For anyone who even remotely pays attention to the news, you know that newspapers are falling like dominoes all across the country. This week came word of another round of layoffs at the vaunted New York Times which has the largest newsroom in the United States. The Journal News, owned by Gannett, has been no exception, having cut another 50 of the remaining 192 news jobs this past August.
All we can say is, the end cannot come soon enough.
It is one thing to say that New Rochelle is badly served by its so-called “paper of record” but another thing to demonstrate it. Fed up with the failure of the Journal News to cover anything going on in City government since the Labor Day weekend I decided to run a Google News Search for “new rochelle lohud” to see just how little coverage New Rochelle gets from the JN. My search on October 15th returned 52 results — stories published on the Journal News web site in the previous 30 day period that contained “New Rochelle” somewhere in the story. Not stories about New Rochelle only that they had the word “New Rochelle” somewhere in the story. For those keeping score at home, that comes out to less than 2 stories per day that even mention the 7th largest City in New York State, in a paper that New Rochelle pays to publish news and information. It gets worse.
The 52 stories break down as follows:
- There were 15 articles that are not about New Rochelle but do make brief or very brief mention of New Rochelle in a way that is ancillary to the story.
- There were 14 articles about high school sports, 11 articles about high school sports teams that made brief or very brief mention of New Rochelle and 1 articles about high school sports that was about a New Rochelle team.
- There were 12 articles about actions of the New Rochelle Police or Fire Department and the D.A. with regard to New Rochelle cases (covering a fire, “The Wrestler” case and the “Pharmacist Wife” case, and various stories from the police blotter).
- There were 8 stories lifted directly from press releases (from the City of New Rochelle/Downtown BID, Nita Lowey,)
- There were 3 full-length articles based on a PR pitch to cover the event or subject.
The only full-length articles that were specifically about a “New Rochelle topic” and not based on press releases or PR pitches seeking coverage were the stories lifted from the NRPD police blotter, the warehouse fire and the two ongoing legal cases involving “The Wrestler” actor and the pharmacist who killed his wife (which are both being covered out of White Plains now).
Other than a press release put out by the City regarding their “green” initiative and a press release put out by Nita Lowey about “green” funds to upgrade City Hall’s energy effeciency, there is absolutely no coverage of the City of New Rochelle government or the New Rochelle Board of Education. Yet, during that time there 2 City Council meetings, an IDA meeting, a Planning Board meeting, a Zoning Board meeting and 2 Board of Education meetings and, by the way, a new City Clerk was appointed by the City Council. None of the resolutions, decisions, or appointments made by the City government and the Board of Education — which combined spend about $400 million a year received the slightest mention let alone coverage. Instead we mostly got stories spoon-fed to the Journal News by the Downtown BID, Mayor Bramson’s office, Nita Lowey’s office, the School District, a publicist for a D-list celebrity and various organizations seeking to promote themselves or their events.
Of what value is a newspaper that gives more coverage to the Ursuline varsity volleyball team than to the Mayor, the 6 elected members of the City Council, the Schools Superintendent or the 9 elected members of the Board of Education — COMBINED?
The one redeeming feature of the newspaper is the “data desk” an editor who files Freedom of Information Law requests and publish databases with information on school test scores, salaries of public employees and health inspection reports. The paper has then done some good stories based on this data but even then the value is quickly diminished due to a lack of follow up. It appears the newspaper is more concerned with putting out stories fed to them by Westchester officialdom then speaking truth to power. There is absolutely no follow up on any of these stories and no fact-checking of claims made by local officials who can lie through their teeth safe in the knowledge that no reporter will every challenge a statement no matter how absurd. Since there is not a single JN reporter with New Rochelle as their beat, there is no continuity in the coverage and no way for a reporter to understand the context of what is going on at a meeting or public event involving elected or appointed officials.
This is why, for example, school officials can repeatedly claim at board meetings that there are no “wrongly enrolled” students in New Rochelle and then call the Journal News months later to cover the board meeting where they intend to “refute” the claims that there are hundreds of wrongly enrolled students in New Rochelle public schools by trotting out a report that claims there are “only” about 50 kids a year removed from the New Rochelle schools for being “wrongly enrolled”. Or why the reporter claims he was at the meeting when he most certainly was not, then writes the story the Superintendent wants to appear in the paper including a quote from the Superintendent making an obviously false claim that he was “surprised” the number was so low. Had Aman Ali actually been at the meeting he claims to have attended (anyone who has been in the Carew Room at City Hall knows it would be impossible to go unnoticed in such a small space) he might then have asked Mr. Organisciak to explain how it could be that he would not know how many kids were removed for being wrongly enrolled given the legal issues surrounding removing a wrongly enrolled student or why he and other board members said for months there were no such students at all?
Any real journalist would be mortified to be associated with the track record of the Journal News. Talk of the Sound has broken more real stories in a week than the Journal News has broken in the past year. You can count the real news coming from the JN on one hand. But this is not a competition between the local affiliate of one of the largest news organizations in the United State and a small, hyper-local blog, it is about doing what is right for the people they purport to serve through their reporting.
We need real journalism over here — investigative reporting, data analysis, fact-checking, getting people on the record and then calling “bullshit” when they lie. If the Journal News is not prepared to put some boots on the ground, start turning over some rocks, and start hard-nosed reporting then they should do us all a favor by packing up and leaving. The only thing worse than no reporting is giving the powerful a patina of respectability by pretending to cover news in New Rochelle.