Locally Grown
Jamil Baldwin on creating the "PBS of the streaming age", a 10 hour Bernie filibuster over lofi beats, and what news could look like.
Today, less than a month after the launch of CNN+, a new, subscription-based streaming news product, Warner Bros Discovery has announced its shut down. This, along with Netflix announcing its plan to introduce ads, and Quibi’s rapid shutdown in 2020, demonstrates that streaming is not our savior and a need to look into new (or old) news models.
Last year, we spent a month talking about the modern landscape of news — the current crises in the traditional business model, the possibility of finding a solution, and the need to reframe the way we view and consume news (ie as something that should exist outside a traditional marketplace). One of our favorite conversations came from Jamil Baldwin — someone who is also working in streaming news, but with a totally different vision.
This interview with Jamil Baldwin, founder of Locally Grown — a website that streams curated, hand-selected archives 24 hours a day, was originally conducted in July 2021.
Jamil | My name is Jamil Baldwin. I was born and raised in Southern California. Locally Grown TV is supposed to be a look back at TV as we knew once knew it.
frank | What does that look like?
We are taking away choice in a world where there is nothing but choice. There are plenty of studies on the paradox of choice, and how it inundates you when you have too much of it. We see that with Netflix, we see it on our apps, we see it with social media, and we see it in all the ways we consume things. This really bothered Ty (Tyler Benard, or Westside Ty, who is Locally Grown’s co-founder) and me, but we are also young enough that our perspective isn't that of a curmudgeon; we don’t think that "we need to go back to when TV was good." The internet and all of these choices have made some things better, too. We wanted to figure out how we could piece these two things together. And ask, when we put them together, is it still good? Will it respond and does it resonate?
Part of the idea behind Locally Grown TV was to take our agency back – to stop allowing our identities to be shifted by the wind. What I mean to say is, if you look at what’s popping, it all has a similar aesthetic or is talking about the same thing. Social media and the news are becoming one thing, one long narrative. As that happens, the identity and the history of your space start to disappear, or, at least, become indiscernible from another place. Sure, there is beauty in the aspirational idea of us all as one global human group, but that only works if there's, like, a cultural history linked to it. And, respectfully, I don't know that that's the direction where we're moving.
So, when we have a programmer from Houston, it feels like they are from Houston. We've got a programmer from Atlanta, it feels like it. And so on. There's something about these channels that feel like they hold something bigger than the programmer; they are tied to a region and a history and a culture. That has manifested in really different and exciting ways.
There is a woman, Christina Desnoyers, who used to do Teach for America in Nashville for years. She built out one of her current programs by sending surveys out to the students that she was working with and asking what they wanted to learn. She took all their feedback, built a curriculum, and made it specific to Nashville and where the kids were. They used her programming in the classroom for Black History Month, and we also put it online so that everyone around the world could tap into Nashville — the HBCUs there, their creative industry, and so on.
I think there was a beauty in how it was very tailored to a group of people and to a community. It was for those kids, quite literally. And because it was shared, it gave those of us who are not from or in Nashville an opportunity to participate in their space. That inspired others to try a similar model in other places. We have another programmer who might start a similar thing in New York.
All of that to say, that this is the beauty that we're trying to preserve... [pauses] no, I don't know what the word is. I don't know if it's disappearing, so I don't know if we're preserving it. I don't know if we're maintaining it. But at least we’re trying to highlight one way that “place” and our connection to it is important.
Another part of this is – and something that Fatimah thinks about through her channel, Colonial Subject, which is not up right now, is how do we turn this into a news network. And what are we doing to put forth the information that we're not allowed to share? What about this information feels like a threat to a system? How are you sharing all of these other things that are tangentially related to the community? That's one of the things that she and I talked about for her channel, figuring out what it looks like to serve your community, and give them what you need.
It's funny when you say it aloud, it doesn't feel that much different from the folks who are making the decisions at the top — figuring out how you get folks what you think they need. I think the difference is when you're in the community, it's not what you think they need, it’s what you know we need because our folks are telling us.
That’s sort of long-winded but...
No, that's great. I have a lot of questions for you. I guess let's start with the basics. How long did it take you to build the site? And when did you launch?
February 2020 was the launch. Just before they locked us down, it was the end of Black History Month, and I was just like, "We're finally up. This is a weird time to be up, but we're here." And then everything shut down. And I was like, maybe this is a blessing because everybody's home. And there was that thing coming out right then – Quibi?
Jesus Christ, Quibi, a billion dollars down the drain.
Right. They were all about shorter, shorter, shorter. And we're sitting here saying longer, longer, longer. We want movies, we want two-hour conversations.
A year and a half in, who is your audience? Do you look at that data, and does that matter to you?
Yes and no.
I think the group of people who are our programmers tells us about our audience in general. Because, to my point earlier, we only put up a channel when somebody asks for it, and it goes down when they don’t want it anymore. There is nothing on Locally Grown that we feel like we need to make sure we always have. I bring it up because the audience keeps pulling up and sharing and growing.
It is mostly people of color, but it has changed it's made it that much more dynamic. It felt very Black when we first launched — everybody and their mother was Black. The content was very pro-Black. But also when we launched, there were a few programs that were centered on spirituality. And then that opened the door for a trans friend who launched their channel. Then the diaspora showed up. We have people from Nigeria, Afro-Latinos from Colombia, and folks from the Caribbean. It just ebbs and flows. People find us and then they're inspired and then they're going to share it with their community and then somebody from their community gets inspired. That’s how it has happened so far.
What does the job of a programmer look like?
It depends on the programmer, honestly, and how involved or not involved they want to be. Glazed NYC, for example, is a black-owned fashion brand in New York City. They were pretty much on a loop, five days a week; they had 18 hours of content on shuffle, mostly music, a handful of their apparel, and a couple of interviews by people who inspire them. On Thursdays, they had a “movie of the week” that they wanted to share. And on Sundays they had a guest come on to share their point of view — whatever that looked like. Other people are programming every single day.
If it's super simple, I can have a channel up in a day. A more complex channel might take me a month. But also none of this is time-sensitive. It's timely in that everybody's working off of what feels important right then, but it is not necessarily what is breaking news.
I don’t really believe in breaking news.
You are not doing straightforward news, but in some sense, the news is meant to be a tool to educate the electorate and you are doing that – do you see yourself in an educational role, or with a possibility of moving towards more news?
I am grateful you asked that question because that is one thing I didn’t touch on when I was speaking about what guided us.
I'm going to begin to answer your question with a story. Westside Ty, our co-founder, is a good friend of mine, and when it comes to Locally Grown, he's more of my guiding light spiritually. He and I are similar in that we have a deep appreciation for the folks who come before us. He really lives in it.
There are so many artists who are important to the music we listen to today who did this little open mic in a venue that was probably about the size of my kitchen. I bring it up because it was part of an important legacy of open mics here in LA. The first venue was the Good Cafe — which was the subject of one of Ava DuVernay's first documentaries. Snoop and all these other folks went through it, and at the end of its life cycle Project Blowed took over. Project Blowed and The Spliff became the spots for freestyles and battle raps and shows. VerBS, a local MC who was doing the Spliff with a number of folks, including Ty, would end up being the co-founder of Bananas. And Bananas became the next open mic in the tradition. Bananas ended up the inheritor of Project Blowed who was the inheritor of the Good Cafe's open mic energy.
This is how we've always looked at Locally Grown. We are from LA, we are both in music, and we both met through music. The energy we brought to Locally Grown was that this isn't going to work if the next generation doesn't find it important and the next generation will only find it important if we find a way to make it important for them. Education has always felt like the right way to touch them. That Nashville programming is an easy example.
When we launched it was obviously the middle of the pandemic. A friend of mine reached out and said a friend of mine is a teacher at Compton High. There are two kids there who are graduating and just finished their films as part of an after-school program there, but they don't have a place to share their films. I said, let's premiere them on Locally Grown. We figured out how to make it feel like an event. We did live streaming, and we did a live Q+A, and we got a lot of local people involved.
I think there is a space for news. What that looks like I don’t know. There is this channel that I have been programming that just came from me wanting to spend two hours every morning with the news I wanted to focus on. So pulling what Black Lives Matters initiatives are going on, what Downtown Crenshaw initiatives are happening, phone calls with our local police chief, city council meetings, and archival conversations that provide some context. Even if I don’t agree with everyone’s policies, I just want to know what's going on and what people are talking about.
That is one of the reasons I am so excited for Fatimah’s channel. If you choose to, you can present information and context around it. It doesn't have to be this thing that was in a vacuum. I can show you Ava Duvernay’s 13th and then show you a conversation with prison abolitionists. If you want to know more, there is more.
This is a long-winded way of emphasizing how much it's important for us to figure out who we're reaching and how we're reaching them. We want to build this so that it's exposed to the people who would hopefully want to maintain it when I'm not here. 20 years from now, if I haven’t handed this off, I didn't do my job right.
I wonder why there aren’t more alternatives to PBS? I found this series, The Black Journal, a public affairs program, and it’s beautifully done, but it’s just a really long form conversion and you can’t help but think why can’t we have this now?
It's possible. Those are the conversations. Those are the questions. It is funny you say PBS. The first article that got written up was, Locally Grown is the PBS of the Streaming Age. I was okay with that assessment.
I agree with you a hundred percent that it is not only about having space for these things, that these things are really well done and really really inviting. I remember we had one channel, when first launched that ran the Bernie Sanders filibuster. I think it was about 10 hours long and has this lofi beat over it. That was it. They just ran the filibuster. He just talks for 10 hours on top of lofi beats. I cannot emphasize to you how powerful that felt when there were multiple people who were like, I watched the filibuster. I watched the whole thing. It was just so easy because the beat was playing, and you kind of got into it. I was doing things, but then he started saying some really important things.
We should play all political information over lofi beats.
Oh my God. It was great. I mean, I'm not gonna lie. I watched the whole filibuster too. It speaks to people's willingness to consume that type of thing. I'm a special case because obviously, I saw value in building Locally Grown, but there were people who called me and who shared it on social media. That is crazy. That's incredible. How do you tell people that? How do you communicate that experience to somebody?