“Let’s do the 5-year renewal, please.”

That’s the answer I sent to our longtime web host earlier this week when asked about our domain renewal.

It’s one of the easiest decisions I’ve been tasked with making in this role. The other was to commit to making sure we saw Sept. 27, 2025, and we will.

When founding executive director Carol Nunnelley introduced the region to BirminghamWatch in 2015, she described its creation as “a story about Birmingham’s need for news that asks important questions and searches for trustworthy answers.”

“It’s about reporters… digging through data, and informing voters. It’s about working with other news organizations.”

I hope she sees that we’re still taking those words to heart every time we publish and every time we think of our role in Birmingham’s present and future.

We attempted to cover a lot more ground in 2015 than we do now. In 2015, collaborations allowed us to produce investigative journalism focused on education and the environment. Recent years have seen us receive requests for increased coverage of Birmingham and Jefferson County. As a result, we decided to narrow our coverage area shortly after my arrival in January 2024 and fill those local gaps.

Recently, we’ve:

• Shared the history of Birmingham’s neighborhood association program. (It still has the potential to be as transformative now as it was when it was first introduced 50 years ago.)
• Explored the impact of last year’s purchase of the Birmingham Race Course on the surrounding region.
• Helped to explain what’s been happening with our region’s largest water utility
• Published a municipal voter guide referenced and used by three local partners. (Incidentally, we’re still working on one for the upcoming Oct. 7 runoff.)

We’re aware that we have two important questions we seek to answer with our work moving forward.

• “So what?” Why does this matter to me? When the news out of Washington doesn’t slow down, it’s more important than ever to understand what’s happening around the corner more… and how both the national and the local situations impact me directly.
• “Now what?” Now that you’re aware of what’s happening and how it could impact you, what are the options available to you to influence a decision?

We aim to do everything Carol outlined in that first note, but we know we can’t do anything without Birmingham. We don’t exist without your interest and support. If we’re not answering those questions or laying the groundwork to do so at a later date for you, what’s the point? Thank you. We also appreciate our donors and those who’ve supported us at any point during the last 10 years.

For those interested in the stats to back it up: We’ve averaged 20,280 unique visitors per month for the 12 months ending last week (resulting in the equivalent of a 24% increase in traffic), with 99% of the reporting produced in-house (versus 50% in 2023). We were the first news organization in Birmingham to be invited to join Nextdoor as a local news partner, introducing us to more of our city and region. We recently regained control of our Instagram account and have been exploring the world of Bluesky and LinkedIn. We’ve seen people slowly find us at these digital outposts.

We are a city built to change and transform the South, and we still can do so whenever we choose. Individuals like A.G. Gaston and Giles Perkins come to mind, individuals who moved this city forward, even as they were not “of” the city, sometimes despite what elected officials thought. I look at the legacies that both left their adopted hometown, especially as Railroad Park (Perkins served as its nonprofit board’s founding president) prepares to celebrate its fifteenth anniversary this weekend, and all I can think of is what happens if you feed the civic curiosity of our fellow residents now.

What happens when we become a resource for Birmingham’s civically curious? 

Who knows what stories we can help share (and how we can share them with and for you)? Who knows what city we could build for the future? How can we effectively amplify stories and issues that require awareness so they reach everyone who needs to hear about them? How do we do a better job of connecting with the community and make sure we look up from our screens from time to time to listen and reflect on what’s happening?

So, how can you help us celebrate this occasion?

• We’ll be sharing a reader survey on the website over the weekend to help us continue working on ways to better serve as that resource for civic curiosity. (We’ll also be looking at how we might collect answers offline as well, so stay tuned.)
• If you’re able to support our efforts financially, we’d appreciate that as well.
• Share our work with others. It helps us raise our visibility in the community.

Remember, you can also use the forms available on our contact page to reach out, or just email me directly at andre@birminghamwatch.org.

I’ll quote Carol again as I sign off: “I trust you’ll find good reading in the BirminghamWatch reports. And I thank you for your interest in our mission and ask for your good wishes for this undertaking.”

Cheers.

André Natta is the executive editor of BirminghamWatch and the executive director of its parent organization, the Alabama Initiative for Independent Journalism.