As a kid growing up in a Bloomington cul-de-sac, Trevor Born was the owner, publisher and reporter of his very own neighborhood newspaper. At first, he wrote out and xeroxed pages by hand, and later designed and printed the paper from a family computer.

Born’s approach was simple, reporting on “these people who just moved in; or the storm just came through, here’s the damage,” he said.

The experience taught him a basic truth about local news.

A “story two neighborhoods over — that’s like a one out of 10 interesting-ness,” Born said. But the same story, “if you just move it to my neighborhood, it’s a seven automatically.”

Years later, that’s the core premise of Longfellow Whatever, Born’s new hyperlocal news outlet for its namesake region of Minneapolis, where he now lives. The tagline? “Neighborhood news so specific, it’s only interesting to us!”

While Minneapolis has no shortage of news organizations covering the city — including many that serve specific neighborhoods like Longfellow — what makes Longfellow Whatever unique is its bare-bones operation and redefined sense of journalism.

Primarily, Longfellow Whatever is an emailed newsletter, with a simple website and basic social media presence to advertise its stories. Started in March 2024, it covers the Greater Longfellow region, which includes the Longfellow, Hiawatha, Howe, and Cooper neighborhoods. 

In that time, Born has written about breaking news on crime, a popular ice statue in a neighbor’s yard, housing developments, and everything in between.

He followed the haggling between Minneapolis Public Schools and a local resident group over the Cooper School playground, and wrote a walkthrough of historical corner grocery stores with archival photos and histories of some of the families who ran them. 

When he isn’t publishing stories, Born puts together a list of local events, or writes out smaller local tidbits in “monthly miscellanea” newsletters.

“I have always wondered about those stores, and he just researched it so in depth,” said Barb Palmer, a local realtor and founding subscriber of Longfellow Whatever. “I surprised myself, I read the whole thing.”

The eclectic mix of stories is driven by the hyperlocal curiosity that only a resident can have about their neighborhood. 

That’s what first inspired Born, a 35-year-old former Associated Press journalist and public relations professional who has written for many Minnesota outlets (including MinnPost), to create Longfellow Whatever.

“I’m a pretty out and about, neighborhood-oriented person,” Born said. “I have this abiding interest in my immediate surroundings.” 

As a result, he found himself wondering about the story behind something in a neighbor’s yard, or what type of business might move into a nearby vacant space. 

But no one was covering those granular stories, which were too niche for other publications. “I had been mulling over that, and then recalling back to…the days of my [childhood] newspaper,” Born said.

“Thinking about, gosh, there’s so many stories that would be of intense interest to a small group of people around here, that don’t really make sense for anyone else to cover, because they’re not actually that interesting on a broad enough scale,” he said. 

“And once I had that seed planted, I would just start to see those stories everywhere.”

No different than a coffee shop

Actually creating Longfellow Whatever required some careful choices. If Born was going to run the outlet full-time, he needed it to be financially sustainable — a daunting goal that much of the news industry is failing to achieve.

So Born decided to strip down the business model. He doesn’t depend on advertising or fundraising, like many news organizations do, though he does have an occasional newsletter sponsor.

He also doesn’t pull on the foundational heartstrings of journalism and ask residents to support him out of a civic duty to hold local government accountable.

Instead, Born sees Longfellow Whatever as having a different kind of social contract with its audience: He’s just the guy digging up the goings-on and fun facts of the neighborhood for people who want to know them. 

Like a coffee shop or bookstore, the goods have a price — in this case, a paywall — and the outlet will live or die by residents deciding Born’s work is valuable enough to support.

If they don’t, “I’ll go back to getting a regular job,” he said. 

“There’s something very clean and satisfying about that arrangement, as opposed to, ‘People loved it, but I couldn’t sell enough ads, so it had to go away,’ or, ‘People loved it, but foundations, their criteria this year happened to not really be interested in [supporting journalism],’” Born said.

With a best guess on price, Born settled on a subscription that’s $12 a month. 

He frames it as the cost of a burrito a month — competitive with outlets like the Minnesota Star Tribune ($24 a month) and streaming services like Netflix ($17.99 a month for a standard plan). 

Even so, Born is concerned about how a paywall can cut off access to local news. For people who, for whatever reason, can’t pay for the outlet, Born gives the subscription for free — no questions asked. He also makes some civic stories available without a subscription. (About one-fifth of all stories so far are un-paywalled.)

Born isn’t disclosing his subscribership and financial data, “just out of the basic Minnesotan bashfulness about talking numbers.” 

But he started Longfellow Whatever with 124 founding subscribers, and is now “most of the way towards the minimum viable threshold of sustainability,” he said. “Which is basically one [full-time employee] salary for a white-collar professional.”

An enthusiastic reception

Since Born started Longfellow Whatever, few, if any, people have complained about the price. And the audience is openly enthusiastic about his work — the neighborhood is now covered in Longfellow Whatever lawn signs.

For Greta Fay, a Realtor who lives in South Minneapolis but works and spends time in Longfellow, the newsletter was an instant hit. Fay signed on as a founding subscriber when Born, a longtime friend, told her about the project. 

“Right away, some of the first stories that [Born] published were like, ‘Oh my god, this is exactly what you described you wanted to do,’” Fay said. “You wanted to talk about things that are happening in the neighborhood that are fun, and alive, and exciting and maybe mysterious, and really from a direction that kind of draws the community together.”

The newsletter format is more convenient for Fay than local print publications, and as a mom, the events list is a great perk.

So is the news on restaurants, said Torey Van Oot, a reporter and co-author of the Axios Twin Cities newsletter who lives in Longfellow. Van Oot is also a founding subscriber.

Longfellow Whatever “were the first to report the opening date for Minnehaha Scoop, which is a big deal for anybody in the neighborhood with kids who love ice cream,” she said.

As someone who works at a newsletter-based local news outlet, she is excited to see people like Born expand hyperlocal news with a similar approach. Axios Twin Cities has featured and linked out to Longfellow Whatever several times.

“I hope that Longfellow Whatever can serve as a model for other journalists who are passionate about providing local news to their communities,” Van Oot said. “I’m so impressed with what [Born has] done just on his own…I love the scoops and love the hustle.”

Born doesn’t let the praise go to his head. He is deliberately almost invisible, with his name not appearing in the newsletter, and only a brief bio about himself on the site. 

That self consciousness extends to how he writes Longfellow Whatever: No outright opinion writing or blogging, and no wildly long newsletters.

“It’s very important to me that it is not about me, about my commentary on things,” Born said.

“You often run the risk of mistaking, ‘Hey, people are really into this thing, clearly it’s me that they’re into,’” he said. “It’s not. What you’re covering is what makes it interesting, and that’s what people respond to.”

Asked what other news outlets could learn from the success of Longfellow Whatever, Born focused on the paywall and subscription model. 

Audiences are notoriously resistant to paying for news (despite subscribing to services like Spotify and Netflix). Just 21% of Americans pay for at least one online news outlet.

If a news organization can be sustainable while free to access, Born thinks that’s great. But struggling outlets shouldn’t “just die because you thought it would be weird to charge for your services,” Born said.

“You don’t walk into the coffee shop and wonder, ‘That’s really weird, that they want me to pay for the coffee — why don’t they just give it to me for free,’” Born said. 

“I think most people intuitively understand, well, if it was free, then [the coffee shop] just wouldn’t exist. And then who wins?”

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