There is an agent I keep thinking about. I have never met her. She works in a county most of the industry could not find on a map, and she knows things about it that no dataset will ever hold.
- She knows which school rezoning is about to move a thousand families.
- She knows the builder who cuts corners and the one whose punch lists are honest.
- She knows why the house on the corner has sold four times in six years, and she knows it because she was there for all four.
That knowledge rarely reaches the rest of us. It lives in her head, and in a few hundred conversations at closings and open houses, and then it fades.
Multiply her by every market in America, and you begin to see the size of what we lose every day. A national newsroom, even a very good one, cannot stand on 10,000 corners at once.
I want to change that.
Centering new voices
For most of my career, I have run organizations that drew their strength from members rather than from headquarters. Associations, conferences, trade media. The lesson was the same each time. The people at the center are never as smart as the people at the edges, and the wisest thing the center can do is listen, gather and give the edges a stage.
I am new to Inman. New enough that I still get lost in our own org chart. But I have been at this long enough to know a great crowd when I see one, and real estate has one of the greatest crowds in American business.
So here is what I am asking for: I want to find a thousand citizen journalists. I am not looking to replace our reporters. We will always have the best journalists in this industry, and I intend to keep it that way. Our newsroom does work a crowd cannot do, and it does it with an independence I will protect at some cost.
What I am after sits alongside them. A thousand agents, brokers, loan officers and team leaders who love their markets enough to write them down. To tell us what a Tuesday looks like where they live. To send the color and the small true stories that never scale but somehow add up to the whole country.
We will give them a real home for it.
Looking ahead to Inman 2.0
Inman.com is being rebuilt, and the community will have a place in it by design, not as an afterthought. Their stories will live on the site and travel across social, carried out to the audiences they earn.
There will be editing. There will be standards, because a byline on Inman has to mean something, and we will make sure it keeps meaning something. But the voice will be theirs. The knowledge will be theirs. We are the amplifier. They are the signal.
I know how this sounds, coming from the new guy with the big idea. Every incoming executive shows up with a vision and a slide deck, and most of the deck ends up in a drawer. I have made a few of those decks myself. This one I mean, and I expect to be measured on it.
The idea is older than my tenure, older than most of our platforms. Inman was built on the belief that this industry talks best when it talks to itself, honestly, without a filter. That the person doing the work has something to teach the person writing about it.
We drifted from that, the way companies do, one reasonable quarter at a time. I want to walk it back toward that founding faith and hand it better tools than the founders ever had.
There is a version of the news business that is tired and cynical, convinced the audience is a problem to be managed. I have never believed it. The audience is the point.
The agent in that county I cannot name is not a metric to me. She is a colleague I have not met yet, doing hard and honorable work in a place she loves, and she has been reporting the truth of her corner of the world for years without anyone thinking to call it journalism. It is time we called it that.
A thousand of them. Writing their streets. Teaching the rest of us what we could never learn from a spreadsheet.
If that sounds sentimental, good. I would rather run a company that believes in its people than one that is merely clever about them.
We are opening the door. I am asking the best of you to walk through it. Come tell us what you see out there. The whole industry is listening, and for once, it will be listening to you.
Thomas M. Bohn
CEO, Inman.com
