So, a kerfluffle at a coffee bar was bigger news than the Development Agreement? At least the Brooklyn Paper beats the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

This week's Brooklyn Paper has some good stories, but the lead story concerns a walkout by staff at Gorilla Coffee in Park Slope. (That's also the lead story in the sibling Courier-Life, at least in the Park Slope edition.)

The Brooklyn Paper's bigger (and newer) Atlantic Yards story concerns the charges that prospective Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov has ties to the pariah state of Zimbabwe.

The subordinate story, first published online April 8, concerns the request that Supreme Court Justice Marcy Friedman reconsider her dismissal of a case challenging the Empire State Development Corporation's 2009 approval of Atlantic Yards, given that a belatedly released Development Agreement gives the developer 25 years to build the project, rather than the officially announced ten years. (Here's my coverage.)

It's not surprising that the Brooklyn Paper would choose more recent stories to highlight in print.

But the fact remains: the newspaper hadn't covered the Development Agreement previously (here's the Atlantic Yards section), even though I broke the news in January.

I have to think that a pre-Murdoch version of the Brooklyn Paper would've jumped on that news.

And in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

At least the Brooklyn Paper took the allegations seriously. By contrast, note the distinctively skeptical tone in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle's coverage, headlined Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards Will Take Over 25 Years, New Legal Documents Claim:

Atlantic Yards will take over a quarter century to build, claims the lead opposition group in a new motion filed in court this week.

Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB), the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that was dismissed by the Manhattan Supreme Court earlier this year, has filed a new Motion to Reargue/Renew, asking the court to consider new evidence that DDDB claims was not available at the time of the oral argument in January.

In what appears to be part of the never-ending litigation involving Atlantic Yards, DDDB now claims that the state’s Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) intentionally withheld documents from the court, so that the court would rule in ESDC’s favor.

Well, was the evidence available at the time of oral argument or not? It wasn't.

Was it intentionally withheld? It sure seems so.