Northside Media Group moves Downtown, exports event to Chicago

Northside Media Group has moved its offices to Downtown Brooklyn and it’s about to export one of its events out to Chicago, a first for the combination publishing company, events curator and agency. It has spent most of its eleven year history moving to different offices around Dumbo as it has grown, but with its latest expansion it has arrived at 1 Metrotech Plaza, where cofounder Daniel Stedman says he believes they’ve shown up on the cusp of Downtown Brooklyn becoming the next exciting neighborhood to be in.

The company is exporting Taste Talks, which started here in 2013. This year they are conducting it both in Brooklyn and Chicago this Fall. It’s the first time they have run an event in another city.

We filed several stories about the Innovation aspect of the Northside Festival (including one on transportation and one on the peer-to-peer economy), which Stedman describes as a discovery event, somewhat in the spirit of SXSW. One kind of discovery that visitors can make is discovering new technologies. RideScout debuted at this year’s conference and cofounder Scott Stedman described for us what he believes attendees want in product debuts, “I think at northside the real successes are products that speak to both our general attendees and also the tech leaders who are there. RideScout is a good example. Our audience is very into the politics of transportation and the venture and its potential scale is exciting for the media and the capital who are at northside looking for big new ideas.”

The cofounders are brothers and the company was basically their first venture in their early 20s. Daniel had made a short film that had won at a film fest in Berlin and Scott was freelancing for the MIT Technology Review. They started the company and the marriage of branded content, events and editorial all emerged. “We found they work tremendously well together. None of those parts exist without the others.” Though the company has been around for a while, in innovation economy terms, Daniel said, “We continue to launch new companies within our media group.”

He said the company has approximately 25 employees now, plus freelancers. About half the staff works on the company’s event and agency work and the other half is on the editorial side.