A website covering business news in Brooklyn has launched and is being run by a former Time and Fortune editor.
The Bridge is focused on covering the companies, entrepreneurs and trends that have made Brooklyn a growing economic area. It covers Brooklyn’s growing pains as well, including rising costs and inequities.
The Bridge is run by Steve Koepp, a longtime Brooklyn resident who previously was business editor at Time and executive editor of Fortune.
“I couldn’t help but notice that Brooklyn was changing fast,” said Koepp in a telephone interview on Monday. “They’re building things all around me. And some of these companies are growing into big enterprises, like Vice Media and Kickstarter. This is a place that has become a real economic force.”
A lot of media cover Brooklyn, but Koepp wants to dig deeper on individual business stories: How they got started, what obstacles they had to overcome, how they survive long-term. Koepp believes he has the focus, the experience and the borderline obsession to make this work.
Koepp, who has funded the site from his savings, is currently the only full-time employee. He is using freelancers for his stories and his photographs.
The site hopes to sell direct ads once it garners a large enough audience. Koepp also expects to generate revenue from special reports and from events. He is not currently considering subscriptions.
After launching last week, Koepp has been adding a feature a day. He is also aggregating Brooklyn business news from other sources on the site, and he hoped to add a weekly newsletter and an opinion section.
“It’s very much a hatchling at this point, and a work in progress,” he said. “But it got off to a good start. It’s like the captian on a submarine who has to know how everything works.”
While at Time, Koepp led the reporting on the downfall of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky and produced a cover story on the proposed RJR-Nabisco leveraged buyout. At Fortune, he managed its website in 2008-09 and edited cover stories on Carl Icahn and Indra Nooyi.
