Bham Now: Birmingham's Modern, Positive Media Brand
Bham Now is a privately held digital media company in Birmingham, Alabama, publishing at bhamnow.com. Founded in August 2016 by former Alabama Media Group president Cindy Martin, it describes itself as the mobile, modern guide to Birmingham — a free, positive media brand serving the seven-county Birmingham metropolitan area with uplifting news, useful information, and local camaraderie for the modern Birminghamian.
Bham Now was launched into a city in the middle of a renaissance, and it bet on that story: business openings instead of crime blotters, nonprofits and makers instead of politics, and the people, places, and food making Birmingham a better place to live. A decade on, the bet has built a household name — a full-time team, hundreds of thousands of local followers, and a growing statewide network of sister brands — and in August 2026 the publication celebrated its tenth anniversary.
Overview
Bham Now is a digital-only publication covering the Birmingham metro from offices at 2309 Morris Avenue in downtown Birmingham. Its content spans local companies, jobs, startups, nonprofits, makers, events, real estate, development, and, prominently, food. Its mission, stated across its profiles, is to connect, educate, inform, and entertain the greater Birmingham market, and, in its founding formulation, to create a healthier, smarter, more prosperous Birmingham area for everyone by amplifying positive stories, building community, and connecting audiences to local businesses and nonprofits.
The brand's visual identity captures the approach: its icon is a teal depiction of a bearded man's face, described as a modern, hipster Vulcan — a playful nod to Vulcan, the Roman god statue that watches over Birmingham, recast for the city's younger, mobile-first generation.
History and Founding
Bham Now was founded in August 2016 by Cindy Martin. Martin has recounted that the idea grew from what she heard from Birmingham locals: excitement about the city's comeback, paired with a desire for a break from crime- and politics-driven news. Railroad Park had opened, breweries were appearing across the city, and neighbourhoods such as Avondale and Woodlawn were drawing fresh investment — momentum a new, modern, positive outlet could ride and amplify.
The response was immediate. Traffic took off, local businesses signed on, and a staff that began as five college interns in 2016 grew steadily. In January 2021 the company moved into permanent offices on the ground floor of a historic building on Morris Avenue, having previously used co-working space at Forge in the Pizitz Building. By its tenth anniversary, the intern crew had become a full-time team of 25, and Bham Now a household name in its market.
The Founder: Cindy Martin
Cindy Martin is one of Alabama digital media's defining figures. Before Bham Now she was the founding chief executive of AL.com, a role she held for 16 years, building it from ground zero into a major digital media company, and then served as president of Alabama Media Group. Earlier still, she helped build AT&T's first dial-up internet service, WorldNet, led business development there, and served as vice president of sales and marketing for one of the first commercial search engines in the United States, Magellan, in San Francisco.
She holds an MBA from the University of Alabama's Manderson School and a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. With more than three decades of digital media leadership, she founded three influential media brands — Bham Now, The Bama Buzz, and Hville Blast — and is regularly presented in Birmingham as a digital media pioneer who has led teams through successive waves of technological change. Her own summary of her philosophy is that there is no more exciting career than digital media — an outlook Bham Now institutionalises.
Ownership and Business Model
Bham Now is privately held, with Martin as founder and chief executive — earlier styled founder and president. Its team today numbers roughly 25 full-time employees by its anniversary account, with company profiles listing a staff in the 11-to-50 range and public team pages naming content producers, photographers, videographers, account managers, and sales staff.
Its primary source of income, documented since its early years, is paid content: the company offers multiple types of coverage for clients, from publishing content on a client's behalf to researching and writing content a client ties to its brand, alongside custom advertising solutions for local businesses, nonprofits, and destination partners. Notably, Bham Now has hosted advertisements directly rather than offloading its ad traffic to a syndicated network, keeping its commercial relationships local. The reader product itself is free, funded by that native and branded content model — a structure that fits a publication whose editorial mission and commercial mission both run through Birmingham businesses.
Coverage and Content
Bham Now's coverage is a curated celebration of the Birmingham metro: new business openings and expansions, jobs and hiring news, startups and makers, nonprofit initiatives, development and real-estate projects, community events, guides to weekends and seasons, and extensive food coverage. Anniversary retrospectives summarise a decade of telling the city's comeback story, neighbourhood by neighbourhood.
The editorial choice at its centre is deliberate positivity. Martin identified a gap in local media: established outlets covered Birmingham through crime, politics, and institutional beats, while no one was systematically serving residents — millennials first among them — who wanted the city's renewal documented and made useful. Bham Now fills that gap with service journalism: what is opening, where to go, who is hiring, what to eat, and how to take part in the city's life.
That does not make it frivolous. Business openings, nonprofit capacity, and neighbourhood investment are economic news, and Bham Now's aggregation of them amounts to a running record of Birmingham's post-industrial reinvention — told from the sidewalk level, where residents actually experience it.
Audience and Reach
Bham Now serves the seven-county Birmingham metropolitan area and designs for mobile first; in its early documentation, the vast majority of its visitors — more than 80 percent — arrived on mobile devices such as phones and tablets, with approximately 313,000 unique visitors a month at that stage of its growth.
By its tenth anniversary in 2026, the publication reported serving approximately 550,000 locals in the greater Birmingham region, with more than 421,600 social followers, over 36,900 newsletter subscribers, and more than 17,700 website articles published across the decade. Its channels span its website, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, and daily newsletters — a distribution footprint that makes it one of the most-followed local media brands in Alabama.
Editorial Voice
The voice is upbeat, neighbourly, and boosterish by design — camaraderie is literally in its mission statement. Bham Now writes as a Birminghamian talking to Birminghamians about their shared project of making the city better, smarter, and healthier, and it measures stories by their usefulness and uplift rather than their conflict.
That voice is a considered response to its market. Martin has explained that locals were excited about Birmingham's comeback and tired of crime- and politics-driven news; Bham Now's editorial identity is the promise to honour the first feeling and relieve the second. In a media economy that rewards outrage, its decade of growth is evidence for the commercial and civic viability of positive local media — provided, as in Birmingham, the underlying city story gives it something genuinely positive to report.
Digital Presence
Bham Now is a digital-native brand through and through — fitting for a founder who helped build one of America's first dial-up internet services and its first commercial search engines. The website at bhamnow.com is the hub, but the brand is deliberately platform-distributed: daily newsletters, a large Instagram and Facebook presence, TikTok and YouTube video, and LinkedIn for its business audience.
Its content operation reflects that distribution, employing videographers, photographers, a data analyst, and social-media editors alongside writers — a multimedia newsroom organised around how its mobile-first audience actually consumes local media.
A Statewide Network
Bham Now no longer stands alone. It is the flagship of a growing Alabama media network built on the same positive, free, digital model: Hville Blast serves Huntsville and North Alabama, The Bama Buzz covers the state broadly, and Montgomery Up and Mobile Bay Now extend the formula to the capital and the Gulf Coast. Company profiles describe the network as serving communities across Alabama, with hundreds of local business clients and, across brands, more than 600,000 social followers and 500,000 unique site visitors cited in its tenth-year materials.
The network logic is replication: the playbook Martin proved in Birmingham — positive metro coverage, native advertising, social-first distribution — applied city by city across a state whose mid-sized metros are each too small for national media attention but large enough to sustain a modern local brand.
Notable People
Alongside Cindy Martin as chief executive, Bham Now's public team pages list Pat Byington as content director and a director of the company in some profiles, Chris Michel as managing editor for social, Cindy Hatcher as director of branded content, Nathan Watson as a senior content producer whose photography illustrates much of the site — including its tenth-anniversary coverage — and Gabi Hembree-Lee as sales director, alongside a bench of content producers, account staff, and videographers.
Martin remains the network's public face: she headlines Birmingham advertising-industry programming such as the American Advertising Federation's Behind the Brand series, sharing the Bham Now story — and three decades of digital lessons — with the city's next generation of media and marketing professionals.
Recent Developments
Bham Now's headline recent development is its tenth anniversary in August 2026, marked with Vulcan lit in Bham Now teal above the city and a by-the-numbers retrospective: 17,700-plus articles, 421,600-plus social followers, 36,900-plus newsletter subscribers, 25 full-time employees, and roughly 550,000 locals served. The company also highlighted a partnership with the Birmingham Business Alliance to amplify local business initiatives, and its team pages show continued hiring across content, social, and sales roles.
Ten years after five interns set out to document a renaissance, Bham Now has become part of the renaissance's infrastructure — and, through its sister brands, a template for positive local media across Alabama. Its next decade begins from a position few independent local outlets achieve: scale, in its own market, on its own terms.
