Brick City Live

Brick City Live was an online publication covering arts, culture, business and community life in Newark, New Jersey. Founded in 2013 by journalist Andaiye Taylor and published at brickcitylive.com, it was a hyperlocal news startup built to report on Taylor's hometown — a city of more than a quarter-million people that she believed was rich with untold stories. The site published consistently for six years, built an audience of tens of thousands of unique visitors a month, won awards and community acclaim, and became a frequently cited case study in the economics of independent local publishing. Taylor ran the publication from 2013 to 2019, an experience she later documented in a widely read account of nearly quitting, and of what rebuilding the site taught her about running a local news business.

Founder

Andaiye Taylor was born and raised in Newark. She entered Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in the summer of 2010 as a part-time student, already knowing that she wanted to be a journalism entrepreneur, and while earning her master's degree she discovered her passion for reporting stories about Newark. By the time she graduated two years later, she had written dozens of pieces about the city. Taylor is also a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and was a fellow at the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York. Alongside publishing, she spent more than a decade working at high-performing advertising technology startups in account management, product management and content strategy roles, including serving as head of content for the Clover brand at First Data. She received the Lars-Erik Nelson Prize for excellence in reporting and writing. Her standing in Newark's civic life was recognized locally as well; in March 2015 the Forward Ever Sustainable Business Alliance honored her, as Brick City Live's founder and editor in chief, during Women's History Month.

Founding in 2013

Taylor launched Brick City Live in 2013 to test a question she had posed to herself at Columbia: whether wanting to tell stories about Newark meant there was a viable business model that could support telling them. One purpose of the site, from the start, was to discover that model, and to stay engaged with the publishing problems other news organizations were facing locally and nationally. The name invoked Newark's long-standing nickname, the Brick City. The site set out to cover the movement and change in the city — its events, people, businesses and culture — consistently and positively in spirit without avoiding hard subjects. Working as an independent, bootstrapped operation in a city of more than 250,000 people, it published steadily, drew tens of thousands of unique visitors monthly, built a substantial social media following, and earned high marks from readers in its annual surveys.

What It Published

Taylor conceived Brick City Live as a small but complete publication. In her own description of the ambition, it was to deliver everything from explainers and commentary to profiles of local people and trends, a guide to opportunities for fun and for personal development, and occasional investigations, produced with partners, that unpacked critical issues for the community. The site's events calendar became one of its defining products: Brick City Live invested heavily in building what Taylor called a calendar of record for Newark, a comprehensive listing of what was happening in the city. The calendar later proved to be a business asset in its own right, because event producers, faced with so much listed information, began asking to pay for featured listings in order to stand out. Features, Q&As conducted by email, photo slideshows of events and deeply reported stories formed a deliberate ladder of formats, matched to what a lean newsroom could sustain.

The Business Experiment

Brick City Live's business history is unusually well documented because Taylor wrote about it candidly. Before launching, she had spent much of her career in digital advertising and had watched online ad prices collapse, so she decided banner advertising would not be the cornerstone of the model. Instead, she attempted to build a citywide loyalty program: businesses would pay to participate, customers would join free and receive incentives and savings, and the site experimented with several versions, including a physical loyalty card and a stand-alone mobile app. The program never took off; businesses saw it as a burden requiring day-to-day management for an unclear return. Taylor later wrote that she had been too quick to dismiss banner ads — which, done well for local businesses, could feel relevant to readers who came to the site for local information — and too hasty in falling in love with her own loyalty idea without testing whether customers wanted it. She also funded the site at first with freelance writing and content strategy contracts, returned to a full-time job a year after launch for income, and found that the division of her time made the lack of early strategic planning — audience definition, revenue building, process creation and recruiting — harder to repair.

The 2016 Crisis and Relaunch

In the summer of 2016, after three years of publishing, Taylor decided to walk away from the site. The venture had not achieved the economic sustainability she had hoped for, and it had left her overworked, overextended and exhausted, despite strong audience numbers and peer recognition — one foundation had granted the site money to experiment with business and publishing models, and another organization had offered her a job. Working through how to shut the site down responsibly changed her mind. She considered preserving the archive as a searchable record, perhaps with the Newark Public Library; handing the infrastructure to a university as a journalism learning laboratory; or opening the platform to the community itself. Pricing out each option, she realized that doing the cleaning, documenting and streamlining any of them required would produce exactly the kind of operation she would be proud to run — and one that would be far easier to operate. She relaunched Brick City Live on that basis, defining what excellence looked like at each level of effort, from a 200-word event post to a photo slideshow to a fully reported feature, and matching story ambitions to resources.

Advertising and the Later Model

The rebuilt site adopted the tools Taylor had once avoided. Brick City Live began working with Broadstreet Ads, an ad-serving technology built for small publishers, which allowed an attractive banner advertising experience for readers and advertisers, including self-service ad creation that could scale without a large sales staff. It experimented with sponsored content campaigns, finding larger institutions the most promising prospects. The events calendar generated paid featured listings, and Taylor worked with a partner, Matthew Ling, on creating and managing the site's advertising products. The result was a mixed model — advertising, sponsored content and paid listings — assembled from the practical lessons of the site's first three years.

Community Presence in Newark

Brick City Live was embedded in the city it covered in ways its founder later described with affection. Taylor did much of her work on the site at Taste Venue, a Newark gathering place on Edison Place, where she met scores of the people who became sources, collaborators and friends; it was also where she met her husband, and where the couple later married. The site's standing in the local business community was marked in March 2015, when the Forward Ever Sustainable Business Alliance used its ReMIXX networking event at Taste Venue, held for Women's History Month, to honor Taylor as founder and editor in chief, citing the national recognition her work had received. That presence — a publisher physically rooted in the city's venues and organizations, rather than parachuting in — was central to the site's identity and to the trust its annual reader surveys recorded.

Final Years and Legacy

URL Media, which later hired Taylor as its first editorial director, records that she ran Brick City Live from 2013 to 2019. Her account of the venture, published by the Expanding News Desert project under the title "What quitting taught me about running a local publishing business," has been used as a teaching text on local news entrepreneurship, and she has discussed the site's founding on podcasts and on public television, including an appearance on NJ PBS's One-on-One in December 2015. After Brick City Live, Taylor ran her own company, Angle Content, helping companies and publications with audience and customer acquisition through content strategy, before joining URL Media. The site's significance in Newark's media history is twofold: it demonstrated, in the 2010s, that a single determined publisher could build a real audience for independent online news in New Jersey's largest city, and it left one of the most honest public records of what that work costs — and what it takes to make it sustainable.