadelphia. Around that time Mike Brenner, the web designer–turned–Betamore cofounder, crossed paths with us in D.C. and began a conversation about just what an expansion might mean.
We all agreed that we’d need a lot of local support and to have a local office.
The two of them introduced me to so many others when I was deciding whether Baltimore was the right place for us to test our model of funding community reporting by offering that community services. People like ETC incubator director Deb Tillett and then TEDCO chief Rob Rosenbaum, and Rodney Foxworth and Jane Shaab and Paris Pittman and Greg Cangialosi and Yair Flicker.
Our team spent most of a year making trips speaking to these people and many others, learning about Baltimore, its business community, IT sector and startup scene. We took our time and earned the trust of many early community stewards — being patient with others who wanted to see what good a local journalism outpost could do. In June 2012, we launched, and we have reported daily on Baltimore’s tech, startup and entrepreneurial community every day since. Technical.ly is in Baltimore because of those people — and, now, you too.
We think Technical.ly is more important now than ever before, and we want you to be part of shaping what we’ll be for the next six years.
Today across the Mid-Atlantic, Technical.ly has announced an individual membership program.
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Primarily we fund our work through events (like our upcoming tech jobs fair NET/WORK), underwritten reporting series and company culture pages (like this). If your organization supports us in these ways, thank you: please continue, it means the world to us. It’s gotten Technical.ly this far, but we have realized we need to invest more in our communities. We want to further strengthen the reporting we offer. We’re only going to do that with your help.
Please hear me: this is not a paywall.
Our reporting and this site will remain free and accessible. We also aren’t looking for a quick transaction.
Yes, for $12 per month, you get early access to our events and our reporting and our staff — with more to come — but more importantly we want you to help us shape what the relationship between local media and readers can be. Once you join, we want to hear more about what we can offer.
We report on people and places and companies before anyone else does. We’ll continue to organize annual events that help connect growing tech companies with the talent and customers they need.
The world has other tech blogs and business sites. But news gets harder the more niche you go. We have the costs of national sites but less of the scale. I aim for Technical.ly to last a long time, because I know the technology community (however it evolves) will need us to narrate, prod and challenge. Join us.