Public Character #11: Trevor Born Walks Daily to Make a Neighborhood Newspaper

[Diving as deep as possible into local news with shoe-leather journalism.]

Most people, myself very much included, gather our news in front of a screen, scrolling through websites, RSS feeds and social media streams. Trevor Born, who writes and publishes the Longfellow Whatever, does it the old fashioned way with shoe leather. Nearly every day, he walks the streets of Minneapolis, Longfellow neighborhood and tries to figure out what’s going on.

“I usually call it a newsletter, but if I'm trying to sound high-minded, I might call it a news project,” Born said.  

Trevor Born’s project, the Longfellow Whatever, has been around now for two years and, judging by the “few hundred” subscribers, it’s thriving. 

According to Born, Minneapolis’ Longfellow neighborhood is bound by the Mississippi and the Hiawatha freeway on the east and west, and I-94 and Minnehaha Falls / Creek on the south. In between lay a substantial swath of south Minneapolis, mostly middle-class housing with a few key commercial corridors: East Lake Street, Franklin, and Minnehaha Avenues. 

In other words, it’s just at the right size for a local newspaper. But since the decline of that industry — the Southside Pride is the only lingering print publication, and it’s largely composed of rants rather than news — there’s a vacuum out there. 

That’s no longer true in Longfellow, where Born walks the streets daily searching for story ideas. After two years he hasn’t run out of them. 

“Today, as I was about to hit send [on the newsletter], I was walking down the street, and noticed people buffing out this piece of graffiti that I had noticed before,” explained Born, who included their story. 

It was a short 50-word blurb about the maintenance ot the wall of Longfellow Market, an East Lake grocery store, but it was the kind of irreplaceable detail that makes Longfellow Whatever worth the subscription.

Born publishes two articles a month with a wide variety of angles. This week the Whatever featured a piece on dog treat stations, profiling residents who have installed front yard boxes boasting Milk Bones (like little free libraries for dogs). Another recent piece covered the 1975 “freedom train” that ran through Longfellow in fifty years ago to celebrate the bicentennial. In February Trevor Born dug into the backstory of a mutual aid fund that opened up during the ICE occupation.  

Still, the bulk  of the Longfellow Whatever features cover business comings and goings, like what’s happening tho this building or if the old Chinese restaurant is every going to be remodeled, a new dispensary, or the history of the dog sauna business. 

That’s kind the kind of story that gave Trevor Born the idea for his news project in the first place. A few years after the COVID pandemic, he was at a gathering and a someone mentioned to him that the local long-shuttered wine bar (the old Riverview, on the corner of 42nd and 46th) was about to get a new owner. 

That was exactly the kind of thing he wanted to know.

“I really wish that it could just be somebody's job to stay on top of that stuff,” Born said. “So, I figured I would just try.”

Thus the Longfellow Whatever was born, beginning in March of 2024 when Born began recruiting subscribers from the neighborhood. It’s been growing slowly ever since. 

[Born leading a tour of old fast food joints for Preserve Minneapolis: here at the White Castle corner.]

Trevor Born got his journalism start quite young, as he describes it, with a childhood newspaper he ran out of his house during grade school. Growing up in Bloomington, he was lucky to have family friends at the Star Tribune who let him hang around the newsroom. When he went off to college at the University of Minnesota, he naturally gravitated to journalism at the Minnesota Daily, and became an editor. 

Over the years he’s had his byline in the Star Tribune more than once, and after graduating worked as an AP stringer, along with a brief stint doing private public relations. Following the COVID pandemic, Trevor left that job behind, and went out on his own, essentially creating a dream job in his backyard.

“An amazing aspect of the job, because of the small folk geographic footprint of it, it has this ability to be just kind of old school,” Born said. “It’s almost a Mr. Rogers' neighborhood kind of thing, a lot of what I do is conducted on foot and it serendipitously happens just from running into people. It's kind of what you dream of: [For] most beats, it doesn't really get to happen.” 

[This building used to be an old-school Kentucky Fried Chicken.]

Two weeks ago, I tagged along with Trevor Born walk down East Lake on a local history tour, sponsored by Preserve Minneapolis. Titled “Lost Fast Food Joints of Longfellow,” the stroll was a blast: a trove of deep history like the first Kentucky Fried Chicken location (above: the building is now an eye clinic), a once-popular A & W restaurant at East Lake and West River Road, and the two different White Castle locations on the corner of 36th Avenue.

In each case Born illuminated the landscape with histories of fast food in general and specific South Minneapolis franchises. The tour was supplemented with cans of root beer and enlarged photographs, and the audience of a two dozen mostly older preservation buffs was delighted. 

For the newsletter, subscribers are charged monthly or yearly, Patreon style. They receive twice-weekly stories about their neighborhood, and the results pay Born’s bills and even allow him to rent a desk at an East Lake co-working space.

A recent Longfellow Whatever newsletter blast included the following: a bakery (temporarily) closing, a cancelled art fair, an upcoming corn roast, the energy utility’s impending telephone pole inspections, park board arborists condemning diseased trees, a near-drowning at the falls, a closed wading pool, an office building for sale, a commercial building getting repainted, a new projection system at the micro-cinema, a new sign at the animal clinic, a brewery block party, three different concerts, and the news that the Japanese deli is now open for lunch on Fridays.

This is the kind of thing that once would have been the purview of print community newspapers you could pick up at coffee shops or grocery stores, all supported by local advertising and want ads. As readers well know, though local news is still vital, those days are far behind us. City papers have been cutting local newsrooms for decades, and where a four or five people might have covered city hall a generation ago, today it’s likely one reporter juggling that beat alongside a bunch of others.  

In that world, the Longfellow Whatever is the kind of solution we need: a micro-enterprise, where one person fills in gaps about business openings, the politics of neighbor disputes, and local development drama. If every neighborhood could have a Born on the beat, I would not be so worried about the future of local news.