A new journalism venture is available in Tulsa this week.
The Pickup focuses on local food, arts and culture, with commentary aimed at sparking conversations and connecting Tulsans.
The digital publication from This Land Press features newsletters and weekly event recommendations. Republished long form journalism from the shuttered quarterly magazine This Land will also appear on the site.
KOSU’s Ryan LaCroix spoke with The Pickup Editor-in-Chief Matt Carney about the new venture and what readers can expect. Listen to the conversation or read the transcript below.
TRANSCRIPT
LaCroix: Well, Matt, give us a short overview of what The Pickup is and what people can expect from it.
Carney: The Pickup is a digital publication from This Land Press that does subscriber-driven culture and community journalism for people who want to know Tulsa better. We cover local food, art and music with a critical eye, local savvy and an irreverent point of view, specializing in reviews, commentary and deep dives into Tulsa lore. We're not This Land 2.0, exactly. This Land was an incredible publication that had an editorial run from 2010 to the end of 2016. But in the tradition of This Land and great alt-weekly publications like The Tulsa Voice, we offer alternatives to mainstream narratives and on the ground perspectives on why Tulsa is the way it is. Basically, we want to be like an outlet for stories that nobody else here is telling.
LaCroix: You mentioned This Land Press, and The Pickup is going to feature the long form writing content from This Land Press, which, for those that don't know, [it was a] quarterly print magazine, like you said, from 2011 to 2016. For folks that maybe aren't familiar with the heyday of that publication – I remember it when it first came out, and it was a really big deal… this kind of long form content. What was This Land Press all about? What do you remember?
Carney: Oh, man, that's, yeah, big question. The thing I remember about This Land was – I was in college when This Land launched, and it had this, you know, beautiful broadsheet publication, and they published it every two weeks. And the design and the layout was, like, really spectacular and like custom to each issue. Yeah, every issue had, like, one really, really massive deep dive, like real cover story that dug into a particular, like, major topic, everything from, you know, water rights to… one of my favorite stories is my friend Jezy Gray wrote about a group of furries who would get together every year in, I think, a park in, like, southeastern Oklahoma. But yeah, it was off beat. It was funny. The stories were long and in depth and always carried like a touch of the human element to them, like you really understood, like psychologically, what their character's motivation was or why they were doing the things that they were doing. Actually, my team with The Pickup we spent a big chunk of this summer and into this fall reading back through the This Land catalog as we prep stories to move over to The Pickup’s website from the This Land production archives. And it was a real treat to get to spend time with those like really taking the design and the illustration work you know, going over each and every little footnote with these stories. A lot of them were, like, very research intensive. And, you know, driven by historical records that, like Michael Mason, Lee Roy Chapman, Mark Brown, these journalists would really dig into the history. And I remember one of This Land's big, big wins, like early on, was they published an article about the Brady Theater in Tulsa and the Brady Heights neighborhood, which was connected, of course, to Tate Brady, who was a founding father of Tulsa, turned out to actually be a member of the Ku Klux Klan, which This Land unearthed in their research work, and the article that they published, you know, ultimately, kind of led to the city removing, you know, the name Brady from a main street in the arts district. And eventually, I think, the neighborhood name got changed to just the heights as well. So they, they did a lot for kind of, like, the legacy of Oklahoma culture, by digging into the actual historical record and proving, like, you know, hey, we do have some skeletons in the closet. Let's have a conversation about that.
LaCroix: Yeah, definitely an example of how journalism and even kind of in that way, almost a subculture writing, can influence everyday life and how we view things. Yeah, that's one thing I always appreciated about This Land Press, is it seemed like everything was very well-researched, and it was just a little bit below the mainstream, a little bit. And that always kind of gave it a little bit of a danger to it, and a little bit of a, “I'm not reading this anywhere else.” So, this is special. So that's always fun. It'll be fun to kind of see those rerun here in The Pickup.
I know you started the Root back in, what in 2017? So just almost close, closest to a decade here. Root called itself “the insider guide to Tulsa.” There was an events calendar newsletter, curated guides on what to do and see in Tulsa. Root was acquired by This Land Press last year by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, which was Root’s seed starter, so to speak, right? How do you feel The Pickup is different from what you were doing at Root?
Carney: Yeah, good question. We'll be doing some of the similar things like, we'll be publishing, you know, a weekly roundup of things to do around Tulsa. We'll be doing more in depth features journalism, which we had been doing in Root’s newsletter. But with The Pickup, it's the offerings are much more expanded. We have a full-service website that's on a freemium business model, so we can publish longer stories. We can publish more in depth stories. We can work with a variety of journalists and freelance writers. And really too, being a smaller, more independently owned operation, we just have a lot more freedom to say and do what we want to do. So we'll be, we'll be a much smaller newsroom without any outside influence really.
LaCroix: One thing that I see similar here between what you're doing and what I've seen other folks do, like, for example, just a couple of months ago, Oklahoma City relaunched its alt-weekly, Oklahoma Gazette. Tulsa used to have alt-weeklies and monthly mags like Urban Tulsa Weekly, Infinite Press, Tulsa Voice – most of those ceased publication years or even decades ago. Did the lack of Tulsa having an alt-weekly spur you to launch The Pickup and just kind of fill that void in that arts and culture space?
Carney: Yeah, absolutely. My team here, Alicia Chesser, Zach Reeves and I were veterans of writing for alt-weeklies. Alicia actually wrote for The Village Voice in New York City years ago when she lived there. We love alts, and we love, This Land, you know, kind of these outsider publications. And there just hasn't been one in Tulsa since The Voice folded in 2019, I believe. So, yeah, it definitely spurred us on to doing that. We believe that The Pickup is additive to the local journalism economy. There are a lot of really talented writers, editors, photographers, designers here in Tulsa. There just, for the last couple of years, haven't been like a great variety of publications to publish their work. So we definitely want The Pickup to be able to publish stories that other outlets won't, to put a really strong premium, much like This Land did, on storytelling. Sometimes that's long form, and sometimes that's that's just telling a story from a different perspective or in a different way, finding a source who has insight to a particular issue that, just for whatever reason, isn't being published in the mainstream media. So we, we think that we can, can be that for Tulsa.
LaCroix: I see The Pickup is looking for pitches from the public as well. What are you looking for in a pitch and how to how do people do that?
Carney: Yeah, we put out an initial call for freelancer submissions back in November, and received like a wave of enthusiasm, of pitches, of people who are just kind of like, ‘yeah, I've had the story I've wanted to write for years, and there's kind of hasn't been the local publication that's that's right for it.’ Journalists can send us pitches at [email protected] you can email them to us. Get in touch with me – I'm [email protected], and I'll send you our freelancer guidelines, and, our processes and all that. We pay, of course, for work. And, yeah, I guess, what we're looking for is for like, a strong perspective, like, We want somebody who knows a lot about the topic that they're covering enough to have a strong opinion about it. Obviously, we're not going to publish like, totally embedded nonsense, but we do want, authoritative writers who know the topics well enough to guide us, to guide the audience into a new understanding of a fresh perspective on maybe an old story or a new one.
LaCroix: The Pickup runs on a subscription model you mentioned as freemium. Want to explain that for some folks that don't know what freemium is? And tell us just how it works. What do subscribers get from that?
Carney: Yeah, sure. So, yeah, freemium business model – it's basically a business model where they're kind of different tiers of access, from non-paying to paying. So we have a website that we publish, The Pickup.com. It has new stories on a daily to weekly basis. Those are free for the public to access, up until you hit a registration wall after a certain number of stories. I think the first registration wall asks for your email address, and then so many stories, and it'll become a hard wall, and you'll have to pay to subscribe after that. Paying subscribers, we have three tiers of subscription: Red Dirt, Sunday Paper and Certified Gold at ascending price points. Basically, what you get is full access to the website, regular newsletters that we will send to you, and they're written by me and my team. And so you're talking to the actual journalists in the newsroom doing the work day to day. And then, other bonus things, like merchandise drops – we'll do quarterly merchandise drops for the premium tier subscribers and annual ones otherwise, and then on up to higher level benefits after that. It's not like a totally brand new business model. There are other publications, around the country, that are trying out stuff like this. There's one in Minnesota that we like a lot called Racket, Defector, a great sports and culture journalism website - a very, very similar model, 404 Media. It's kind of a micro trend that we're seeing nationally. It's not exactly like what a venture capitalist would invest in. It's not built to just scale out like crazy, but it's a good, solid local business when it's when it's done tight. And that's what we're hoping to do.
LaCroix: Well, and I have to ask you kind of one silly question. When you start something new, new product, new business, whatever, coming up with a name, I know is really hard. How hard was it for you guys to come up with the name, The Pickup?
Carney: It was actually surprisingly hard. I think we had two sit down workshops facilitated by a friend of ours who does this work for a living. And I think we spent like three hours each time, like, passing notepads back and forth, spitballing ideas, very writers room. We basically, like, we locked everybody together in a room for several hours. And, you know, said, don't come out until we have a name for this thing. But yeah, we really agonized over it. We kept track of all the rejected names, and I think there were probably, like, over 100. But we felt good about The Pickup – kind of what we were going for was, the idea of community and togetherness through, like, a shared ritual, right? And if you're from here, if you grew up in Tulsa or Oklahoma, generally, like, you probably have a fond memory of talking in the back of somebody's pickup truck, and that's kind of what we wanted the site to feel like. It felt good. It was like one of those things where I think we came up with the name very early in the second workshop, and we all kind of liked it, and we almost thought about calling off the workshop, but then we were like, no, let's see it through, and at the end of it, we just kind of agreed like, yeah, that's sort of the one.
LaCroix: It kind of also has a double meaning, right, with alt-weeklies, you used to pick them up outside of grocery stores and restaurants. And this is the same kind of idea, right?
Carney: Yep. It's got some musical connotations as well, like radio, you know, picking up a radio signal. And it's kind of funny, as we've been using the name now for several months. As we build out the website and the branding and the strategy and all that, you start to notice it around town. Every like to go food business has a pickup line. So it's actually a much more commonplace or saying than we maybe realized when we first came up with it.
LaCroix: Well, tell us where [folks] can go and find out more about The Pickup.
Carney: Yep, thepickup.com. You can follow, follow us on our social media channels, which are @thepickupdotcom. Thepickup.com will have new stories there on a daily to weekly basis. Yeah, subscribe, tell your friends about us. We built our site to be very easily shareable, right? So you finish the story, can turn around and text it to a friend and talk about it. That is one thing we do believe in kind of the modern journalism landscape, the job of the journalist isn't exactly done when you publish a story, right? It's the discussion that it sparks after the fact, and that's something we really want to emphasize with The Pickup that we want to start conversations, kind of provoke, come up with new ideas for how we can be together, work together as a city, as a society. And I think a big part of that is just getting people throwing those ideas out there, and getting people talking and meeting and together, and, talking through it, whatever it is.
The Pickup can be found online at thepickup.com.
