News Is a Bu$iness — Or Is It?

Part Two: The New York Story

At a large recent gathering of New York Times readers in a venerable midtown Manhattan club (I asked if they were), the issue of metropolitan coverage came up, to muttered grumbles across the room about there being less of it.

So, I asked how many people read The City, founded in 2019 as “a nonprofit, nonpartisan, digital news platform dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that serves the people of New York.”

At most, a handful.

I asked about Gothamist, a digital news site that is part of New York Public Radio. The same. Not even I had heard of Streetsblog NYC, which just won a George Polk Award in local reporting for the series “Ghost Tags: Inside New York City’s Black Market for Temporary License Plates.”

There it is.

As recently as the late twentieth century, New York City and the surrounding area had many major local or regional newspapers — the Newark Star-Ledger, Newsday on Long Island (with a New York City edition), the Daily News, and the New York Post, survivors of the cull of dailies that had taken place over time. There were chain-owned dailies in Westchester and Fairfield Counties, and downtown the Village Voice provided edgy coverage of culture and cityside celebrities like the developer Donald Trump. The brands may remain, but they are much diminished.

 There are seven hundred languages spoken in New York, according to some reports, and the largest of these have had news organizations of one kind or another serving them and probably still do.

The point is that a robust — and in its heyday profitable — business of metro coverage is now in the past. Still, there is an emerging new model. The City, which I know best, has a full news staff covering all five boroughs and an investigative team led by my friend Marty Gottlieb, who brings decades of top-tier experience at the Times, Newsday, and the Daily News. The executive director, Nic Dawes, ran major news organizations in South Africa and India. He now lives in Park Slope and is prodigiously navigating the philanthropic scene, which provided about $8 million to The City at its launch.

The City has ambitions, some resources (never enough), and talent. What it does not have that is indispensable is enough visibility and impact for its output. To adapt an old aphorism, if the drum is being banged and no one hears it, is it worth the trouble?

Readers used to get their local news from the major dailies and local broadcasts — my boyhood household had the New York Times in the morning, and the World-Telegram & Sun in the afternoon (for closing stocks), with the New York Post and Herald Tribune often around. Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton and others provided gritty urban prose portraits. (The Library of America, which assembles classic writing, has just released a collection of Breslin’s work.)

Today determined, interested New Yorkers would have to become editor-in-chief of their own news operation, taking the time and initiative to put together as much of the information they want — probably on devices that everyone has. This takes commitment — more, it seems, than the great majority of people want or are able to make.

The New York Times has about one hundred people on staff in the puzzles and games department. It has correspondents and reporters all over the world, where an increasing proportion of its subscribers live. I don’t have the numbers, but I was told that the Times probably has more subscribers in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada than in New York’s outer boroughs.

 Still, when Times editors are challenged, they can provide ample examples of their outstanding local coverage about transportation, education, crime, politics, and culture. But this is coverage rendered from the lofty perspective of a global news organization.

The Sunday print paper does have a small Metropolitan section, which includes (my favorite feature) the “Metropolitan Diary” of items submitted by readers that recount ground-level experiences in the subways, on the buses, and in the streets.

By contrast, the fledgling news organizations whose goals are classically local are still upstarts. Unless they start being noticed in ways they are not now — and appreciated enough to raise the money they need to grow — they will fizzle.

For all their determination to cover what goes on, without resources and attention the job can’t be done. Period.

I had one specific idea after that session with the Times readers, which I’d like to propose:

Suppose the mighty New York Times decided that one of its reader services was to recognize that The City, Gothamist, Streetsblog NYC, and others exist, with regular links to them from the home page or remainder ads in the print paper, which are now given over to the promotion of Times-related products for sale.

What about monitoring these publications’ standards? The City is already quite good — and if people were told that, it might well get better. Every day, 100,000 people are sent a morning newsletter from The City, but only a small percentage of the newsletter recipients convert to paid support. The City is dependent on what amounts mainly to donations.

In the 1940s and ’50s there was a film noir and a television series called Naked City that ended each episode with the line: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” There are 20.1 million residents in the New York metropolitan area, according to the most recent census. That is a great many stories to be written.

There are public libraries, public hospitals, public schools and universities, as well as privately funded and endowed for-profit institutions of all sorts. News about where we live, work, and play is as important as other things that determine the quality of life — a bromide perhaps, but true.

Every community of size and consequence in the United States is in the essential process of reinventing local news to replace the traditional sources. Any drum to bang on and summon readers to where the news they want can be found, should be put to maximum use.

Next Week: Part Three: Mississippi Today and Beyond