Local Reporting in Winter

Newspapers are under attack -- and not just from the orange buffoon in the White House.

They're under attack from major forces, both technological and economic, from the Internet wiping out paid-for print publications and destroying classified ad revenue, to wealthy owners buying up newspapers and either turning them into vanity vehicles or shuttering them completely. Never before have newspapers been in such perilous decline.

That said, online news outlets are stepping into the breach, and some big name legacy papers  (The New York Times, The Washington Post, for example) have done a good job monetizing and re-inventing themselves online.

But what's really being lost is super-local coverage, and high-quality "guerrilla" or "underground" journalism -- the kinds that the Village Voice produced. This kind of in-depth, on-the-ground, in-the-streets, down-the-back-alley reporting is vanishing -- and online coverage isn't replacing it.

NYC has always had great super local papers in every borough but, even though they still exist and have strong web presences, they have virtually no staff and money to do in-depth reporting. As this lengthy article points out, Brooklyn is a borough of 2.5 million people, bigger than most American cities, and the papers and news outlets that exist there have minute staffs and budgets, unable to cover the plethora of stories and controversies that occur in Brooklyn every day.

Reporting is not the same as writing, it's hard work -- interviewing people, looking over documents, making calls, piecing details together, etc. As much as I love blogging and aggregating and commentary, these things can't replace the importance and power -- not to mention  the democratic necessity -- of shoe-leather reporting. 

One such reporter was a guy named John Wilcock who was the ultimate New York "underground" journalist who did brilliant trailblazing work back in the 1960s and 1970s (he recently died at the age of 91. He was a journeyman reporter, a shoe-leather pioneer, and we'll probably never the likes of him or the papers he wrote for ever again.