Why you should consider Technical.ly’s new membership program

This year will mark five years since Technical.ly first did a very strange thing.

Rather than start with the unrealistic notion of comprehensively reporting on the surging New York tech community, we decided to focus on Brooklyn, first and foremost. We liked the citywide identity that was developing, but we thought we could dive deeper and have more impact if we started with the tiny borough of 2.6 million.

Though plenty was afoot in Dumbo in 2012, the tech boom hadn’t quite reverberated like it has now. When in late 2013, we were organizing our first Diversity In/Tech conference at the not-distant Brooklyn Navy Yard, there was some sense that we were pushing Brooklyn tech’s geographic boundaries.

That changed, of course. We reported on tensions in Greenpoint when Kickstarter first opened its headquarters there — and then again for Livestream into Bushwick — plus the waxes and wanes of Etsy and MakerBot and Huge and more. Lead Reporter Tyler Woods followed a startup founder’s trip through welfare and tracked tech’s influence on gentrification concerns.

We want to continue and, in truth, we want to expand that work. (This afternoon, for example, we’ll drop our popular realLIST of the borough’s most promising startups.) But we need your help.

Today, across our mid-Atlantic footprint, Technical.ly announced a new individual membership offering.

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Technical.ly is a niche, local news site: we care about topic and we care about place. In this era of global web communities and newsrooms, it is easy to lose sight of some basic economic realities. Many of the fixed costs of digital media companies without geographic lenses are the same for the local and community oriented. But the scale won’t ever be there.

We spend about a third of our payroll on a five-market newsroom that aims to discover the weird and wondrous in new corners of the smartest, densest region in the U.S. In business terms, this new membership program enables our newsroom to deliver revenue. But it’s more than that.

Firstly, this is not a paywall. For $12 a month, yes, you’ll get access to members-only content and staff and events, but really, this is a pilot to understand what we can do best for you. A tighter focus on new opportunities? A curated newsletter highlighting the week’s best? A prized introduction to someone in the business community? It all depends on feedback from members like you.

Become a Technical.ly member. We’ll be growing this together, creating the local media we deserve.