December 23, 2019–January 6, 2020
City & State New York
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“WE ARE IN A POST-COMPETITION AGE IN LOCAL NEWS. WE ARE HERE TO SUPPORT EVERYONE – PROFIT, NONPROFIT AND WHATEVER HYBRID OR NEW MODEL COMES DOWN THE LINE.” – THE CIT Y FOUNDING EDITOR JERE HESTER
The City, which launched in April, is experimenting with the nonprofit model with a news site focused entirely on New York City and its boroughs. Founding editor Jere Hester said that the purpose of The City is to fill the gap in local news coverage, particularly after DNAinfo’s demise in 2017. The site has already had an impact on local politics, both on a large and small scale. One early story uncovered misuse of community board funds in Brooklyn. The story got picked up by other outlets and directly led to an investigation by the de Blasio administration. The City also has broken ground covering ethics violations by de Blasio donors. Like the Times, The City reports on
local stories that editors feel have the greatest impact, rather than writing up every single community board meeting or covering general interest events. It encourages other outlets to republish its work, and its editorial staff is heartened to see when its coverage is picked up and expanded on by other publications. “The way I like to put it is that I feel that we are in a post-competition age in local news,” Hester told City & State. “We are here to support everyone – profit, nonprofit and whatever hybrid or new model comes down the line. For us, it’s all about getting the local news out there.” Even if such an idealistic approach is successful, it highlights another challenge facing the city’s press corps. Whereas at one time newspapers once had large enough staffs that someone reading just the Daily News or the Times could get a wide range of stories, coverage is now fragmented among many smaller, niche outlets that cannot singlehandedly fill the void. The average news consumer is not going to rely on more than a few outlets for what could once have been covered by a big newspaper with an army of reporters. “We do have lots of digital outlets that are beginning to meet some of the gap, but it’s still vast,” Robbins said. Even when a story gets covered in a smaller or niche outlet, it will likely not have the same political impact if it’s not in the Times, the Journal or the Daily News. The reach of other outlets is more limited, and reliant on larger publications to pick up the story. It’s hard to imagine that the New York City Housing Authority’s lead paint scandal would have had such an impact – from the resignation of several city officials to the launch of a federal investigation
– had it not been spearheaded by a legacy paper like the Daily News. It also comes down to the matter of resources; smaller operations simply do not have the money or manpower to afford consistent investigative reporting. “When The New York Times puts all of its resources into a story, you can’t beat that,” Marques said. “But nobody else is really doing that to any great degree because it takes resources and it takes commitment and it takes money.” Bernard Stein, the former editor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Riverdale Press, put it more bluntly. He was asked in 2017 whether community weeklies and other hyperlocal news outlets are filling the gaps left by the major dailies. “They aren’t,” he said at the time. Even under Hester’s ideal “post-competition” model, reporters and editors will still be left with tough decisions about what they have the time and bandwidth to cover. This is true for the Daily News, which still has print pages to fill every day, and the Times, which must decide which stories are big enough or important enough to pursue – as well as local papers like the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which is trying to do a little of both. Ned Berke, editor of the Eagle, said those decisions never come easy. “We don’t get to do every story the way we want because we try to be somewhere in between The City and Brooklyn Paper and Bklyner and even the Daily News,” Berke said. “So that does require a certain volume.” Ultimately, New York City, like so many other municipalities across the nation, is in a tough spot when it comes to local news. Loss of papers and staff have taken its toll on the city, even as the remaining outlets continue trying to churn out the stories necessary to keep local government accountable. “There’s still so much hunger – probably more so now – for news, for stories, for information,” said Adam Nichols, New York City managing editor at Patch. “The need is very high for what we do. The question is how to provide that – that’s the puzzle.”
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