As the national crisis for local news has gained more visibility in the past year, some of the more mainstream NYC outlets have renewed their focus on local coverage. The New York Times spotlighted its metro desk in advertising campaigns, and WNYC acquired and relaunched the shuttered Gothamist site. The City, an online nonprofit news outlet, also launched in the spring of 2019 with 10 million dollars in funding from the Leon Levy Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Charles H. Revson Foundation, among other individual contributors. Addressing what it classified as a “life-or-death moment for local news in New York City,” the organization focused on filling the increasing void in citywide beat coverage.

But none of these efforts have resolved one of the key issues highlighted at the 2018 Tow event—that hyperlocal and community-level local outlets in New York City are still struggling, and that, subsequently, residents are being deprived of critical information.

Taking this complexity into account, this study seeks to understand the New York City media ecosystem—print, digital, broadcast, mainstream, community, and ethnic—by examining how news organizations prioritize beats and where they see gaps in coverage, rather than counting or mapping publications. To do this, we interviewed journalism professionals at a wide range of news organizations in New York City about how they allocate resources when choosing editorial priorities, the challenges they face, where they see the gaps in coverage, and what they wish they could be doing better. These interviews also touched on questions related to the relationships between news outlets and their audiences, as well as with one another.

Methodology

This study relied upon a series of interviews with 39 participants from 28 news outlets, one journalism academic center, and a philanthropic foundation. National or international news outlets were not included, unless they had dedicated metro sections. The interview subjects at the journalistic organizations were both publishers and journalists. All are identified by name except one, who wished to remain anonymous. Interviews were sought with as wide a range of news outlets as possible and potential subjects were identified from existing local news outlet databases, as well as by recommendation from industry professionals. Of the interviews conducted, 25 were with print and digital publications (11 of which were digital-only). We spoke with organizations from all five boroughs of New York City and five that publish or broadcast in a language other than English. Only two television networks and one radio station agreed to participate.

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Studies have shown that local newspapers continue to produce more and better journalistic output than any other medium, and that their reporting is the basis for most local stories on broadcast media.

Analyzing news output and the extent to which it satisfies critical information needs is very helpful in getting us there, but even that misses the nuances of both accountability reporting and community journalism that are at the heart of local news coverage. Are any reporters still regularly attending city council meetings? How many reporters are consistently present during courthouse hearings? Who is informing citizens about changes in government services? Where can residents turn to make sure potholes get fixed and to see photos from Little League games?

These questions are critical to understanding the health of local news ecosystems, be they small rural communities, midsize metro areas, or major media markets like New York City. NYC’s media landscape is hardly analogous to that of less prosperous metro areas or rural communities, but it is in some ways a microcosm of broader local news phenomena. The struggles of the citywide daily papers is similar in nature, if not in scale or severity, to the market failure of newspapers detailed in The Expanding News Desert project. The rapid acquisition of community papers by the family-owned Schneps Media company, which now owns at least 33 newspapers as well as dozens of magazines and websites throughout the five boroughs, mirrors concerns about media consolidation nationwide. After Schneps bought the daily tabloid amNewYork in October and laid off more than half the newsroom, the Gothamist interviewed former Schneps employees who accused the company of “cozying up to advertisers and local powerbrokers, while muzzling critical coverage of friends and public officials close to the owners.”

At the same time, the city has become a laboratory for the same kinds of business model experimentation that are taking place across the country: the move by public radio station WNYC to resurrect the shuttered Gothamist digital publication, the proliferation of nonprofit news websites like The City and niche education site Chalkbeat, and for-profit digital upstarts like BKLYNER, which started as a network of neighborhood news sites. And as interest in some form of government intervention to rescue the journalism industry grows, the city and state have presented a few proposals of their own. In May, City Hall issued an executive order mandating that city agencies spend at least half of their annual print and online advertising budgets on community and ethnic media outlets. In October, two New York State Senators presented a bill that would “require every cable television company and telephone corporation that provides cable television service to carry a local news channel to ensure a source of local information to every community.” New York City may be a unique case study, but the successes and failures of local news here can tell us much about the potential for local news anywhere.

A number of recent articles and reports have assessed the health of local news in NYC by looking at parts of the city’s media ecosystem. Many have focused on declining resources at the leading citywide dailies, in particular the shuttering of the once mighty New York Daily News’s bureaus outside Manhattan, and the impact on accountability reporting. An in-depth CJR piece featured some of the community media and new digital publications that were trying to fill the void left by the dailies, but for the most part concluded that, with small budgets and staffs, “most would be hard-pressed to pull off investigations of pervasive problems . . . and many lack the resources to support in-depth reporting.” A “landscape analysis” by News Revenue Hub counted 90 digital news publications in New York City but found that “local news coverage is unevenly distributed across neighborhoods and boroughs . . . There are fewer digital outlets in Manhattan and Staten Island than in The Bronx, Queens, or (especially) Brooklyn.”

While the common perception across these studies is that reporting on issues of public interest had declined in the city, there is little consensus on what that looks like on a granular or hyperlocal level. Building on this work, our study aims to look more closely at what kinds of coverage these news outlets are able to maintain, and choose to prioritize, with increasingly limited resources. We spoke with a wide range of print, digital, broadcast, mainstream, community, and ethic organizations throughout the city about how they prioritize beats and areas of coverage, and seek to serve their communities. We also discussed how the digital transformation of the media landscape has changed the ways in which information circulates between news outlets and their audiences, and opportunities for collaboration. And finally, we asked these media organizations what topics and communities are going underreported, and what they would like to be covering if they had additional resources. While our study only provides a snapshot of the city’s media landscape and is far from comprehensive, we aim to provide another facet of research to the ongoing efforts to assess the challenges facing the media ecosystem in New York City and the broader crisis for local news.

The issue that perhaps most frequently tests the delineation and definition of local coverage along geographic lines is politics. In a moment in which many of the country’s most prominent political figures—President Trump, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, etc.—are all New Yorkers, the lines between national and local are often blurred. “New Yorkers in general are used to thinking of ourselves as the center of the universe anyway, so we probably would get in trouble if we didn’t [reflect that in our coverage],” joked NY1’s Errol Louis. For Jim Schachter, the former vice president for news at WNYC, “So much of what happens in New York City is a big story for the country,” he said, that distinguishing between local and national news is often a “false distinction.” (Schachter left WNYC in July shortly after this interview was conducted after seven years in the role.)

At the news organizations that maintain citywide coverage, the majority of newsrooms have none or significantly reduced geographic beats in favor of thematic ones. Despite the likely financial imperative behind these decisions, some editors presented the move as an opportunity to tap more deeply into reporters’ expertise and draw connections between “intersectional” beats in a way that benefited the audience.

 

One notable exception is The City, a nonprofit local news website launched in April 2019 with a staff of nearly 20, thanks to 10 million dollars in funding from several leading philanthropic foundations and individual contributors. The news outlet was created with the mission of filling the void in consistent, citywide beat coverage left by the retreat of the daily newspapers and the 2017 closure of the neighborhood news online newspaper, DNAinfo. The website follows both geographic and thematic beats, according to Editor-in-Chief Jere Hester, a Daily News veteran. The newsroom has a reporter in each borough, along with a handful of thematic beats like transportation and City Hall. An additional reporter covers juvenile justice issues in the Bronx as part of a Report for America fellowship. The South Bronx, according to the Report for America website, is “the poorest congressional district in the country, [and] is home to Horizon Juvenile Center, which . . . made headlines recently amid outbreaks of violence.”

Of the topic-based beats that news outlets said they cover, the clear winner was politics, which not only gets reported on to varying degrees by the citywide, borough-level, community and hyperlocal press, but is also the sole focus of a number of both commercial and nonprofit news outlets like City & State, POLITICO NY, Gotham Gazette, Kings County Politics/Queens County Politics, and others. Following politics in prevalence were education, transportation, criminal justice, and public housing/city planning and development. A handful of news outlets mentioned immigration as an important beat in the Trump era.

Within these broadly defined beats exist a plethora of topics, each of which is being covered in different ways. Political reporting for the Gotham Gazette, a digital news outlet published by the government watchdog group Citizens Union Foundation, is mostly in-depth coverage of City Hall and down the ballot local elections, according to Executive Editor Ben Max. For the small for-profit websites Kings County Politics and Queens County Politics, the mission is “to cover hyperlocal news from a political lens, and cover it from the ground up, rather than the marble halls down,” and starting at the granular level of local political clubs, said Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Stephen Witt.

The community and hyperlocal organizations mostly said they cover criminal justice in the mold of the traditional crime or police beat. But at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, according to Berke, they are now looking to cover criminal justice “by looking at the systems at play.” Berke, who was hired as editorial director in April by the more than century-old paper as part of a “deepening investment in digital local news product,” said that part of the daily’s new strategy was: “We don’t cover individual crimes for the most part. We cover things that are revealing something broader about the system.”

WNYC has taken the opposite tack, choosing to marshal its efforts toward narrowly focused investigative beats like immigrations courts, as well as surveillance, privacy, and community relations issues within the NYPD, according to Jim Schachter, the former vice president for news. Editorial priorities are determined by a “process of engaging as many people in the newsroom as we can to discuss topics and issues that we should be covering,” he said, and then deploying resources to where there is “consensus of what’s important and how we can make an impact.” Schachter acknowledged that, “You can begin to imagine the vast swath of policing and criminal justice and civil justice systems that we’re not covering at all.” However, he said, “We kind of have a strategy of picking our spots and going deep on the things that we do realize.”

Neighborhood watchdog or community champion? ersation.”

Michael Hinman, editor of The Riverdale Press, agreed that finding a balance between local journalism’s watchdog role and that of community champion, was key:

You’re going to have the stuff that people want you to know and then there’s going to be this stuff no one wants you to know—and you have to have both . . . It’s less glamorous to be the reporter that covers the community board, or goes to the elementary school and covers pajama day. But our role is to tell stories, not pick and choose what kind of community we want to depict. The dream newsroom is to be able to cover all of those things—have people to do investigative work . . . to attend every [community board] meeting, and to just walk the streets.

Hinman’s vision of the dream community newsroom resonated with some of the other interviewed news outlets, but in reality, choices have to be made. Liena Zagare, the editor and publisher of the BKLYNER, said, “We don’t have that many of the bigger enterprise stories at the moment . . . because they take time and we have people that we have. ...

Zagare has been particularly frank about the kinds of sacrifices local news outlets have to make. In the September 16 edition of BKLYNER’s daily newsletter, in-between a selection of the day’s top stories, she wrote, “I hoped to have the John Dewey High School story ready this morning but had to make an unexpected stop by the pediatrician, and so it will be up tomorrow, along with our next installment on stories about homelessness.” In November, as part of a plea for subscriptions, Zagare wrote a long article that explained her perspective on the state of local news in Brooklyn:

Brooklyn has the population to be the 4th largest city in America, and yet we only have a dozen or two reporters across all the outlets combined . . . We may all purport to cover all of Brooklyn, but in reality, all of us combined don’t do it justice . . . THE CITY does great stories that have an impact—but have limited reach—something new outlets struggle with, but it seems a particular challenge for non-profit news, with the focus on just the biggest impact. It’s also the mission of these nonprofits to focus pretty exclusively on tough accountability stories, which is a good thing—but there is more to local news and living in our communities that is worth writing about, rooting for and celebrating. If you write just about the crime, and not about the good things taking place in the community it is easy to distort reality. I want a bit of candy with my kale. I want balance.

David Cruz, editor-in-chief of the bi-weekly nonprofit community newspaper in the northwest Bronx, the Norwood News, echoed some of Zagare’s comments when speaking about coverage of the Bronx in the city’s legacy news outlets. He praised many of the big investigations written by The New York Times, for example, but mentioned they sometimes amounted to isolated “parachute reporting” that only focused on crime-related or other kinds of “serious stories, hard news.” ..

When it comes to “enterprise” reporting, the only news outlets that said they regularly conducted or prioritized investigative pieces were either the specialized nonprofit outlets or the best-resourced newsrooms. Both Levy of The Times and Schachter, formerly of WNYC, said their news outlets had moved to focus on investigations in lieu of daily reporting. Levy said that the Metro desk was unique in comparison to other local news outlets in that its main challenge was finding “where does metro fit in a global news organization like The New York Times?” “There is limited space on our home screen,” he said, “and so we have to be even more nimble and even better, because we’re competing against the latest Trump news or the latest news out of Paris or London or Beijing.” The Metro desk’s hard-hitting series on the taxi medallion industry, for example, had spun off from the paper’s reporting on President Trump’s now incarcerated former lawyer, Michael Cohen.

While The Times’s competition may be mostly internal, most of the news organizations were frank that their editorial priorities are occasionally decided with other outlets in mind. Unsurprisingly, many of the interviewees said they look to differentiate themselves by finding stories their competitors aren’t covering. “Is someone else doing it?,” said Berke of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, when asked how he prioritizes beats. “Can we own it? That’s really it.” Jarrett Murphy, executive editor of the city’s oldest investigative journalism nonprofit, City Limits, explained how the city’s changing media ecosystem has impacted his organization: “Recently, we have sort of narrowed our editorial focus,” he said, “because, frankly, we have some more competition in the nonprofit sphere . . . We’re not changing our brand, so much as trying to sharpen it, so we have an easier story to tell. So, we’ve basically kicked a couple of beloved editorial buckets to the side.”

Murphy said that rather than compete with well-funded nonprofits like The Marshall Project or ProPublica or The City on criminal justice, or Chalkbeat on education, City Limits has chosen to focus on other areas. ... And lastly, election coverage of local races, which he said, despite the number of outlets covering politics, still goes underreported. York, from the Daily News, also mentioned increased competition from the nonprofit sector in the context of difficulties with “staff retention,” and the loss of well-sourced veteran reporters with deep institutional knowledge. Three former Daily News reporters left to work for The City.

Initially, Murphy said, City Limits’ pitch to funders was “no one’s doing investigative work. You’ve got to fund this.” While enterprise reporting is still rare in the wider NYC media ecosystem, within the ever-growing field of nonprofit journalism “that has changed to a great degree,” he said. Speaking of the daily beat reporting that used to be central to newspaper coverage, he said, “It’s the sort of day-to-day stuff that is falling by the wayside.” Explaining the importance of this kind of coverage, a report by Tony Proscio for the Revson Foundation described it as the “routine explanatory reporting that makes it possible to portray the day-to-day reality of local life, and also makes it far easier to identify an opportunity for investigative or enterprise reporting when it arises.”

Chasing Daily Beats versus Looking for Impact 

The City, while itself a nonprofit news outlet, would like to fill that void of day-to-day reporting. Describing the organization’s mission, Editor-in-Chief Jere Hester said:

We have no grand illusions that we are going to get granularity of coverage with one person covering all of Queens. And certainly not what DNAinfo was able to do in terms of volume of stories and the Daily News and others back in the day. But the way we’re deploying those reporters is really with a kind of mission. We set a high bar, to find borough stories that transcend the neighborhood. So that it is not just a story about a broken traffic signal on one block in Brooklyn. It is a bigger story about Vision Zero [a City Hall program seeking to end traffic-related deaths and injuries in the city] and other issues that folks may be having elsewhere. Something that’s going to resonate, we hope, with a good number of folks and say something about what it means to be a New Yorker today. I think another really big important function of the reporters in the boroughs is that we can use them to connect the dots, right? So if we’re seeing something that’s happening in the Bronx that’s similar to something that’s happening in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, etc., this really gives us a chance to get out ahead on bigger stories.

This mission to find stories that “transcend” a specific community came up repeatedly in interviews with news outlets of varying sizes, and gets at a tension that is at the heart of editorial decision making for local newsroom in an era of limited resources. When is a local story too local, and to what audience exactly is a news organization trying to speak? This challenge was highlighted to comical effect in a statement outlining the editorial strategy for amNewYork after its sale to Schneps Media: the “approach is to make it a local paper, but not too micro-local.”

Speaking of the changes that have occurred at the Daily News in recent years, Editor-in-Chief Robert York said, “This newspaper was trying desperately to be all things to all people. Which is just, regardless of how big your newsroom is, or how small it is, that’s a very difficult thing.” The mission of the Daily News now, he said, was defined by “scope control.” And, he added, “We expect our reporters to be very entrepreneurial,” which he explained as being “willing to do a variety of different things, as opposed to ‘I just cover the Queen’s DA. That’s all I do.’” If reporters want to get away from the daily work to focus on a longer story, he said, “as entrepreneurs, sometimes you’ve got to sell that idea [to your editor]. But, if it’s a good idea, it’s going to sell . . . a lot of this falls on the reporters to be able to pitch ideas.”

For York, who has to answer to bosses in the executive suites at Tribune Publishing (and now the much-reviled hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which bought a 32 percent stake in Tribune in November), the guiding principle for allocating editorial resources may be “scope control.” But for editors at Chalkbeat, who have to answer to philanthropic funders, the answer is “impact.” Journalists have always been proud when their reporting has led to demonstrable consequences, be it for individuals or in the policy realm. In the era of nonprofit journalism, that is an imperative, from both a mission and a funding perspective.

Carrie Melago, Chalkbeat’s managing editor for local news, said the organization considers it “really important to pick stories where a policy might get changed.” The outlet uses a framework called MORI—Measures of Our Reporting’s Influence—which, Melago said, tracks things like “how many people picked up this story? Did we appear on the radio to talk about it? Did a council person include it in their city council testimony? Is it mentioned in a lawsuit?” In late 2019, Chalkbeat also issued a five-year “strategic plan” that outlined the organization’s plans to grow from seven to 18 local bureaus by 2025. The outlet said it would simultaneously be looking to: “Deepen our impact. Across our seven bureaus, we are learning what type of work has the biggest impact. It’s a mix of the mundane (showing up where no one else does) and the lofty (identifying important lessons learned, bringing transgressions and challenges to light, and offering sharp analysis that fosters understanding).”

Chalkbeat may be unique in its applied measurement framework, but most of the journalism organizations interviewed, in both the for- and nonprofit sectors, highlighted community impact as a guiding principle when prioritizing coverage. Trying to determine that impact is essential, they nearly all said, when deciding whether to field reporters to attend community board meetings or observe courthouse proceedings. For Zagare of BKLYNER, like many of the other interviewees, channeling resources toward impact means identifying the community board meeting, for example, that “no one’s going to be covering, where something’s going to be happening. Or if there’s a story [we’ve been covering], where there’s likely to be a big development.”

Coverage of community board meetings varies widely across the media ecosystem. At the hyperlocal level, a handful of outlets like the Norwood News and The Tribeca Trib make the effort to attend regularly, despite limited resources. Carl Glassman, editor and sole editorial employee of The Tribeca Trib, said that on average he attends around six community board meetings per month. In the many years he’s been attending these meetings, he’s seen the presence of reporters ebb and flow. After watching the number of journalists in attendance decline in the 21st century, he said, there was a brief uptick at the peak of DNAinfo and the hyperlocal news platform Patch’s influence. “At a certain point a few years ago, there could be up to five reporters,” he said. “Now it’s gone back to the way it was before, which is . . . a lot of times it’s just me again.”

The medium-sized community news outlets said they might attend meetings on a monthly basis, prioritized certain more dynamic community boards over others, or chose to attend based on the importance of items on the agenda. Many of the news outlets said they would never have time to attend most meetings, but at the same time saw them as important places for story generation and to cultivate sources. “It takes a lot of determination to really keep going to community board meetings,” said Traven Rice, co-founder and publisher of The Lo-Down. “But that’s where you get everything. All the info that you can possibly need to lead you down the road to do different stories.”

Hester said some of the The City’s scoops have come from “just being there” at meetings. He highlighted a series the outlet published about dubious use of public funds by community boards on things like an SUV and branded swag, which led to the city council placing limits on how community boards can spend funds. At the same time, he said, he couldn’t expect his one Brooklyn reporter to cover the borough’s 18 community boards and have time to report bigger stories. “I want those daily beat stories,” he said. “But I want the good ones that can lead to the great ones three weeks away, and then the one shaking the city to its very core that’s three months away. As long as we’ve got people working on these tracks all the time, I think that’s where we’re gonna find our balance.”

While several of the outlets interviewed shared stories in which a reporter’s presence at a random meeting led to a scoop, it’s the meetings that don’t get covered that haunted them most. In her subscription-appeal article, Zagare of BKLYNER gave a specific example:

Just this week, we did not have the resources to cover an important traffic safety meeting about Coney Island Avenue—something we and I in particular care and have written a lot about over the almost 12 years of covering the area. But—I was exhausted, and some of our advertisers were taking their sweet time to pay, and I had no extra money to hire someone to cover a meeting that would take hours to attend and report on. So we did not. And as far as I know—no news outlet did, though it was an important meeting.

In fact—we only had someone at 1/4 of the community meetings we wanted to cover this week. Community boards, police precincts, community education councils—places where decisions get made about land use, policing and school rezoning efforts. Community groups and grassroots organizations, charity work by neighbors. You probably don’t know they ever took place. And if we failed to cover your event—this is why.

Finding the Gaps in Coverage

A central “part of the problem of the decline of local news,” according to Jim Schachter, formerly of WNYC, is that “we don’t know what we don’t know.” Nonetheless, there was a rough consensus between the interviewed news outlets about the topics that are going underreported in the New York City’s current media landscape. Reports by former Newsday journalist Paul Moses and former Daily News editor Arthur Browne have both noted the disappearance of consistent beat coverage from “outer-borough” courthouses in the wake of the closure of the dailies’ borough bureaus. This was confirmed by our interviewees, all of whom said that outside of a handful of the city’s most prominent federal courthouses—such as the one that hosted the trial of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, where dozens of reporters camped outside overnight to earn a spot inside—none of the courts are now routinely covered by assigned beat reporters.

“The courts in New York City have been woefully under covered,” said Hester of The City. He mentioned not just the criminal courts, but also “civil court, which really speaks to people’s challenges.” David Cruz, editor-in-chief of the Norwood News, also singled out the dearth of courthouse reporting, as well as wider criminal justice issues like “bail reform and alternative methods to incarceration.”

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“Certain agencies get perfectly fine coverage,” according to NY1’s Errol Louis. Coverage of the Department of Education and the NYPD, for example, may be imperfect, he said. “But people are diligent, and important stories tend to not get missed. And more importantly, the agency knows that they are being watched by a group of reporters who can’t be swatted away or bullshitted.” But generally speaking, Louis said, echoing many of the other interviewees:

We’re not covering the agencies the way we should . . . We’re not covering the courts. ...

Fellowship programs like Report for America have attempted to fill some of these gaps, placing reporters on narrowly targeted beats at a handful of news outlets, such as juvenile justice in the Bronx at The City...

 Imagining a Newsroom with More Resources 

...Stephen Witt, publisher and editor-in-chief of Kings County Politics and Queens County Politics, gestured to the surroundings of the coffee shop where his interview took place and called it his “away office.” His primary office, he said, is his home’s basement.

For these smaller outlets, many of whom are scraping by while hoping to find a path to financial sustainability, any additional resources would be first put to cover essential costs, like office space. They also mentioned difficulties in hiring and retaining reporters and how they would use higher salaries to attract better talent and flesh out administrative support and infrastructure. Traven Rice of The Lo-Down mentioned the need for a dedicated marketing team. Ben Max of the Gotham Gazette said he could use a deputy editor to help him manage his team of reporters and interns, and a dedicated staff member to work on audience and revenue growth. Carl Glassman of The Tribeca Trib said it would be a relief to have just one other reporter to relieve him of some of his duties as the sole editorial staff member.

...

According to City Limits Executive Editor Jarrett Murphy, “There’s a two million-dollar plan, and there’s a 20 million-dollar plan . . . If I had one extra reporter, I would put them on the climate [beat]. If I had a bunch of reporters,” he said, he would expand City Limits’ investigative work into hyperlocal borough coverage. (In early December 2019, Report for America announced it would place a fellow at City Limits to cover climate change and its implications for New York City as part of its 2020–2021 cohort.) Ben Max of the Gotham Gazette also dreamed of expanding into borough-based accountability and public policy reporting, particularly in the Bronx, as well as hiring a City Council reporter.

Murphy and Max’s wishes indirectly alluded to a distinction that emerged between newsrooms of different means: Many of the community and hyperlocal outlets dreamed of having the ability to pursue more in-depth investigative and accountability reporting, while many of the citywide organizations spoke of wanting to deliver more consistent coverage across the boroughs. Max of the Gotham Gazette spoke of the need to have more opportunities for collaboration between outlets that served different audiences, particularly with the ethnic and foreign-language media. “How do we get a better sense of what that ecosystem looks like?” he said. “Are there ways to work together better?”

...

Engaging with the Community

Stephen Witt of Kings County Politics and Queens County Politics also dreamed of expanding his political websites into the other boroughs, but he said he feared the tight-knit world of grantmaking was closed off to people who weren’t in the right circles. He wasn’t the only person with this concern. A fair number of the other interviewed news outlets grumbled and were incredulous about the decision to pour so much money into the launch of The City, rather than disperse it to existing organizations.

Beyond the founding of The City by major philanthropic foundations, Witt watched as publications such as City Limits, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the New York Daily News, and NY1 have received grants from places like the Facebook Journalism Project Community Network, WordPress’s Newspack project, the Poynter-Koch Media & Journalism Fellowship, and Report for America. Despite feeling excluded, he wasn’t giving up, however. “My pitch [to funders] would be I’m fiercely independent.” he said, “I’m an outlier.” “I believe in training reporters from the community,” he added. “I’m not that interested in their degrees . . . I like people that work side jobs. I like people that live life . . .I think the best way to cover the community, ideally, is to get someone living in the community and train them.” He said he saw his mission as inspiring more civic engagement in local communities. “You can blame the politicians and you can blame the Board of Elections, but the media’s not doing something right when only 10 percent of Queens’ voters turn out,” he said. “The media should take some responsibility for NYC’s low voter turnout.”

While the better-resourced nonprofit news organizations like The City and WNYC have carefully designed “community engagement” plans and strategies, and well-resourced for-profit outlets like The New York Times and NY1 are in constant digital communication with their audiences, the popular journalism industry term did not resonate with many of the smaller community-based news organizations. “It’s a luxury of time and resources again, I think, to a degree,” said Zagare of BKLYNER. “Do we hold coffee hour? No, because nobody has the time for that,” she said. “I think often times people don’t quite appreciate how hard small outlets work, and how little time people have . . . [ But] we live in the communities we cover. We’re not, foreigners. We’re not strangers.”

...

In response to The City’s initiative to hold a series of open meetings with communities in public libraries throughout Brooklyn, Witt said:

I’m a little skeptical of it but it’s interesting . . . they always talk about community policing where cops are actually walking the beats. You know, don’t go to the library, fan out. Tell them, “These next two weeks we’re going to be in Bed-Stuy.” All the reporters are going to be there, walking around. They’re going to go in the stores, into the barber shops . . . You walk in, you eat the food, you get a haircut, it’s the only way. The library idea just seems too, kind of, white and academic. I mean, maybe it’ll work . . . It’s a nice try. I’m not dissing it.

Hester said that before launching The City, the borough-based reporters did significant outreach in their communities and that reporters “are going out during the day and weekends in the parks and just talking to people.”

Enriching the Media Ecosystem 

While some media outlets may see The City as competition, the news organization and its funders view its role as “first and foremost, hopefully, a catalyst for local news in New York City overall,” said publisher John Wotowicz. “We can achieve success if others grow their news gathering and reporting capabilities, either directly or indirectly, as a result of the fact that the broader local news arena has been energized.” Besides injecting some constructive competitive spirit into the media market, one element of that plan has been encouraging media outlets to republish The City’s work. Hester said that, as of late October 2019, outlets ranging from community newspaper the Queens Courier to WNYC had republished their stories 768 times since The City’s launch in April. The publication has also collaborated on reporting with others nonprofit news outlets like Chalkbeat and The Trace, as well as New York Magazine, which provided The City’s content management system and initial design and tech support.

For the Revson Foundation, a key funder of The City, as well as WNYC and other local media organizations, this is a critical part of the foundation’s long-term move to fortify the NYC media ecosystem. The foundation’s president, Julie Sandorf, wrote of their investment strategy:

Investigative journalism is essential but content must be amplified by distributors who can reach as wide an audience as possible. Nothing can replace experienced and expert journalists—investment in expanding the number of high quality journalists is essential. And, without the distribution “megaphones” that are not only authoritative, but also wide-reaching, great content will not achieve its intended impact.

Schachter and Louis said that featuring journalists from other outlets on WNYC and NY1 programming to discuss their reporting, was a crucial part of the “megaphone” role. The daily and community newspapers, Louis said, are “basically our assignment pages on some level. We do a fair amount of enterprise [reporting], but we’re always looking at their stuff.” Bob Hardt, the political director of NY1, said Louis makes an effort to include members of the community and ethnic media as part of the “reporters’ round table” on his TV program “Inside City Hall” whenever possible. “They are trying to get my attention,” Louis said. “I know that they know that I’m one of their primary audiences . . . and I’m relying on them . . . I feel like I have a whole team behind me that doesn’t work here, but that are going to do what we’re supposed to do collectively as an industry, which is hold these folks accountable.”

 ...Accountability reporting doesn’t have any impact until it appears in English, she wrote in a critical article for Poynter about The New York Times’s investigation into the New York nail salon industry, which she said lacked nuance. ...

Is New York City a News Desert? 

... Julie Sandorf of the Revson Foundation said it was unreasonable to use the same frame of reference to compare New York City with a “town in North Carolina.” She said there were clear content gaps in the media ecosystem, one of them being authoritative, borough-wide beat accountability reporting, which The City had been founded to address.

NY1’s Joel Siegel took the middle ground: “I don’t think you can make a blanket statement that nobody is covering local news, or even that it’s just a shell of what it was. I don’t know how to quantify it,” he said. “I think it’s robust. I don’t think it’s as robust as it was, or as ideally as it should be, in a city of eight-and-a-half million people.”

...

There was some consensus in our interviews that while even if the city’s media ecosystem as a whole defies easy classification, there are certain, specific topical news deserts (courts, healthcare, and the municipal hospital system) and geographic ones (Staten Island). That said, even in its heyday, there were always gaps in NYC local coverage that reflected wider societal, economic, and racial inequities. Discussing the history of City Limits, which originally founded to do in-depth reporting on housing, and later expanded to cover other civic and policy issues, Executive Editor Jarrett Murphy said:

This idea that New York City has this very rich media environment, and yet there are still things that go uncovered is kind of the rationale behind our founding, which was back in the mid-70s when, frankly, there was a lot more healthy metro coverage and everybody had, you know, five reporters, or more, at City Hall . . . Even back then the feeling was that outer borough neighborhoods were not getting covered. Even though you had this level of local coverage doing good work on City Hall, and keeping the mayor accountable, and covering local politics, and courts, and cops, really important stories were falling by the wayside. Either because of the geography, or the demographics, or the nature of the story . . . So, City Limits was set up really to kind of fill that gap.

As the media ecosystem has changed, the quantity of information available may not directly correspond to its reach. While acknowledging that there’s “probably generally less” of it, “there’s a lot of accountability reporting [still] happening,” said Schachter, formerly of WNYC. “It’s just more specialized.” To some, the media-centric news desert question was the wrong one to be asking. The problem, according to Zagare of BKLYNER, was not on the supply side, but on that of the consumer:

...Everyone seems to be so focused on what the outlets are doing, as opposed to how people are getting the news. Ultimately, I think the big problem that we have as a society is a lack of a common conversation about what’s going on . . . When there are big issues, it’s not that those issues haven’t been written about by somebody. It’s that nobody knows that they were written . . .

Errol Louis agreed that “what is missing is a feedback loop from the public.” “We should probably be a little bit less backward-facing about, ‘Gee, why can’t we reproduce the old metro section of The New York Times?’” he said, “and more forward-looking in saying, ‘What do people care about and what have they proved that they care about?’” From his perspective, the indicator of that preference would come from whatever kind of news delivery or content people were willing to pay for. “Let’s figure out what they are paying for and see if we can offer them more, and maybe they will help explain to us what we are not doing right.”

Clifford Levy believes the salvation for local news lies with service journalism. “At the end of the day, we have to find a profit-driven business model,” he said. Elsewhere, the successful model for news has proven to be, he said, that “if you can very intensely cover a particular sector and make yourself an indispensable read, you can get people to pay for it. But no one yet has shown, ‘Oh, we’re going to become an indispensable read for people who live in a particular place.’” The general bundle of local accountability news that The City represents, he said, while vitally important, “is much harder to get people to pay for. You need a publication that really addresses all needs, and that means [in addition to accountability news]—weather, traffic, [subway delays], where to go out, what to eat—something that brings that all under one place and says, ‘Hey, for 5, 7, 10 dollars a month, we’re going to give you the news that you need, but we’re also going to give you all these things to ensure that you live a better life.’ That’s what people will pay for.”

Whether a successful financial model for their work exists or not, many of the community and ethnic outlets already view their roles as performing a form of service journalism. ..

Conclusion 

While its size and diversity make it challenging to classify the New York City media ecosystem as a whole, a rough consensus emerged between the dozens of media outlets interviewed for this study on two points: First, that there are specific areas where there are clear gaps in coverage (healthcare and hospitals, and courthouses). And second, that the city’s media ecosystem is not what it once was, or what most of the interview subjects would like it to be. But the severity and exact nature of that change is still up for debate. While the daily newspapers provide significantly less borough-wide, political beat reporting than before, for example, there are a number of new, niche and community political publications providing in-depth coverage. Some question, however, whether that reporting can have the desired impact if a fractured media ecosystem means it’s not reaching the intended audience, or being picked up on by citywide outlets. News deserts, to some degree, are in the eye of the beholder.

Future quantitative and qualitative methodologies of both producers and consumers of news will likely be necessary to help determine the exact nature of what has occurred in the New York City media ecosystem. While it will never be possible to fully reveal the extent of “we don’t know what we don’t know,” these studies will be critical to inform the debate as policy and philanthropy sectors become increasingly interested in “correcting the market failure” for local news. As with most issues related to local news, potential solutions are likely to be heavily context-specific and resistant to scale. The economic or editorial model that works for a Queens newspaper dependent on revenue from printed legal notices, for example, is unlikely to be helpful for a digital ethnic media outlet trying to build an audience in New York and among a wider diaspora movement.

Better and more far-reaching collaboration is likely to play an important role in fortifying the media ecosystem. There is an opportunity to develop partnerships between the sectors that are already actively collaborating, and the community and ethnic media, which are often excluded from these initiatives. While these smaller organizations are eager for more collaboration that results in reaching wider audiences and having more impact, they also recognize the pitfalls of asymmetric power relations, and insist that any partnerships would have to be truly equitable. Institutions like the CUNY Center for Community and Ethnic Media and Montclair State’s Center for Cooperative Media might be particularly well poised to play a key role in convening, capacity building, and resource gathering.

It remains to be seen what the future holds for new publications like The City, upon whose editorial and financial nonprofit model so much hope rests. As ambitious as its newsroom and funders may be, no one outlet—particularly one with 20 reporters—can fill the void left by the cessation of both DNAinfo’s community-based coverage and the Daily News’s aggressive, borough-wide accountability reporting. But if its vision of consistent beat reporting that reaches a diverse audience is realized along with a path to long-term financial sustainability, it will be an important accomplishment. Any ecosystem’s health relies on that of all its organisms, and so every media organization—and residents in the city—should have a vested interest in its survival. If the world’s media capital cannot succeed in doing so, the implications will be grave for the future of local news far beyond the five boroughs.