The Future of NYC Local Media

 

 

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In a city where the local paper takes up more and more oxygen within the entire national (if not international) media ecosystem, it can be easy to forget that local news has never been a one-outlet game in New York City. In 1900, there were 15 daily newspapers in the city; before DNAinfo was shut down in 2017 after workers voted to unionize, there was a period of years when a variety of online outlets (which regularly expanded as contracted, as digital media tends to do) provided rich coverage of neighborhood-level news for the five boroughs. But since the loss of DNAinfo and Gothamist becoming the digital arm of WNYC in 2017, local news has become more stagnant. Even the Times metro desk moved toward “less incremental” local news coverage the same year. A year later, in 2018, The Village Voice was shuttered (and was later bought and revived by Brian Calle, but remains a shadow of its former self).

“The fun, informative local news that we all love wasn’t around any more,” Tim Donnelly, a freelance journalist who used to run Brokelyn, a Brooklyn news website, told Study Hall. But a generation of journalists who, like Donnelly, came up writing for many of those bygone local-news publications are still around and writing about the city—and some of them are now helping to fill the local-news void with new worker-owned publications, and they are determined not to make the same mistakes the likes of Joe Ricketts did in the past.

Last year, a group of five journalists who had experience working for publications like Gothamist, The Village Voice, and Jezebel launched Hell Gate, a scrappy city blog that has quickly become a media darling. And in July, Hell Gate was joined by New York Groove, which Donnelly started with Streetsblog reporter Dave Colon and Marketplace digital editor Virginia K. Smith. The new site has a lot in common with Hell Gate: both are dedicated to writing stories that answer the questions and curiosities that New Yorkers have about their city (Why isn’t there a legal weed shop in Brooklyn yet? Why Is Paying for the JFK AirTrain Such a Huge Pain in the Ass?), and both are fiercely independent and owned solely by the journalists who run them.

Rather than see each other as competitors, the people behind Hell Gate and NY Groove regard each other as signs of a reinvigorated local media scene, not to mention further proof that worker-owned businesses can be a success. “Our reaction was that it’s great,” Hell Gate editor Christopher Robbins told Study Hall about their response to NY Groove, “and that the more the merrier.” And thanks to the way both businesses are organized, they both have the potential to find success if they can turn only a very small percentage of New Yorkers into paying readers.

Since launching, the publication’s subscriber base has grown to nearly 3,000 paid readers (subscriptions range between $6.99 per month and $200 annually, with the upper tier including perks like commenting privileges and the much-coveted Hell Gate baseball hat), and two new owner-editors have been added to the team. Inspired by Defector, which pioneered worker ownership in digital media and puts out an exhaustive annual report on its business, Hell Gate published its own breakdown of costs and revenue in July, which shows that the site is close to breaking even, but not quite. The May expenses quoted in the report were just over $46,000, with revenue was $35,384, all from subscriptions and donations (some grant funding has helped make up the difference).

Those numbers may all seem modest, but that’s part of the whole idea: with a subscriber-based model and worker ownership, a site like Hell Gate doesn’t have to chase millions of eyeballs to maybe make programmatic ads sold against its content earn enough money to keep the lights on while also paying inflated executive salaries. Currently, Robins and his fellow owner-editors are each earning $48,000 annually, and are bumping that up to $60,000 and providing themselves with non-ACA health insurance next year. 

“It’s sustainable enough to allow us to pay our rent, and to live life as journalists covering New York City, which is the thing we care about the most,” Robbins said.

When Smith and her colleagues were discussing starting their own site (which they’ve talked about since before the pandemic), a friend told her, “you can build a house, you just can’t build a mansion.” Their goal, as the site grows, is a similarly humble one: to be able to provide themselves with livable salaries and healthcare, and to pay their freelancers well too. And to torture the house-as-publication metaphor, Donnelly joked, “when you tear down a mansion you have lots of rooms for houses—there used to be one mansion on this block and now there’s room for like 20 families.”

NY Groove is working on a membership model for starters too, keeping everything published in its weekly newsletter editions free to all readers, with additional editorial goodies accessible only to those who pay $6 a month (higher subscription tiers run up to $100 per month). The newsletter runs on Ghost, and with the hundred paid memberships they currently have (out of 1,000 subscribers) there’s enough revenue to cover their start-up costs and have some money set aside for paying freelancers. 

The launch has been deliberately slow; Colon and Smith are still working their day jobs, and Connelly is continuing to freelance for the time being as well (I have worked with him in the past when I was an editor at Curbed). While they can’t really say quantitatively what success looks like just yet, they want NY Groove to become a sustainable, full-time pursuit. “If the three of us and a handful of other people are able to have salaries and health insurance and the stuff that you need to live while we all treat each other with respect and answer to each other,” Colon said, “that’s kind of all that you can ask for.”

At Hell Gate, the long-game hope is to grow to about three times of their current size in the years to come. “I feel like in a town the size of New York, I think you could support a newsroom of around 20 odd people if you had subscriber levels in the low five figures,” Robbins said. “That would be wonderful.”

When it comes to covering New York (or any major city, for that matter), there are a number of distinct approaches a publication can take: there’s writing about the city as an international capital of finance, business, and culture; there’s treating it like the playground for the rich and those who aspire be, and focusing on stories that cater to such a crowd; there’s inventing the worst possible image of the city and filtering all of the news through that dire fantasy. And then there’s covering the city as if it were a small town, or a series of small towns all strung together, familiar and full of characters, and always presenting something new and interesting if you’re looking for it. It’s the latter that has been neglected in recent years, and when done right, it can and should depict a richer, more universal image of the city as it’s experienced by the masses—and it’s that approach that, thankfully, the likes of Hell Gate and NY Groove are attempting. 

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Requiem For A Job Posting

For a brief moment in the history of the universe, Chobani was purportedly hiring an “Executive Writer” who would be responsible for “capturing” their CEO’s “voice” and “assisting in strategic communications pieces.” The pay range? Anything from $185,600.00 to $278,400.00 and I assume, a few buckets of yogurt. According to Chobani’s website, which also has a fantastic recipe section (I want to try the summer corn bisque), this position is now… closed. If you have any information about Chobani and its seemingly robust investment in content, please email [email protected]. 

 

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Everything Else

—Paper Magazine is relaunching this fall. Justin Moran is returning as EIC and Matt Wille will be returning as managing editor. In June, the culture magazine was acquired by Brian Calle. Calle also owns The Village Voice and L.A. Weekly.
—More G/O Media Chaos: According to The Verge, G/O Media has replaced the four employees who wrote for Gizmodo en Español with AI tools. In a statement, the GMG Union said that they were “saddened” by the development and criticized higher-ups at G/O Media. “Unfortunately this move to eliminate the Español team represents yet another broken promise from G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller and Editorial Director Merrill Brown, who have repeatedly said that the company’s AI experiments were intended to supplement human writing, not replace it,” the GMG Union posted on X.
—More X Chaos: Elon Musk has essentially declared war on the Anti-Defamation League, blaming the anti-hate organization for the social media platform’s 60% dip in ad revenue. He is also seemingly feuding with Tucker Carlson, his platform’s biggest show pony, for interviewing a man who claimed to have had sexual relations with Barack Obama without providing “objective evidence.” I guess it’s time for us to dust off our BlueSky account. 

 

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Comings and Goings 

 

—Megan Morrone is now technology editor at Axios.
—Neel V. Patel is now a staff editor for the Opinion section at The New York Times.
—Danny Nguyen is now a reporter covering social issues at The Washington Post.
—Catherine Valentine will be the head of politics at Substack.
—Karen Hao is now a contributing writer at The Atlantic. She will be focusing on the AI beat.
—Michael Gold is moving from the Metro desk to the Politics desk at The New York Times.
—Maeve Allsup is no longer a tech reporter at Morning Brew.