Flintside
Flintside is a weekly online news magazine publishing neighbourhood-level journalism by and for the residents of Flint, Michigan. Published by Issue Media Group, the Detroit-based network of solutions-oriented local publications, Flintside published its first issue in March 2017 and delivers its stories free online at flintside.com and through a weekly newsletter distributed every Wednesday. It describes its speciality precisely: stories told by Flint people about Flint people, centred on the talent, hustle, culture and resilience of a city whose name became known worldwide for a water crisis, but whose residents insist — and whose magazine documents — that the crisis is not the whole story. Flintside is an award-winning publication supported by community underwriters and foundations, and it maintains editorial independence from its funders.
Founding in March 2017
Flintside's own About page records that its first issue was published on 3 March 2017, while its launch announcement described the magazine going live that month after more than six months of preparation. Issue Media Group was invited to explore a Flint publication by several anchor organisations in the city, and it worked with community stakeholders before launching. The founding publisher and managing editor was Marjory Raymer, who brought twenty years of journalism experience to the role, including serving as editor of The Flint Journal, and who had most recently headed marketing and media relations at the University of Michigan-Flint.
Raymer framed the mission personally at launch: she wanted the world to know the Flint she loved — its problem-solving, passion, people, investment and fun. Veteran local journalists joined her as contributors. That founding formula — an experienced local editor, community invitation first, launch second — reflects the Issue Media Group method of entering a city only where local partners want the publication to exist.
Neighbourhood-Level Journalism
Flintside specialises in what it calls neighbourhood-level journalism. Rather than treating Flint as a single story, it reports at the scale of the block and the district: the entrepreneur opening a business, the school programme working, the health initiative reaching residents, the artist or athlete carrying the city's name outward. Its About page argues that Flint was integral to the development of the United States and produced influential inventors, leaders, artists, educators, athletes, entertainers, entrepreneurs and thinkers, and that the same creative spirit continues in the city today.
This approach gives Flintside a distinctive archive. Where national coverage of Flint tends to arrive for a crisis and leave, Flintside publishes every week, in ordinary times as well as difficult ones, building a record of the city's business community, education institutions and neighbourhood life that no outside outlet maintains.
Coverage Areas
Flintside's coverage is organised around topic areas underwritten by its community partners: business and entrepreneurship, education, neighbourhoods, public health, arts and culture, and recreation, with economic development, community sustainability and transportation also featuring in its work over the years. Its homepage mixes those local stories with solutions reporting from across the Issue Media Group network, so readers encounter Flint stories alongside reporting on, for example, Michigan farmworkers, family economic pressures and health-access innovations elsewhere in the state.
The breadth is deliberate. A magazine about a city's future cannot separate a new business from the schools that train its workers, the public health conditions its employees live with, or the cultural life that makes people stay. Flintside's beats are drawn to connect those pieces rather than to silo them.
Issue Media Group and Solutions Journalism
Flintside's parent, Issue Media Group, was founded in Detroit in 2005 by Brian Boyle and Paul Schutt, beginning with the flagship publication Model D. IMG grew into a network of weekly digital magazines across Michigan and other states — among them Rapid Growth in Grand Rapids, Concentrate in Ann Arbor, Metromode in suburban Detroit and Second Wave titles — all practising solutions journalism focused on community growth, development and innovation.
Solutions journalism, as IMG practises it, reports on responses to problems with the same rigour conventional journalism applies to the problems themselves. Flintside therefore covers Flint's real challenges — its stories do not pretend the city has none — but approaches them through the people and programmes working on them. In August 2024, IMG was acquired by Fourth Estate Inc., an Indiana-based public benefit journalism organisation, and the network continued under chief executive John Montgomery, with Flintside's model and mission unchanged.
Funding and Editorial Independence
Flintside is explicit about how it is paid for and where the editorial line sits. Its current funders listed on its About page are the Ruth Mott Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, Hamilton Community Health Network, the United Way of Genesee County, the Genesee Intermediate School District, the Flint Institute of Arts and the Flint & Genesee Group. Supporters over its life have also included Bishop Airport, the Flint Downtown Development Authority, Genesee County Parks, the Hagerman Foundation, Hurley Medical Center, Kettering University, Shaltz Automation and the University of Michigan-Flint, with the Flint & Genesee Chamber Foundation serving as fiscal sponsor in its earlier years.
The accompanying rule is stated just as clearly: underwriters help support the mission but do not influence coverage, funders aligned with a topic area are denied any ability to assign, review or approve content, and the staff maintains editorial independence. For a publication funded by the institutions it may write about, publishing that firewall — and inviting readers to hold it to account at editor@flintside.com — is itself part of the journalism.
Recognition and Standing in Genesee County
Flintside describes itself as an award-winning magazine, and its standing in its market grew quickly. When Issue Media Group's Michigan publications joined the Michigan Press Association — a step that more than doubled the association's online-only news membership — IMG reported that Flintside, launched in March 2017, had grown readership by 53 percent in the previous year and ranked as the largest nontraditional news outlet in Genesee County. Membership in the 150-year-old press association also served as peer recognition that a weekly, underwriting-funded online magazine counted as part of Michigan's news media.
Readers shape the publication directly as well as by reading it. Flintside actively solicits story suggestions and pitches from residents, noting that some of its best stories come from readers — a natural consequence of a model built on telling a community's stories back to itself.
Leadership and the Editor's Role
The managing editor is the central figure in a Flintside-style publication: directing coverage of neighbourhood development, innovation, talent and transformation, editing magazine-style features, and maintaining the local relationships the reporting depends on. When Flintside advertised for a new managing editor, it described the job as wearing many hats and required a candidate based in the area with a strong grasp of Flint's neighbourhoods, history and culture, several years of experience writing and editing high-quality features, and a demonstrated interest in urban and social issues, economic development, innovation and technology.
That job description is a useful portrait of the publication itself. Flintside's journalism is place-knowledge journalism: its authority comes from editors and contributors who know which street a project sits on, which institution anchors a neighbourhood, and which resident has been working on a problem for a decade.
Common Ground and the Wider Network
Flintside readers also receive the benefit of the Issue Media Group network through Common Ground, IMG's national platform for solutions stories drawn from across its publications. Common Ground curates that network content online, in a weekly email newsletter reaching nearly 300,000 subscribers according to IMG, and on social media, with a potential annual reach above two million readers and no paywalls. Flintside's site carries Common Ground stories beside its own, and its homepage presents network reporting under the idea that solutions that work in one community can inform another.
For Flint, whose experience is so often treated as unique, that two-way exchange matters: Flint's own problem-solvers appear before a national audience, and ideas tested elsewhere in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee and Florida are placed in front of Flint readers.
Why Flintside Matters
Flintside matters because it answers a specific failure of attention. Flint received intense national coverage during its water crisis, but sustained, week-in-week-out journalism about the city's businesses, schools, health programmes and neighbourhoods is rarer and harder. Flintside was built to provide exactly that continuity, staffed by Flint journalists, funded by Flint institutions under a published independence policy, and read as the largest nontraditional news outlet in its county.
Its record since March 2017 is therefore more than a magazine archive. It is a counterweight narrative, assembled in real time, documenting a community solving problems and building institutions — the story residents said, at the founding, that they wanted the world to hear.
Flintside Today
Today Flintside continues as a weekly online news magazine of Issue Media Group, publishing Flint stories every week, distributing its newsletter on Wednesdays, and inviting tips and pitches at editor@flintside.com. Its coverage remains supported by its community funders under its editorial-independence policy, and its focus remains the neighbourhoods, entrepreneurs, educators, health programmes and cultural life of Flint, Michigan. Readers can find it at its official website, flintside.com, where its current stories, network features and newsletter sign-up are freely available.
