The Queens Daily Eagle Faces the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Queens Eagle was launched in May 2018 with the goal of covering the borough’s court system. Then, the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Queens, New York, is one of the most ethnically diverse places in the world, home to 2.2 million residents and dozens of multilingual newspapers: the World Journal, New York’s largest Chinese-language daily newspaper; the Queens Latino, which serves 90,000 Latinx readers in New York City; and the Weekly Bangalee, widely read by the Queens’ Bangladeshi community. But there is only one daily English-language print newspaper remaining in the borough, from a peak of several dozen in the early 2000s: the Queens Daily Eagle.

The Queens Daily Eagle was created in May 2018 by Brooklyn Daily Eagle publisher Dozier Hasty and Queens Tribune owner Mike Nussbaum. (Hasty owns both the Queens and Brooklyn Daily Eagle; the titles are separate entities and produce separate content, although they collaborate and share some pieces in print.) After his three-year stint as associate publisher of the now-defunct Queens Tribune, Nussbaum decided that he “wanted to continue in the newspaper business” and pursue something that was “totally different from community journalism,” he told Study Hall. Instead of publishing general local news, as Nussbaum says he has done all his career, he wanted the Queens Eagle to focus specifically on the Queens court system and legal community.

While the newspaper is still small and fairly new, it has already garnered national attention: One of their most popular articles last year was a tongue-in-cheek “Queens man impeached” headline for a story on Donald Trump’s impeachment, written by Victoria Merlino, that was featured on the Rachel Maddow Show. The Queens Eagle gained more sustained attention locally for their thorough coverage of the contentious 2019 Queens District Attorney race between Tiffany Cabán and Melinda Katz. Many readers looked to the paper as a trustworthy source for in-depth coverage of the race and the ensuing recount, which Katz won by just 60 votes.

Once the coronavirus hit in March of this year, however, the Queens Eagle changed course. Queens has been the hardest-hit borough in New York City by the pandemic, and borough residents wanted to know how coronavirus was affecting their communities and hospitals, and how people could support each other. While the paper had previously focused its coverage on the Queens court system, they found themselves covering human-interest and public health stories more often. “What people really crave in a crisis like the coronavirus is [news about] what is going on in their own communities,” said David Brand, the Queens Eagle’s managing editor.

As the Queens Eagle covered the crisis, web traffic increased dramatically, with roughly 1.25 million readers — the same amount of traffic for the entire previous year — visiting the website by early April, according to Brand. One of the most popular coronavirus-related stories from the Queens Eagle was an interview Brand conducted with a few doctors from a Jamaica, Queens, hospital in which they talked about the severe lack of ventilators for the influx of COVID-19 patients. Later that same day, a video was leaked from inside the emergency room showing how packed the hospital was, bringing the reality of the coronavirus crisis to light.

Other popular stories covered community groups and assisting others in need, written by Rachel Vick. “There’s a lot of doom and gloom about the coronavirus, but there are also people stepping up to help one another and help people in their own communities,” Brand said. Despite furloughs and a rapid transition in coverage caused by the pandemic, the Queens Eagle has been able to find its footing, better preparing the paper for an uncertain future.

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While the Queens Eagle was covering a massive sewage flood this past December, Hasty laid off four digital team journalists at its sister paper, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, including digital editor-in-chief Ned Berke, managing editor Sara Bosworth, reporter Meaghan McGoldrick, and audience and growth manager Cambria Roth, allegedly without severance packages being offered to at least three people. The layoffs happened as the Brooklyn Eagle’s readership was growing, the paper had secured over $100,000 in grants, and the website gained big-name partnerships, according to Gothamist, leading to questions from staff about whether the cuts were financially necessary.

Half a year later, Queens Daily Eagle furloughed or laid off five staff members due to coronavirus-related pressures, even as web traffic was increasing, leaving Brand as the only editorial staffer. “In terms of the day-to-day, [work] doesn’t really end,” he told Study Hall. He finds it hard to balance print production, posting breaking news stories online, and writing stories himself.

Before coronavirus hit, the Queens Eagle was doing extensive work looking at racial disparities in community board demographics based on the first annual report published by Queens Borough President Melinda Katz and the other four borough presidents. Due to coronavirus precautions, the courts have been closed since March, effectively halting all coverage of the Queens court system, one of the paper’s main coverage areas. For other topics, like homelessness, the Queens Eagle had to shift its focus to the ways in which people who are homeless or have experienced homelessness are dealing with the pandemic.

Although it represents a departure from the Queens Eagle’s original focus, Brand said he worked “very hard” to get up to speed on public health issues in Queens. One strategy Brand has used is looking to older newspapers in Queens like the Queens Chronicle or Queens Courier for “institutional knowledge” that informs reporting on the borough’s present-day hospital system. Their past reporting can provide useful insight into the relationships between institutions, politicians, politicians, and lobbyist organizations — for example, Brand used a story from Queens News and Community that told him about the closure of three Queens hospitals over a decade ago and used it to explain how the closings worsened the coronavirus crisis.

The Queens Eagle is still waiting for the courts to open up to resume coverage of the legal system, and to cover reforms that were passed late last year by the state legislature, like a law designed to eliminate cash bail. Since crime is also one of the paper’s main coverage areas, Nussbaum says that one challenge going forward is covering from a legal perspective the “changing dynamics of how people view crime, and how people look at the social demographics that are changing throughout the city.” Nussbaum says that in the last two years, Caribbean and South Asian lawyers in Queens have formed multiple, growing bar associations that “reflect the ethnic diversity of the courts and in the community,” allowing the legal framework through which the Queens Eagle covers the borough to be more accurate.

Brand says it was “incredible” to see the reporting the Queens Eagle has done as the coronavirus pandemic raged on. When he looked back on the paper’s work in March and April covering the expansion of COVID testing, he feels like the publication did an “excellent job…tracking and reporting on the day-by-day COVID-19 developments in Queens.” Brand says he will continue to develop the testing maps and spreadsheets he made for his reporting, and last month, the paper partnered with Measure of America to plot every COVID-19 testing site in Queens. The project identifies gaps in public health resources, provides a map and addresses of testing sites in Queens, and reports neighborhood-level death rates; the Queens Eagle will continue to revisit the project throughout the year.

Last month, the Queens Eagle announced a partnership with NY1 and parent company Spectrum to provide daily Queens coverage on the Spectrum News app. The app will feature at least seven Queens Eagle articles per week, along with content from Gothamist, City & State, Chalkbeat, Bklyner, and The City. In the announcement, Brand writes: “The Eagle is spreading its wings.”

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