the red hook
JABARI BRISPORT FOR STATE SENATE - PAGE 11
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CELEBRATING 10 YEARS OF PUBLISHING
COVID takes a Brooklyn newspaper pioneer by George Fiala
M
ichael A. Armstrong, originally from the state of Washington, but who spent the majority of his 79 years in Boerum Hill, passed away last month after spending 17 days on a ventilator at Methodist Hospital. Dnynia, his wife and publishing partner, succumbed a month earlier, after contracting the virus at the Cobble Hill Health Center. I worked for Mike for a decade, as did a whole host of young people whose first stop on a successful career in journalism was the Phoenix office, first at 155 Atlantic Avenue, and later at 395 Atlantic. This newspaper exists mostly because of what I learned from Armstrong, who was expert at taking 'diamonds in the rough' and teaching them the ropes. It was probably the best education that any aspiring newspaper person would ever want (although we may not have all realized that at the time). Graduates of the Phoenix include Pulitzer Prize winners, reporters and editors for the NY Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Business Week, New York Magazine; authors of major best sellers and major motion pictures, and contributers to publications such as the NY Review of Books and Esquire. Others have gone on to successful careers in politics, business and the non-profit world. It's still hard to believe I can't stop by his State Street house and shoot the breeze with him when in the neighborhood. He was as active in his work as ever, despite being almost 80, and without the virus would have continue on for many years, contributing his acerbic commentaries to anyone lucky enough to be in the vicinity. I am lucky to be be publishing bylines from these two excellent writers who spent time at the Phoenix. Tracy Garrity came to the Phoenix after a stint at the Brooklyn Paper, and ended up as the features editor for the Reading Eagle. Peter Haley, who wrote a political column called Haley's Comet, has spent a career in sales and government service.
Newspaper boot camp Remembering Mike by Tracy Garrity Rasmussen and the Phoenix
W
orking for the Phoenix wasn’t so much as a job as a calling.
You’d work six days a week, sometimes 12 hours a day. You’d get yelled at regularly for infractions as major as missing a scoop and as minor as tossing a press release without reusing the back to type copy. Your paycheck bounced nearly as often as it cleared. The line between student and servant, ally and adversary often blurred. Yet an army of great journalists did their bootcamp there because Mike Armstrong was the quintessential newspaper drill sergeant, and if you put in the time, fished the press releases out of the trash, caught your bouncing checks and listened through the meltdown for the message, you’d end up a damn fine reporter. I was there in the mid 1980s, writing, editing, taking photos and smoking endless chains of cigarettes. Not too long before he died Mike reminded me that I once interviewed a cow. I wrote about corruption and business (Mike started Brooklyn, Inc. while I was there) and community boards and school boards and the arts. I wrote headlines and cutlines and editorials. I took photos and phone calls and the occasional notes at a staff meeting. I’d walk the four blocks home to my basement brownstone apartment after midnight most Monday nights, locking up the Phoenix office knowing I’d be back in just a matter of hours to wax copy and find space for it on the pages that hung around the production room like family snapshots. Late Tuesday night (sometimes earlier in summer when the papers were smaller and the poor air conditioning made us work more quickly) we’d send the paper off, clean up the half-smoked, half-chewed cigars from the production tables and scatter
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F
by Peter Haley
rom 1976 thru April ’79 I worked directly for the Brooklyn Phoenix. Prior to that, I worked with Mike Armstrong at starting up a newspaper in Williamsburg, the Williamsburg Advocate, which failed because we could not build enough advertising revenue in this mostly Hispanic and Hasidic community. But based on that effort, Mike encouraged me to join up at his still young Phoenix newspaper, first as a salesman of its advertising and then later as a reporter. Mike loved the local community politics and news of brownstone Brooklyn: Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, eastward to Fort Greene, south to Park Slope and then to Red Hook. He took this love to Williamsburg and then later to the Village in Manhattan with the Villager newspaper, where he took over an ongoing business and kept the ball bouncing. But my work with Mike was with the Phoenix. And as the saying goes, he “brought a lot to the table” to North Brooklyn’s civic, cultural and political communities. He was a pioneer both in local newspaper publishing and, indeed, in homesteading a much wilder, untamed Brooklyn than today. But working there in the mid ‘70s was, as a fellow newspaper person put it, like the “‘60s never died.” We weren’t dropping acid, of course, but definitely dropping the conventional neckties and button-down collars that
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