This week on Niche, we spent some quality time with founder and “head editorialist” of Noble Nashville, Collin Czarnecki. In just a few short months, Noble has grown from one-man startup to one of Nashville’s go-to news sources for all things creative.

A journalist by trade, Collin had struggled to find meaning in writing for mainstream local news. While he loves Broadway and the great things happening there every day, he saw newspapers — both hard copy and digital — covering the same types of stories week after week. Local news just wasn’t local enough. Enter Noble Nashville.

“Noble is a completely digital platform designed to highlight Nashville’s culture, community, and the conversation surrounding it all,” Collin tells us. He designed the platform to be hyper-local and makes it a point to cover artists, musicians, and other creatives that haven’t yet had exposure in local publications. While Noble serves up relevant news about the creative scene citywide, Collin aims to foster a sense of community at the neighborhood level. By the end of the year, he hopes to implement hyper-local message boards and allow locals to submit their events to Noble’s online calendar.

But why did Collin choose Nashville? A Chicago native, Collin was sucked in by Nashville’s young population and rapidly-growing creative scene. He attributes much of Noble’s success to Nashville’s natural enthusiasm for collaboration. If the timing was right, Collin says, he would consider building similar hyper-local news platforms for other cities; however, it seems that nowhere else in the country is exploding with young creatives the way Nashville is right now

Noble Nashville’s launch party was this past Friday, October 7th, at Bridge Below Space, a street art-covered warehouse, in North Nashville. Noble’s also a sponsor for Athens of the South, a pop-up art event packed with music, painting, spoken-word poetry, and just about every other kind of art, on October 22nd in East Park.

Make sure you check out the whole podcast for more about Collin’s journey from disillusioned college grad t