By Adam Pagnucco.
Bethesda Today, which rebranded itself from MoCo360 on Tuesday, is Montgomery County’s principal news outlet. It has its roots in Bethesda Magazine, a print publication founded by Steve Hull, and started an online newsroom a decade ago. Hull sold the outlet to developer Scott Copeland in 2021, who then sold it to Delaware-based Today Media a year ago. Its regularity and breadth of county coverage is matched only by Alex Tsironis’s MoCo Show, so any change in its status is a big deal for Montgomery County.
What should we make of its rebranding, its second in two years?
On the one hand, it seems little will change other than the name and website, at least in the short term. Its publisher asserts that it will still cover all of Montgomery County, as difficult as that might be with the modest size of its staff. And perhaps the rebranding will help get advertisers, which is paramount for its financial well-being. Without adequate funding, Bethesda Today will not survive and we would lose a key media outlet. None of us should root for that to happen.
Nevertheless, the rebranding bothers me. I have lived in Montgomery County for more than twenty years and here is one thing I have learned about this place: no one locality represents all the others. MoCo is not really one jurisdiction in a classic sense. It’s more of a collection of individual, distinctive communities that happen to share common governmental borders and one county government. Each of these communities has different political cultures, racial distributions, housing mixes, economics and geographic features. Burtonsville is not Potomac. Wheaton is not Damascus. Bethesda is not a synonym for MoCo.
I lived with this for four years when I worked for an at-large county council member (Hans Riemer). That job involved balancing the needs of MoCo’s different communities. The differences of those needs showed up constantly in decisions over budget, land use and transportation. For example, a transportation approach emphasizing transit, walking and bicycle use might be appropriate for dense areas in Downcounty, but it has less relevance for spread-out Upcounty communities that were designed for cars. Debates over transportation projects like the ICC and M-83 reinforced these local differences. And don’t even get me started on racial equity issues, especially in the schools. Once again, differences between MoCo communities are stark.
Yes, the outlet was originally named after Bethesda – both the magazine and the online newsroom (Bethesda Beat). In its early days, the newsroom focused primarily on Bethesda and nearby areas (like Chevy Chase and Potomac) and occasionally strayed into other communities. It always covered county government, which after all, governs Bethesda (which has no municipal government). (Disclosure: I was a paid columnist at Bethesda Beat in 2018 and 2019.)
Back then, the local media was bigger. The Post had more local coverage. The Gazette existed. The Washington Examiner, the Sentinel and Patch ran local news. So Bethesda Beat could be hyper-local. It probably made financial sense. When the rest of the media faded, Bethesda Beat stepped up and became MoCo360 in 2023. It was becoming more of a county-wide outlet anyway, but now it was declaring this ambition openly. Here is what the outlet said at the time.
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The popular Montgomery County media umbrella that produces Bethesda Magazine and the online daily news outlet Bethesda Beat is now going by a new name: MoCo360.
The change is not just about a name, but also about uniting people across Montgomery County, according to Sumindi Peiris, the president of Z-Pop Media, the publisher of MoCo360.
“MoCo360 is about encompassing everyone,” Peiris said.
That encompassing effort extends to the url, which is changing from bethesdamagazine.com to moco360.media.
The rebrand goal is to expand the message and purpose of the media outlet in order to serve and unite the greater Montgomery County area, she said.
Peiris said the idea for a name change came about because of confusion in the community about Bethesda Beat’s coverage area. While the Beat covered news throughout Montgomery County, there was some public misconception that the Beat was focused only on Bethesda. With this name change comes a commitment to enhancing coverage throughout Montgomery County and Upper Northwest D.C.
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That’s a lot of ambition that was hard to realize. Soon after, the outlet’s top reporter was gone and so was the president of its parent company (who is quoted above). The content never changed much, but the economics probably did not allow it. We’re lucky that Today Media bought it.
That said, given the statements above, this new rebranding back to “Bethesda” feels like a step back. And the publication’s desire to nevertheless be regarded as “Montgomery County’s trusted news source” feels like it wants to have it both ways – keeping readers from all over MoCo while using the cachet of its wealthiest neighborhoods for marketing purposes.
I will continue to read Bethesda Today. I will keep linking to its articles, which I find informative and objective. The outlet has a large content library written by an outstanding staff of reporters who have gone on to bigger and better things. Over the years, standouts like A.J. Metcalf, Aaron Kraut, Caitlynn Peetz, Bethany Rodgers, Steve Bohnel and others produced great work that outlasts their tenure. Most jurisdictions in this region don’t have exclusive local publications with this record of achievement. I don’t love this rebranding, but I want Bethesda Today to succeed and prosper.
So should you.