From The New Yorker: "New York is a city of neighborhoods, and each has its own paper." (No way. Much missing in local coverage.)

The New Yorker on 3/13/23 published A Coup at the WestView News. an entertaining and troubling story about the succession battle at an Greenwich Village newspaper run by eccentric (at best) seniors.

It's gotten much deserved praise, but what stuck in my craw was this assumption that we live in an era of good local coverage. Writes Zach Helfand:

New York is a city of neighborhoods, and each has its own paper. Bowery Boogie, Rockaway Times, Norwood News, Canarsie Courier. Amid the larger forces of homogenization, the community rag remains a stubborn fixture. The city has a hundred and sixteen of them—your foreign-language Der Yid and ethnic Haitian Times and fully digital WeHeartAstoria.com—and that doesn’t include dozens of newsletters, zines, and shoppers.... Now, as then, the papers tend to be vehicles for ads for hyper-local periodontists and shoe-repair joints, but they bestow upon the bodega browser a sense of belonging to a particular place, even as foreign investors buy up the condos, and the mom-and-pop shops leave for Nassau County.

(Emphasis added)

That link for 116 news outlets, by the way, went to the Local News Initiative from Northwestern/Medill, but the statistic wasn't immediately easy to pin down.

What I can say is that it's a bunch of bull. New York City's neighborhoods don't each have their own news outlet, and there's even overlap among the neighborhood-focused editions from the same publisher.

The "stubborn fixture" of, say, the Brooklyn Paper, has gone through a series of owners until it was absorbed--economies of scale!--by the local conglomerate Schneps Media, The 9/14/18 Schneps press release cited "award-winning content" (not journalism) and focused on marketing:

“We will clearly have the largest reach of any local media company in New York City across print, digital, and events,” said Joshua Schneps, SCNG Chief Executive Officer. “We can now offer companies large and small, seeking to reach an individual neighborhood or the entire City of New York and its surrounding region, the most cost-effective and efficient means of marketing.”

Missed opportunities

What neighborhood publication, covering Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, and Bedford-Stuyvesant, has sent a reporter to cover the meetings of the Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan (AAMUP), an important rezoning around a key corridor? My coverage: preview, kickoff, and housing/land use workshop.

What neighborhood publication sent a reporter to the Community Board 8 meeting to learn, as I wrote, that a developer had proposed a 13-story project, requiring a spot rezoning, along Atlantic Avenue well east of the boundaries of the AAMUP?

None. (Once, with neighborhood-focused reporters at DNAinfo, now closed, such coverage was more likely.)

Nor did any such publication rewrite or re-report my coverage, which was once what journalists in a competitive news environment would be required to do, to inform their audience. (On the latter story, it would've required watching video of any online meeting, and getting a document.)

These are just a few examples of news that deserves wider notice.

Is that sour grapes from me as a freelance journalist, since there was no obvious outlet for me to pitch and sell my articles? 

Well, a little, since we should have more publications and there should be more work for journalists, rather than mostly "communications" jobs serving government agencies/officials, companies, consultants, lobbyists, and non-profit organizations.

News flash: those latter entities produce much of the "content" that you see laundered into "news" coverage, especially that produced by the entry-level reporters tasked to produce a high volume of bylined journalism for some "community rags."

But it's more a lament that the system is not working, One reason our citizenry isn't as informed and engaged as it should be is that journalism--and the market for journalism--is failing them. In New York's neighborhoods, it's gotten worse.