Cara Kuhlman has loved the water since she was a kid. Her father would take her and her siblings sailing and she got hooked pretty easily.
So now in adulthood, as she worked for the tech news startup Geekwire and now the public radio station KNKX in Seattle, she got frustrated by the lack of journalism outlets that matched her interest and passion. So she started one herself.
"I saw a gap in what I call maritime media," Kuhlman said on this week's episode of The Journalism Salute, "where there's a lot of very industry specific publications with a national focus, so for commercial fishing or boat builders, and then there's a lot of more niche hobbies, again, with recreational fishing or sailing or power boats. And similar across both of those is that they were very much and still are kind of your typical legacy publications. Print first, not a strong digital presence and not really reaching the younger generations of people who are working and recreating on the waters and feeling that myself and my peers weren't being represented."
Cara channeled that frustration into Future Tides, a newsletter that she developed with help from the CUNY-Newmark Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program. Over four years she's established a small but loyal following of waterway enthusiasts.
One of her priorities is building community and she recently started giving local 90-minute walking tours as a means of bringing her newsletter subscribers together. She'll take anywhere between 8 to 20 folks out for a walk, sharing her interests and current events with them, with a little bit of history added in. Cara has continually been building her knowledge base in an attempt to make the tour as interesting and current as possible. "Beat building" is how she describes it.
“ It's been fun to let the attendees interests guide the topics a little bit more," she said. "I take down their questions and then I research and incorporate that into the next version of the tour."
Cara is working with the Reynolds Journalism Institute, developing a guide for other journalists to help them determine if giving tours would be a fit for their beat or publication.
The biggest lesson she's learned:
"Everything takes longer than you think," she said. "I've tried to shift into a mode of embracing the constraints. That includes with launching the tours, there's so much more I would like to do with them. But I have to focus on executing the core idea."
Learn more about Cara's ideas for Future Tides by listening to the episode.
We've got a (short) bonus episode this week. Anita Pinto is a speech therapist at Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology, a high school in New York City that last year started a student journalism club.
Anita is one of the club's advisors and she's going to provide monthly updates on how her journalism program is doing and what challenges they face. In this initial episode, she introduces herself, her school, and her journalism club
"The students that I work with are typically the students who have learning disorders," she said. " So they have a really difficult time with nuance and reading comprehension, listening comprehension. They really struggle with fact and opinion. I noticed in the last 10 years as students consume more and more social media, that they are probably the most vulnerable to misinformation. I felt I needed to do something about it."
Check out more from Anita's introductory episode.
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