In Raleigh, Gawker’s Former “Editor of the Internet” Turns Toward Analog Media

In another timeline, journalist Neetzan Zimmerman was in charge of creating clickable stories that would drive millions of monthly page views to news websites such as Gawker, The Messenger, and The Hill. 

Now, Zimmerman and his wife, Yulia Shamis, a biomedical scientist with a doctoral degree, have plans to chase a different kind of traffic: foot traffic on downtown Raleigh’s newly reemerging Fayetteville Street.

This summer, the couple will open The Newsagent’s, a cultural hub located in the historic Mahler building in the heart of the City of Oaks. Part bookshop, part coffee shop, part event space, The Newsagent’s will be, in Zimmerman’s telling, a museum of the common, “a place where people can come and appreciate all sorts of cultural artifacts from the past, things that maybe have been neglected or forgotten or set aside too early.”

Things like cassette and VHS tapes, vinyl records and magazines, paperback novels and comic books, CDs and DVDs. Zimmerman and Shamis see The Newsagent’s as a place to both retreat from technology and build community in. Throughout the sprawling ground floor and up some stairs into a cozy mezzanine, the space’s coffee bar, music section, gaming area, and comic book space is sure to lure analog aficionados. Tables and chairs and comfy couches stationed throughout—plus repurposed newspaper boxes serving as little free libraries—will invite those visitors to stay awhile.  

“I’m not breaking new ground,” Zimmerman says of his vision. “I’m just trying to recapture something we’ve lost and something I think we need to find again. It’s important for society that we have these spaces and the time to spend with these artifacts, because they’re what make us human. They’re what contributes to our humanity.”

Zimmerman and Shamis met as students in Boston and lived up and down the East and West Coasts—New York City, then Los Angeles, then San Diego—before landing in Raleigh a little under three years ago. Like many transplants to the Triangle, they were drawn to Raleigh’s relatively lower cost of living and family-friendly lifestyle and to the opportunity to become homeowners and business owners. Since the move, Zimmerman has immersed himself in downtown Raleigh’s history and culture and wants to contribute to Fayetteville Street’s ongoing revitalization. 

“I just want to bring that downtown feel back,” he says. “I saw photos from the ’50s of Fayetteville Street, bustling, just humming with activity. People falling out of stores. I want to see that again.”

With grants from the City of Raleigh and assistance from the Downtown Raleigh Alliance, the couple has poured their energy into upfitting the circa 1876 Romanesque revival–style Mahler building at 228 Fayetteville Street. Raleigh’s third oldest existing building, the Mahler originally belonged to Frederick Mahler, a silversmith who ran a general store and jewelry business. Most recently, it served as Rory Parnell’s Mahler Fine Art Gallery. 

After leasing the ground floor of the building from Parnell and the Worthy family, local titans of commercial real estate, Raleigh architect Alison Croop of Louis Cherry Architecture helped the couple see their vision for the space through. Zimmerman and Shamis befriended sisters-in-law Hannah and Bre Brunswick, who own Blackbird Books and Coffee in City Market, and who connected them with Silver Lake Construction Co. for the build-out. 

It hasn’t been an easy journey. A fire code snag that the city is working to resolve is a current holdup, Shamis explains, and, beyond “summer 2025,” the timeline for opening isn’t clear—but, as soon as the custom-made bookshelves are delivered, the couple will be able to host more than 100 people at a time in the space, an ideal capacity for movie screenings, guest lectures, book clubs, and other community events. 

“We really stuck by [the Mahler building] through all of these bureaucratic issues, because we just feel so strongly that this place matches our vision for this, for what we’re building,” Zimmerman says.

The Newsagent’s singular focus on secondhand physical media may seem like a pivot for someone whose job once was to capture the attention of the masses in the digital realm with endless new content. But Zimmerman says his earlier work informs the current vision, and it’s the antithesis of the gatekeeping of knowledge, culture, and information that we see throughout much of modern society. 

“I saw myself, first and foremost, as a storyteller,” Zimmerman says of his time as a journalist. “I saw myself as bridging the gap between people and information. People need information. I saw myself as the conduit to that information, and I saw it as my responsibility to break down that information in a way that was accessible. Access remains the primary focus of my work.”

As an editor and blogger for digital websites, Zimmerman had a knack for “generating Internet traffic, increasing page views, and unleashing viral content,” according to an alumni profile from his alma mater, UMass Boston. While cat videos and other clickbait may not have inherent news value, that content, and the advertising revenue that comes with it via web traffic, supplemented sites like Gawker’s more heavyweight reporting. 

It’s a lesson Zimmerman carries forward. The Newsagent’s will “treat every piece of culture that we curate for our store as deserving, regardless of its provenance, of its history,” he says.

“We take books that some might consider lower on the food chain, so to speak,” he says. “But we still acknowledge that it has a sizable audience, and that audience enjoys it for what it is. So we never look down on any culture, never make you feel bad for liking bodice-rippers or young adult fiction. Whatever it is that gets you to spend time with a piece of culture, we are into, and we want to help facilitate that.”

For Zimmerman and Shamis, there’s also a desire to give back—to a city that’s given the couple and their young daughter a new home, and to the culture that shaped kids of the ’80s and ’90s before the internet and the “virtual pain box” of social media (as a recent post labeled “Manifesto” on The Newsagent’s Instagram page describes) stole our attention.  

“I’ve seen the dark side of digital media and where it’s gotten us,” Zimmerman says. “And so for me, a way of giving back is returning to a time, maybe before digital media, before a lot of these so-called advancements, when we had real interpersonal relationships and human, face-to-face interaction. Hiding behind a screen leads almost exclusively to negative outcomes. So, we want to bring people out. We want people to see their neighbors.”

Send an email to Raleigh editor Jane Porter at [email protected].