The Daily News Cut Half Its Reporters. We all Lose.
When I first heard that the Daily News had indeed cut 50% of their editorial staff to focus on breaking news my first thought was: Is there really no hope for local news in New York City?
The Daily News closed its Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx bureaus in 2015. New York Times pulled back metro coverage in 2016. DNA Info shuttered in 2017. And while it’s unclear exactly how many reporters the Daily News now has on its City Desk, we know that at least one City Hall reporter (Erin Durkin), Brooklyn Courts Reporter (Christina Carrega) and Todd Maisel, the Daily News photographer, were let go.
I do not need to tell you this is not good news for Brooklyn or democracy. We do our share of daily reporting and investigations alike — but we also depended on the Daily News to do big, city-wide investigations we did not have the resources for. But I guess big out-of-town corporations care about as much about NYC as out-of-town billionaires, and the rest of us will need to find a way to step up our reporting.
We are around, covering Brooklyn, only because so many of our readers believe it is important to cover local news and they have become paying subscribers. (You can join them!) As I told councilmember Mark Treyger today – we care about what happens to our communities – about local schools, crosswalks, and affordable housing.
Windsor Terrace neighbor Harry Siegel penned this op-ed in the Daily News today about the rather unglamorous job of local reporting and Why we need local journalism: Look around at how vulnerable we are right now. He writes:
“There’s really no way to scale that reporting work or automate it or make it go viral. (“This woman gave a disjointed speech in the form of a question at a community board meeting. What happened next will shock you!”)
Reporting is a necessary part of a functioning state, sure, but it’s also a job, like keeping the shelves stocked. Public service, too, is a job. When the economics of those businesses get out of whack — often because people in power increase their share to the point where there isn’t enough left to go around — things slowly rot, and then quickly collapse.”
There are so few reporters left covering Brooklyn, you can count them on your hands, and that is all outlets combined. There are close to 9 million people living in NYC. A third of them live in Brooklyn. Many of them subscribe to the New York Times and give to WNYC. In the case of Bklyner, if even a fraction of that number — of you, our readers — choose to support the remaining, locally-owned outlets, we can keep building a robust news operation covering this city. For there should be many voices telling the stories of our city, and right now it is awfully quiet out there.
