Lisa Snowden is Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Baltimore Beat, a digital and print-based news product based in Baltimore City. At Baltimore Beat, she uses decades of experience both as a reporter and in leadership to help re-imagine a new approach to news and storytelling. She believes that journalism is vital to communities, but in its current form, it can cause harm to the reporters who do the work and the communities they serve. Baltimore Beat is her response to that - her priority is stories told with dignity and integrity. At the same time, she believes that reporters, especially reporters from marginalized backgrounds, must be treated respectfully.
She founded Baltimore Beat in 2016 after Baltimore City Paper, a 40-year-old alternative weekly paper, was shuttered. City Paper was an institution in Baltimore that used long-form journalism to look deeply into matters that affected the city. City Paper provided comprehensive arts coverage and often offered a more tongue-in-cheek way of looking at the powerful institutions that run Baltimore City. She knew that just because that paper ended didn’t mean that the need for those things vanished.
She needed more journalism focused on the city’s 60 percent Black population, and we needed more places for Black journalists to tell those stories. Racial inequities mean that there are primarily white writers telling Black Baltimore’s stories. All of these things are why Baltimore Beat came to be. Over the years, Baltimore Beat has won over the trust of readers in Baltimore by becoming a reliable source for good journalism: trustworthy, thoughtful stories, engaging events, and striking photography. Due to a generous $1 million grant, Baltimore Beat is printed bi-monthly and distributed throughout the city.
Previously, she was an editor at Baltimore City Paper, Baltimore Sun, and The Real News Network. Her work has also appeared in Essence, Washington Post, Baltimore Magazine, and many other publications.
