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Immediately following its inaugural issue, coastal publications responded in a way that further proved the need for Belt ’s regional insight.
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“The national media wanted to paint the the region as either full of ruin or full of renaissance.” Feeling inspired by the demand, she launched a Kickstarter to fund a magazine, and just a year after publishing the anthology, Belt was born.
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But once she figured out how to get an ISBN number and put it on Amazon, the book sold through its first two printings and people started asking her what was next. “It’s so full of typos,” Trubek says, laughing. In May 2013, they put out submissions, and in September, they published the Rust Belt Chic anthology with the intention that it would be a one-off. Frustrated with outsider journalists’ coverage of the city, she decided to collaborate with Richey Piiparinen, a writer, urban researcher, and Cleveland native, on a book. “There’s a thirst and hunger for people here to tell what has really happened.”īefore it was the only independent media company dedicated to Rust Belt writing, Belt was, in the words of Trubek, “a lark.” In 2012, she was teaching half-time at Oberlin and working on a book about t he evolution of handwriting this was around the same time that the media had begun to fixate on Cleveland. “The impetus for Belt came from this sense that the national media wanted to paint the region as either full of ruin or full of renaissance,” Trubek tells me. Today, the business is not just a magazine, but also a small press that puts out a few books a year. It’s precisely this oversimplified narrative that compelled Anne Trubek to start Belt Magazine in 2013, a weekly online publication that features longform writing about the Rust Belt by locals who have a nuanced understanding of the area. farm-to-table eateries, award-winning craft breweries and cool art spaces.” In an article published a few months prior, the New York Times had named Cleveland as just one of the cities in the region that was “transcend its Rust Belt reputation.” New York Post called the city a site of “revival,” claiming that the former “failing Rust Belt town” was “earning laurels for its homegrown talent. So in late 2012, just before the Federal Reserve tapered off its economic stimulus and the Dow hit a record high, coastal journalists went looking inside the disaster for signs of new life.īefore Detroit and Buffalo and Pittsburgh were declared The New Rust Belt Cities, journalists found the triumphant narrative they sought in Cleveland, Ohio, a former manufacturing stronghold that was experiencing cultural growth, largely ushered in by local chefs. While the region had been plagued by deindustrialization, depopulation, and social conservatism for decades, the Recession devastated its already-declining local economies and pushed them closer to ruin. Eager to spot a rising phoenix after the Great Recession, media outlets began looking to a part of the country they had continuously likened to ashes : The Rust Belt.
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