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Brooklyn Eagle Forum Transcript
50 Years after the Eagle: This is a slightly edited transcript of a forum held at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in the Woody Tanger Auditorium of the Brooklyn College Library. Leading journalists who cover Brooklyn discussed the coverage the city's most populous borough gets from a news media largely based in Manhattan. The event was timed to the 50th anniversary of the demise of the Brooklyn Eagle, which predicted in its final edition that Brooklyn would forever be in Manhattan's shadow once it lacked its own daily newspaper. The speakers include Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., Jesuit professor of the humanities at St. Peter's College and author of The Eagle and Brooklyn: A Community Newspaper, 1841-1955 (Greenwood Press, 1974); Jimmy Breslin, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author of many books, including The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (Crown, 2004); Diane Cardwell, New York Times reporter in Brooklyn; Patrick Gallahue, New York Post reporter in Brooklyn; Ron Howell, former reporter for Newsday and the New York Daily News and editor of CUNY Matters; and Joanne Wasserman, Brooklyn bureau chief of the New York Daily News. The moderator is Paul Moses, director of the Center for the Study of Brooklyn and former city editor at Newsday. The program's sponsors include the Center for the Study of Brooklyn; the Brooklyn Studies Program @ Brooklyn College; the Ethyl R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities and the American Democracy Project. The format: The program started with the showing of a documentary directed by graduate student Sanda Htyte and co-produced with Stephen Ogumah under the direction of Prof. Stuart MacLelland of the Brooklyn College Department of Television and Radio. Father Schroth then spoke about the Eagle's role in Brooklyn's civic life. Following these opening remarks, the panelists discussed what it is like to cover Brooklyn nowadays - what gets covered, and what doesn't. The Center for the Study of Brooklyn invites your comments on the discussion. You can email us at pmoses@brooklyn.cuny.edu. Please indicate if you would like your comments to be posted. Paul Moses: Welcome. My name is Paul Moses, I teach journalism here at Brooklyn College. I'm also the director of something new that's been started that's called the Center for the Study of Brooklyn, and really this is our first event since having our opening conference last month. So, thanks for being here, helping us get things started with the Center. Our center is devoted to discussing public policy from a Brooklyn point of view - or even with a Brooklyn attitude perhaps. … Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the day when the Brooklyn Eagle announced that it was going to close, and it closed the following day ... Today, we'll remember the Eagle and what it meant in Brooklyn's civic life in its day, and with an eye on what that means today. Today we have chains of local papers that cover most, if not all, of Brooklyn. There are more ethnic newspapers now than in 1955, and certainly more broadcast news coverage than in 1955. But I think when all is said and done, the citywide daily newspapers still have a good deal of clout in deciding what the agenda is for the public debate in New York City, and that is what the decision-makers discuss - and what they don't discuss. So for that reason we've focused on the dailies today. There certainly are other aspects of Brooklyn media that we could talk about. We're going to start with a five minute documentary about the Eagle, and then we'll hear about the Eagle by author Raymond Schroth, who is on expert on the subject, and finally we'll discuss the current picture with a panel of distinguished journalists, with columnist Jimmy Breslin, New York Times reporter Diane Cardwell, writer Ron Howell, Daily News Brooklyn Bureau Chief Joanne Wasserman, and New York Post reporter Patrick Gallahue.
Raymond A. Schroth, S.J.
So, a century ago, the readers of the Brooklyn Eagle, having absorbed the lead story about the outside world, could turn to the dozen other stories crammed into a seven-column page one of the 22 pages of international, national, and local news on society and religion, editorials, sports when the Brooklyn baseball team was still referred to as the Brooklyns, death, crimes, accidents, a picture section, real estate, 6 pages of classified ads, and a serialized novel about J. Percy Dunbar, President of the Brooklyn Universal Supplies Company, who successfully battles a Wall street magnate determined to wreck his company, becomes a multimillionaire through illegal stocks manipulation, is put on trial, and is now tempted to kill himself. Back on page one, the courts are flooded with more than 2000 sewer suits - most, says the judge, total frauds. Priceless grandpianos and violins stored in the basements of the poor are wiped out by overflowing sewers. One man lost 98 barrels of flour stored in a space that would hold only 50. Meanwhile, Thomas Deegan took his girlfriend out for an evening, got her very drunk, dumped her into a cab, and was surprised the discover she was dead. When James Anderson, a fur skin dresser, arrived at his factory at 74 Emerson Place early Tuesday morning, he discovered that 549 mink skins, 15 raccoon skins, and 2 gray fox skins, a total value of $3,500 to $4,000, which had been carefully put into a drum on Monday night all ready for finishing, were gone. The sawdust, which had been carefully packed above them the night before, had been carefully, cleverly, moved, not scattered. There were no signs of a break-in. This had the looks of an inside job. Albert Schop, 67 years old, convinced that he was in everyone's way and not wanted, faced with the departure of his wife, who moved from their flat at 62 West One Hundredth street to their daughter's home at 417 West Thirty-fifth street, killed himself by drinking a bottle of carbolic acid. Inside, the editorials on page 4 address whether the Senate should confirm a treaty between Santo Domingo and the United States and whether the state of New York should issue further taxes upon life insurance policies - in both cases the answer is no - and the proposal for an elevated loop in Manhattan joining the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges. The March meeting of the Brooklyn Political Equality Club featured piano solos, vocal solos, recitations and a symposium on women's suffrage. The society writer tells us that there are fewer weddings and parties these last few weeks because it is Lent. There is, however, an At Home reception for Miss Madeleine McKay: though the party is in Manhattan, we are told, "the bride is of great Brooklyn interest." Perhaps the spirit of this day's paper 100 years ago - and indeed of every Eagle in its 114 years of life - is captured in a large editorial cartoon in which a tall, elegantly dressed society woman labeled "Brooklyn" is scolding a portly Johnny Knickerbocker, in Colonial garb, sprawled out hogging a park bench labeled "Manhattan" and hiding behind a newspaper. The bench seat is labeled "space for elevated bridge loop." The point is that the plans for connecting the Manhattan terminals of the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges are being drawn up in a way which disregards the interests of a million and a quarter inhabitants of Brooklyn. The development would destroy Manhattan East Side tenement housing, but improvements on the bridges would benefit Brooklyn. Seven years before in 1898 the Eagle had fought against the consolidation of the boroughs into Greater New York, fearing rightly that Manhattan would forever dominate its poor cousin across the East River. The Eagle would keep fighting that same battle to its last breath. The Beginnings When the 23-year-old Isaac Van Anden lifted the first copy of The Brooklyn Eagle and Kings County Democrat off his hand-operated job press at 39 Fulton Street on October 26, 1841, Brooklyn was a small town of 35,000 people. By 1886 it would consolidate with all the seven other county towns like Flatbush, New Lots, and Greenpoint , plus the city of Williamsburg, to comprise the County of Kings. It thrived on its dual identity of being close to New York and a place to which New Yorkers could escape. However, New York, with the Times still ten years in the future, already had six major morning papers and four evening papers, as well as four other small dailies. The leaders were the Benjamin Day's New York Sun (1833), James Gordon Bennett's Herald (1835) and Horace Greeley's Tribune (1841). From the beginning the Eagle broke with the sensationalism of the "penny press" Sun and Herald and was more likely to emulate the literary quality and reform agenda of the Tribune. Actually the Eagle was the creation of a group of Democratic politicians, lawyers, and businessmen, led by Henry Cruse Murphy (1810-1882) who started out needing a newspaper to help them reform the and reorganize their party in Kings County following the death of President Harrison so they could make a stronger showing the coming elections. The same men, including William C Kingsley and Civil War Eagle editor Thomas Kinsella, became the visionary entrepreneurs who built the Brooklyn Bridge. Their plan simply had been to increase the value of Brooklyn real estate by linking it to Manhattan. Today when you walk across the Bridge from the Manhattan side, pause and read the big bronze plaque honoring the men who brought it about and ask their spirits who must inhabit that windy place what they think of the results of their work. The Brooklyn Bridge worked both ways. It made Brooklyn the bedroom borough for Manhattan businessmen, and the escape valve, the vision of a bigger world for the Brooklyn talent yearning to breath free. Rival New York newspapers flooded across the bridge and challenged Brooklyn with images of the outer world. Brooklyn became the city where famous people were "from" before they made it big. Robert Moses told me once of meeting an old Brooklyn politician one day in the Hotel Bossert, who told him solemnly over a drink: "The trouble with Brooklyn is that everyone is the same size." Talent would be nourished in Brooklyn and become famous somewhere else. Edward Bok, a philanthropist and famous editor of The Ladies Home Journal, as an Eagle reporter, once faked a review of a play he had seen earlier and lavishly praised the star's performance on the night he had skipped. Alas, the star was sick that night and there was no show. H. V. Kaltenborn had 20 years with the Eagle before his fame as a CBS Murrow's Boys correspondent and commentator during World War II. Winston Burdett, another "Murrow boy" and the CBS Rome correspondent through the 1970s, acknowledged in 1955 that he had been part of the Communist cell at the Eagle in the 1930s. My cousin Tom Schroth, managing editor of the Eagle in its last years, went on to edit Congressional Quarterly and to be a founding editor of National Journal. But inevitably, as the Eagle became a "training ground" for other media, it would be harder to maintain its reputation as a local paper with national or international clout. In 1941 when the Eagle celebrated its centennial, New York governor Herbert Lehman wrote publisher Frank D. Schroth a congratulatory letter saying the Eagle's success was due to its role as a local paper for the people of Brooklyn. True, but if Uncle Frank had seen himself as merely a local publisher I doubt that he would have traveled with Henry Luce to the Pacific war zones during World War II, met with General Douglas MacArthur in Australia, and report ed on his meetings with Brooklyn boys at war. Throughout its history, however, the Eagle was able to project a consistent image of itself and its community largely because of the continuity of its leadership. Young VanAnden bought the paper from his political sponsors in 1842, then brought in his 16 year old nephew William Hester, whose dynasty would rule over the expanding enterprise until selling it to Frank E. Gannett of Rochester in 1929. Although Walt Whitman, editor from 1846-1848, was long portrayed in the Eagle's mythology as a bad-mannered loafer, his writing set a mood and style that never left. "There is a curious kind of sympathy . . .that arises in the mind of a newspaper conductor with the public he serves," he wrote, "He gets to love them. Daily communion creates a sort of brotherhood and sisterhood of the two parties." Whitman set out to get the feel of the community, its historic monuments the crowds at the Fulton Street ferry slip, the blooming lilacs, and moist grass, the young men who, he said, should spend less time in bars, play more baseball, and take more baths. Henry McCloskey, the Eagle's pre-Civil War editor was a Southern Democrat whose anti-war editorials exposed the paper to charges of disloyalty. When abolitionist Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher extolled the glories of dying in battle for a principle by being hit "by a whistling ball," the Eagle concluded that if Beecher wanted death "by a whistling ball" he knew where he could get it. If McCloskey's post-Fort Sumter successor Thomas Kinsella's great accomplishment was the Bridge, Kinsella's colorful turn-of-the-century successor, St. Clair McKelway, presided over the Eagle's Age of Confidence, from its magnificent new 1891 building at Washington and Johnson Streets, modeled on Joseph Pulitzer's New York World building across the river, and with its glistening golden, dome atop which a bronze eagle flashed his ten-foot wingspread. When much of urban America was plagued by overcrowding, strikes, and ethnic and racial violence, the Eagle's Brooklyn remained stable, homogeneous, business oriented, and Protestant. It had what it called a class circulation of 35,000 daily and 45,000 Sunday, and the typical reader owned a private home, belonged to the Crescent Riding and Driving Clubs, invested in real estate, and saw Brooklyn as the heart and capital of Long Island, if not the center of the universe. Indeed, the Eagle's vision of Brooklyn's future looked East rather than toward Manhattan: its 1911-1912 "Forward Long Island" dream imagined Brooklyn as a cultural capital of a Long Island linked by long boulevards reaching out to a seaport at Montauk Point, and a series of Eagle pre-Robert Moses, ten-point, ten-year plans emphasized highway construction. Meanwhile McKelway fought the enemy across the East River with the gusto of an old-fashioned "personal journalist," i.e. one who imprints his king-sized personality on the paper. In the losing battle against consolidation into Greater New York in 1898, every day he ran a leader on the editorial page:
"What is the use of running a newspaper according to the rule?" he once barked. "The fun of having a newspaper is to run it just the way you please." It is hard to escape the possibility that Orson Welles had McKelway in mind when he has the young Charles Foster Kane declare, "I think it would be fun to run a newspaper." When Frank D. Schroth, from Trenton, by way of Scranton, where he had published the Scranton Tribune, arrived as editor and publisher of the Eagle in 1938, both the paper and the community it spoke for were in trouble. The Hester group had bought the paper back from Gannett and installed M. Preston Goodfellow as publisher. The newly organized Newspaper Guild chapter, whose grievance chairman called Goodfellow an autocratic "scoundrel," struck the paper for fifteen weeks in 1937, leaving wounds that never healed. Brooklyn, said Fortune magazine, "has long been a kind of joke; it is a place that once had a culture and aristocracy, and now is a no-man's land of factories and homes and gigantic tearing avenues - a place to get lost in - an unknown, unexplored land." Frank Schroth, convinced that Brooklyn still was a community and could support its own paper, revived the idea of a "community service paper," a concept which seems to have anticipated the recent emphasis on "civic journalism," the idea that involves the paper so intimately in civic life, in setting the social and political agenda, that, its critic say it risks its status as an independent observer. Preparing for the 1941 centennial issue, Schroth collected the opinions of 150 prominent citizens and launched a new ten-point plan for a greater Brooklyn. In the wake of World War II, as Brooklyn changed, as more of the middle class moved to Long Island and more blacks moved up from the South, as the big department stores closed, street gangs reemerged, and the mob told hold, the Eagle changed its style: a bolder type face, and big, sensational headlines splashed across the top of the page. Once in the early 1950s when I was an idealistic Fordham student writing for the Fordham Ram, I remarked to my Uncle Frank on a visit to their Brooklyn Heights home that the Eagle had a lot of sensational crime headlines. Uncle Frank informed me that if he were to put the really most important news in the top headline every day, there would be nothing on page one but the deliberations of the United Nations. And then no one would buy the newspaper. And there would be no Brooklyn Eagle! But as I read through a bound volume of Eagle pages the other day it was clear that in the 1950s the Eagle did give the UN, and the Korean War, the execution of the Rosenbergs - 2 A-SPIES GET CHAIR - the Truman MacArthur conflict and other international stories lots of top billings, along with the second game of the 1951 National League Dodger-Giant play-offs, the theft of some jewels blessed by the Pope from a church shrine, and the rise of the subway fare to 15 cents. One of the more memorable headlines is Tuesday April 15, 1952: Comb Woods for Boro Youth's Slayer CLOSE IN ON CAMPFIRE KILLER. John Patrick Dooley, 18, a Brooklyn prep school student on an Easter week camping trip to Bear Mountain, was sitting at his campfire whittling with his friends when a strange boy came out of the woods with a rifle and ordered Dooley to "put that knife down." The new Eagle's best year began when reporter Ed Reid, in September, 1949, overheard a man in a bar say "A new boss has taken over the bookie joints in this town - a guy called Mr. G. They say he was put in business by three top coppers." On December 11, 1949, the Eagle began an eight-part series on crime, gambling, and police corruption: LUCRATIVE BOROUGH RACKETS So began an investigation which led to the resignation of New York Mayor William O'Dwyer - simultaneous to his appointment as U.S. ambassador to Mexico - and which won the Eagle seven awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. The End Fifty years ago today Frank Schroth was making the most painful decision of his life. Two years before, weary of conflict and ready to retire, he had tried to sell the Eagle to the New York Herald Tribune; but union pressure forced the Reid family to pull out of the deal. So he threw himself back into the battle for Brooklyn, built a new Eagle plant, because the old one had to be demolished to make way for the new Supreme Court building in the new Civic Center, and braced himself for negotiations for the new Guild contract in the fall of 1954. His circulation was holding at 125, 339, but limited to the borough, while Newsday was beginning to sweep across Long Island. He could not meet the Guild's demand for the Manhattan wage scale. Furthermore, he saw some of the Guild leaders, like I. Kaufman, as personal antagonists, who could not match the competence of reporters at the Times and Tribune, but demanded the same salaries. Several had been members of the Communist party in the old days, and Uncle Frank could not help holding that against them. Ironically, when I interviewed some of them about him in the 1970s, Kaufman said, "I rather liked him," and Violet Weingarten called him "a great man." Schroth tried to demonstrate that the money was not there to meet the union's demands; but, based in part on their experience with Goodfellow, they thought that he was bluffing. On January 28 the picket lines went up and the craft unions declined to cross them. That day's paper was the last copy of the Eagle to ever appear. Its last headline spread across the top of the page in bold type. Body of Woman, 58, Found in Cellar The second biggest story was of Richard Padgett, a two-year-old Negro boy who had fallen eleven stories from a bedroom window in the Van Dyke Houses and survived with only a slight scratch on his head. Throughout the 22-page paper, six stories were on international news, eleven national, four state, and 48 local. Local stories were on either "community news" or crime. The editorials praised Great Britain and France for rejecting Soviet warnings against rearming Germany, praised Mayor Wagner's moves toward economizing, appraised Eisenhower's responsibility to defend Formosa, and congratulated former Dodger pitcher Dizzy Vance on his election to the Hall of Fame. The Publisher, in a front page box, described the even temporary silencing of the Eagle as another instance of Brooklyn being dominated by Manhattan. The next day, for the first time in 114 years, the Eagle failed to appear. Snow fell on the picket lines. Late at night editors and staff struggled to find a formula for survival. A former editor wrote a memo that the Eagle might come back as a tabloid that would appeal to the "little guys." The Guild imagined a number of scenarios by which Schroth had planned to fake death and pull a resurrection. But on March 16 Schroth, who had not been bluffing, said, "We have chosen to quit." His public statement concluded: "The Newspaper Guild problem is malignant . . . So the Pulitzer Prize Winning paper of Whitman, Van Anden and McKelway has been silenced forever, and Brooklyn, the largest community in America without a voice, will indeed be doomed to be cast in Manhattan's shadow." At any death - an institution, a president, a loved one, or a publication - we must always ask: What is lost? One Eagle employee told me, "Not much." Newsday columnist Stan Isaacs, reviewing my history of the Eagle, wrote that most of the people who would have grieved for it were dead or dying off. He grew up in Williamsburg, he said, and the Eagle did not give his neighborhood the coverage it deserved. Yet Pete Hamill, in a much quoted New York magazine article (July 14, 1969), listed the departure of the Dodgers, the closing of the Navy Yard, the immigration of Southern Negroes, and the folding of the Eagle as the four factors that marked the passing of Brooklyn's traditional way of life. Fr. James Loughran, S.J., a Brooklyn boy who is now president of Saint Peter's College and was once president of Brooklyn College, laments the lost coverage of high school sports. Who will now record the teenager's winning home run? For me, a newspaper is a community's means of public remembering. Without a newspaper's steady re-presentation to its readers of who they are and where they have been, an urban community is little better than an amnesiac who has been told his name but has no idea what the name connotes and symbolizes and, therefore, little sense of his true talents and possibilities. If there are reporters, editors, publishers, or professors within the sound of my voice or the reach of my words, please remember this when you doubt the worth of what you are trying to do. Panel Discussion Moses: … Is there a double standard in deciding what's news in the city - if there's a murder in Central Park, is there any hierarchy of values as compared to a murder in Fort Greene, and is that something you deal with as journalists who cover Brooklyn? Ron Howell: One thing that comes to mind, back in 1989 I think most of us remember a case called the "Central Park jogger" case - a horrific crime. A woman was jogging and was come upon by a group of kids that the papers eventually came to call a "wolf pack." And then the term "wilding" came into currency. And the victim - you know race always becomes part of the story - the victim was a white woman. And the men who were arrested were blacks and Puerto Ricans and were convicted of the crime. But what most people don't realize is that around that same time, here in Brooklyn around Lincoln Place, about three weeks after, there was a black woman who was raped by three men, beaten to the point where she was crippled, and then thrown off the roof of a four-story building. You do a search on that story and you'll find about three stories, compared to the many, many hundreds that were written about the Central Park jogger case. I think that speaks for itself and the answer would be yes. I hope that that it is less so now than it was then, but I think the answer would still be yes. Diane Cardwell: In our Brooklyn bureau we end up doing a lot of the crime reporting and we are the legs that go into the neighborhood and talk to whoever might say something. I haven't faced that specific question, but my sense is that given the city today, and given Fort Greene today, that a murder in Fort Greene would be a story. It might not be as big a story, and it might not be a B1 or A1 story as a murder in Central Park might be, but I think absolutely it would be a story. Patrick Gallahue: Just to pick up on something mentioned before, in terms of Manhattan and Brooklyn, there is a sense that the newspapers are really interested in power and prominence. If something happens in someplace that is perceived as not being in a prominent place like Central Park - you have someone that says, well, `Where the hell is Fort Greene Park? I've never heard of it.' It doesn't get the same amount of attention. But for better or for worse, Brooklyn specifically as opposed to the other boroughs is becoming more like Manhattan - more gentrified. Its buildings are getting higher. As a consequence of that, there is a lot more interest in Brooklyn. If you remember, a couple years back there were some crimes reported on in Prospect Park that made it seem like there was a crime wave in Prospect Park when in fact, the statistics actually indicated that crime was going down. That's my impression. Moses: Do you think Brooklyn is getting more attention because more reporters are moving to Brooklyn, or more editors? Or the buildings are getting bigger, as Patrick said - getting Manhattanized? Joanne Wasserman: I think Brooklyn is definitely having a moment, whether you agree or not with what's going on in the borough in terms of development … I don't know how many of you watched the Academy Awards and saw how Chris Rock ended the show - "Goodnight Brooklyn." And Hillary Swank winning the Academy Award, she did a very heavy sort of Brooklyn link. Mythical Brooklyn, which I wanted to address when you talked about Pete [Hamill]'s New Yorker piece - over the summer I worked on a series with another reporter on the city's new immigrant middle class which you can find on the [Daily News] Web site, and we analyzed data that we got from a CUNY professor at the graduate school and I find myself a little - after having done that piece - a little sort of annoyed at that concept of "Brooklyn had its moment, and now it's over and Brooklyn's dead." Well, if you look around this room and look around the borough you find that it's not that Brooklyn; it's a changed Brooklyn in terms of who lives here and what the future is. And as the bureau chief, I sort of feel coming off of that piece - off that series or stories -my job is to -- as much as we can, to the degree that we can -- write about that Brooklyn, the new Brooklyn. I feel very solemnly about that. Jimmy Breslin: Two things - One, the poor coverage of crime in Brooklyn comes more often from laziness than anything else. People knew where Brooklyn was. They knew that people were getting killed here, but then you had to take a subway here and you had to walk and climb stairs. In the meantime I could just go to Central Park and write about the rich with a stubbed toe, or a murder. A murder was great. It's better to go where the rich are, because in the newspaper mind, they're better. It's that simple, and as far as a cover story is lacking, I find the main reason is that Brooklyn doesn't have as much money as Manhattan. And the other thing is that if you do go around, and I happen to do this, you find that the housing situation in Brooklyn is criminal. It's a national calamity. Landlords are taking six-family buildings like the ones I went to and taking an apartment out of it so it's now a five-family building. No more rent restrictions. And they can go to Lydia Gonzalez with her three kids in an apartment where she had been paying $850 a month, and they tell her they want $1,500 next month. New rules. And that's going on all over and the Housing Court has got to be filled all the time. The few times recently that I've gone there it was packed. A friend there when I was writing a column for Newsday would say to the hearing officer, "I'm going to write a column about this, Breslin is, so you better be good to my client here, Mrs. Torres, that didn't pay for the last six months." The difference is they'll write about the Manhattan housing problem on the West Side where rent is now $15,000 a month. That's a heavy problem and it must be thought out, discussed and written about. A woman getting thrown out of her apartment in Brooklyn still doesn't make the grade. Howell: You're absolutely right … about housing. If Brooklyn is getting more attention because more editors and reporters are moving here, that's all very true. It's getting gentrified: Prospect Heights and Bed-Stuy. But if that's true maybe there are two Brooklyns. There's one and then there's the other because it's also true that most cases of predatory lending are in Brooklyn - Queens and Brooklyn, but more so in Brooklyn. The Daily News had a piece on this just several weeks ago, as a matter of fact, in the Brooklyn section. That is … one of the most horrific crimes imaginable and it essentially doesn't get prosecuted. … Look at … the amount of suffering people go through because of it. And they tend to be older people, and they tend to be minorities, and they tend to be women. And you see it in Bed-Stuy and you see it in Bushwick and it's a terrible, terrible thing that's going on, and I don't think you see enough written about it. And I think in part because it's very complicated, but I think also for the reasons that Jimmy mentioned and I do think it's one of the most serious issues that we face. Wasserman: … I don't think it's a bad thing that I live in Brooklyn, or that Diane lives in Brooklyn, or that Patrick lives in Brooklyn. We want to write about it; we want people to write about it. I feel a tremendous sense of commitment. And the whole issue about gentrification: I mean, you know what I see now, Jimmy, is not so much the stories about the lady who gets thrown out of her house -- yes that's true. But you know the other thing that's going on is immigrants, new immigrants, are pooling their money as families, or as business relationships, and buying buildings. And that's going on all over the borough too. And yes, does that lead to displacement of somebody? Absolutely. But in the meantime there's something else going on. I don't feel we write about enough beyond crime. Gallahue: Actually yes, I was just about to say that. As a person who runs on plenty of crime, I understand the symbolic worth of covering crime, and the symbolic worth of showing that the victim is worthy of coverage. However, when you go into a neighborhood covering a crime, a lot of times they'll say, "Well why are you only coming here when somebody gets killed?" Or when you go into a good neighborhood, the last thing in the world they want in Park Slope is to see a murder in the newspaper about their neighborhood because they paid a million dollars to live there. In a way I kind of feel like it's a redundant subject, murder. I kind of think the more important stories are coming out of a different place… Breslin: Murder is the main event. It's very important because murder is terrific reading. Let's get down to what a newspaper is. Gallahue: Predatory lending is a very important subject… Breslin: I can write it and they'll read it. I can get something in there. It's very important that Lydia Gonzalez is getting thrown out of her apartment, but if there's a murder she can wait 'til tomorrow. Gallahue: But which is the more important story to a neighborhood? Breslin: Murder. Murder is the main event. Gallahue: To the reader or to the neighborhood? Cardwell: I actually think murder is pretty important to the reader and to the neighborhood. I think that people want to know whether there are murders happening in their neighborhood. It has a lot to do with the way people feel about the neighborhood that they live in and the city that they live in. That being said, I don't think we should be doing murder stories at the expense of predatory lending stories. Moses: I think that point that Patrick made is something I used to hear a lot too when I was Brooklyn editor, and it was something I hated to hear, which is, "Well, you come here only when there's a crime." I wanted at least in my mind to be able to say, "Well, we had a reporter out there last week who wrote about something else." Is that a factor for all of you? When you're covering Brooklyn and trying to figure out what to cover, and there's certain breaking news that you've got to cover? How do you balance that? Wasserman: We cover lots of institutions. … Tomorrow -- I'm not going to get into the details -- we have a big school story. I don't know how many of you are aware of this, but there's a big issue going on -- and it made page one after we broke it -- about the parochial schools across the borough closing. That's a huge story. That affects many, many, many people. The hospitals, the roads, the bridges, I mean, what about all that? Where does that stand next to murder? Cardwell: When I think about the Times, we don't frequently do stories about the one person who's getting kicked out of their apartment. We will tend to do more from like a citywide issue, so you won't get that kind of single dramatic example animating the broader thing. But you know, I've done predatory-lending stories. I did them when I was at City Hall, but I haven't done them as much out of the Brooklyn bureau. Part of it has to do with how papers approach their territory. Wasserman: The bigger problem, just by contrast with the Daily News, is because we've done a predatory-lending story - it's been done in the past - how do we make it new? What's new? Is there more of it? That's more kind of our problem because we're writing everyday, and we're writing everyday about issues in the borough. Howell: I think a way to do it, and it's more a question of space and maybe the Times could do it too, is write about people. Featurize it. Because that issue is so, so important and I was happy to see it in the Daily News, but it was only about 360 words. I think there needs to be more of it, and I think people need to be discussing it. Gallahue: Well, again, how do you take an issue in Fort Greene or somewhere else and make it interesting to someone in Bay Ridge? It's a challenging thing, to take the subject and to show it to be a broader tendency. And the institutions are one way of doing that. Breslin: Paul was kind enough to mention a book, A Short, Sweet Dream. A kid from Mexico came up here and he was working non-union labor, and the building collapsed and the cement kept pouring from the truck downstairs and through the hose and he drowned in cement in the basement. And I was in the newspaper office and they told me this had happened and I jumped. I couldn't wait to get here [to Brooklyn] because the best American novel I ever read was Christ in Concrete, by Pietro Di Donato, about an Italian immigrant worker who drowned in concrete. It's still the best novel, ahead of Steinbeck. So, I ran here and I did it, and I did it based on one kid drowning in concrete in this city who came up here from Mexico. It's going to be a very fine movie. I did very well with it. That happened in Williamsburg, and I think people read about it in Queens. And that was one guy. I don't want to read surveys; give me one throb. Moses: I had spoken to Tom Schroth, and as you [Raymond Schroth] mentioned, he was the last managing editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. And he was telling me about how he would send his reporters to City Hall to basically be ready for whatever was on the agenda for Brooklyn, whether it was creating the civic center that we have downtown, whatever. How is it nowadays with these issues we have in Brooklyn? Whether it's the development we have going on all over the place -- there's a lot of dispute and tension. Is that getting addressed on a citywide basis? In other words, there's a lot of attention in the papers on the West Side Stadium. It's a great story, I've written about it myself. But do you hear about issues bubbling in Brooklyn that are interesting to the two and a half million people who live here but are not getting the citywide attention that they might if Brooklyn were a separate city? Do you see that happening at all? Patrick? Gallahue: Yeah, absolutely. The hard part about a lot of the boroughs now is that the future and the history is being written in zoning. And zoning stories are really hard to write. I want to write about ULURP [Uniform Land Use Review Procedure] and these things that don't mean anything to anybody. A ULURP and an RFP [request for proposals], nobody understands this stuff. But there are ways that … we can write our way into it, and an example of that is the Brooklyn waterfront, the pier 6 through 12 study. I mean the fact that there wasn't more on the last working Brooklyn waterfront that was about to be shuttled out. I mean it was amazing. They had Marlon Brando, it had everything, it was a great story. But it was a really hard one and it didn't get much play in the papers - I mean I saw it in the Brooklyn section. But I thought it belonged more in the news in the main pages… Wasserman: Is this the Ikea thing? Gallahue: No, it was the Pier 6 through 12 study. They put out a study on the best possible use of the working waterfront. It was a tough story; there wasn't enough done on it. Wasserman: … I would never use the word ULURP to tell anyone uptown [in the newspaper's main office] about the story. That's a process story. They don't want to put a process story on the front of the paper, and I'm sort of loath to do them in the [Brooklyn] section. But Ikea is in the process of wanting to mow down a historic section in Red Hook, and we really jumped on that in the section. … But they were not going to take that story up front, although I could have told them about taking it upfront because Ikea's a big, well known chain. Gallahue: And in that case they broke the law. Breslin: A hundred loudmouths with fervor in their eyes go after Wal-mart to stop it. I'm living in Rego Park, I got four kids, I want to shop and save money, I'm barely making it on what I'm earning now because of the prices. And they say, "Oh you can't. It's very bad. It's bad for organized labor. It's bad for the general atmosphere of this city. We must stop this big store." And it's got very bad habits. Yes, it does. But it's got lower prices and my husband doesn't bring home enough money for me to stop worrying about saving money. I think the story was not covered at all. I think they just covered the people complaining about it, who have the money to complain, and never went to the people who need this store. There has to be some way to do it better, and stop worrying about the results of the story. It's none of your business. Write the story and let it take care of itself. Moses: That was a citywide story, the Walmart story. But when you see a story jump from the Brooklyn page the front of the paper, do you see the story get a different buzz? Does it get a different reaction at the front of the paper? How about in Brooklyn? When a Brooklyn story is at the front of the paper does that create more of a reaction in Brooklyn, or is there not much of a difference? Wasserman: That's sort of interesting. We actually get more of a reaction from the Brooklyn pages. Moses: In the Brooklyn pages? Wasserman: People read the pages. People seem to call the Brooklyn office more with all kinds of great stuff. Maybe it's more accessible; the number's on the bottom of the page. Moses: Now, when I was an editor at Newsday, I found that the Brooklyn page was one of the first things to get bumped when they needed space. … Has that happened to you at the News? Wasserman: Well that happened yesterday, actually. None of us minded having a break, but if the Pope had died - not just the Brooklyn pages but all the boroughs. But it's a newspaper; I mean, they need the space for something else. Breslin: The most people live in Brooklyn, therefore the most stories are here, therefore if you're a reporter, you're crazy not to want to work here. Everything happens here in the course of a day. The courts are amazing, the federal court in Brooklyn - absolutely amazing the stuff that happens there. If the paper is doing that at their own peril, their circulation is going nowhere, all of them. And if they don't want to cover where most of the people live and where so much action is going on, and if they'd rather go into Manhattan, let them go and they'll die. Gallahue: I would say one of the reasons why you get more calls to the local section - we don't have one at the Post - there's a different reader for the local papers. People pick up the Daily News and the Post and the Times, and they just go through it and look for something of interest and they go through it pretty quickly. Once they have their local paper that they feel like it speaks to them and for them. They read every single story, top to bottom. And the decision makers I think pick it up and read it more closely ... local decision makers, community board members, city council members and civic leaders … They'll call up and say, "Great job," or "You completely messed up." Moses: Now the Times is really a national paper nowadays, so it's a little different discussion. Do you ever wish there was its own page [for Brooklyn news]? Or would you hate to have that because you would say, "Oh no I'd rather have my stories in …" Cardwell: Most of my stories go in the Metro section, and it's the Metro page, and only two pages make it to the national edition. So the only time those stories get out there is if it's a B1 story. I get tons of emails and letters from people all over the country when I have a Brooklyn B1 feature that's run. But, I mean the day to day Metro stories, I feel that I'm very well read because it's a whole big section. I like being in the mix of people looking for city news as well as people who are looking for Brooklyn news. Moses: This may just be my perception but is the Times doing more local Brooklyn stories -- not the big B1 stories, but the ones inside? Is the Times doing more Brooklyn stories than in the past? Cardwell: We may be; certainly in the past couple years the paper has committed more resources to Brooklyn. Three people in the bureau are doing more general assignment work, one person doing local politics, and then we have a reporter full-time in the federal court. But then of course, large news events intercede and we all get called off to other assignments, and so you know, there's a give and take. Moses: You could all go running out of here any minute. I do realize that. Cardwell: What I was going to say earlier is that the Times is obviously a little different about a lot of things, but one of them things is that, you know, we love ULURP stories. So I have found absolutely no resistance when there's some big or even medium-sized rezoning going on in Brooklyn. There's a lot of interest in that. Moses: I wonder if we could go to the audience for some questions too. Audience member #1, student: I have a question for Patrick. You mentioned the ongoing zoning changes that are changing the face of New York, in your opinion. Isn't it the responsibility of the press, or the reporter, if it's a complicated circumstance or situation, to communicate that… Gallahue: Oh yeah, you're right… Audience member: and the terminology… Gallahue: No, you're right. When I pitched the working waterfront story, it was always Starbucks versus stevedores. Or you could take any number of examples on that - condos versus cargo ships. That was the way it was sold and that was the terminology we used when it was run. Audience member #1: But these two words you used, what were they? Cardwell: ULURP. Moses: Uniform Land Use Review Procedure. Audience member: But do you agree that the reader should still understand what that concept is? Gallahue: Yes, in which case it would be called a land use story. Audience member: But your earlier point was you don't want to push the zoning stories? Gallahue: No, it's that they're harder to push. The Q&A you're going to go through is, okay, it's condos versus cargo ships, the question is how so? How is it working? Well, there's this land use review the city is pondering. And what's a ULURP? It's a Uniform Land Use Review Procedure that's certified by the Department of City Planning and it goes through a whole complicated procedure with City Council and all these things. Well, are the cargo ships ever going to actually get kicked off? And the answer is, well, I don't know. It has to go through this big process. I mean, I wrote the story. I did my job. I wrote the story. Audience member: It's so frustrating that stories like this get such short shrift. They're not elucidated to the point where the reader gets a full understanding, and then it falls off the pages. Moses: I think there's someone over here who wants to ask a question. Prof. Robert Viscusi: I'm Robert Viscusi. I teach here at Brooklyn College. I just want to make an observation. I don't know if anyone can really reply to it. We've had a lot of things about what great jobs all of your papers are doing in Brooklyn, and I don't disagree with that. I just want to say that as someone who teaches at Brooklyn College ( I've been here for over 30 years), someone who lives in Brooklyn, the experience of reading newspapers in New York City is a daily humiliation. Brooklyn is 10th, 15th. We're treated to a continuous display of the rich and powerful of Manhattan in every conceivable way. And this part of Brooklyn is yet another borough from the one that everyone is raving about. This part of Brooklyn never appears in the news at all, unless there's a spectacular murder. Moses: Are you conscious of that in your coverage, that maybe there's a tendency to focus on downtown and the brownstone areas? Gallahue: Yes, to some degree. Moses: Your office is in Bay Ridge, right? Gallahue: Yes, it's in Bay Ridge. But I mean, I can assure you that there are reporters trying hard as hell to get great stories out of any and all neighborhoods, and trying really, really hard to get people interested. They don't always get in the paper, but people are trying. Audience member: I agree with you about the zoning, and I agree with Jimmy that crime is the thing that gets the headlines. Well there's a crime going on right in this very community. They're trying to steal the space we have from our children. I haven't read about it anywhere but in Flatbush Life. Midwood schoolyard - the teachers used to park there - it took us seven years to get the teachers out so that the two elementary schools and the kids in the neighborhood could have a place to play. I moved into this neighborhood in 1955, and my kids all played there. Moses: So what's being done with that land? Audience member: The Board of Education owns it, so we don't even have to go through a ULURP, and they're turning it into a science building. Wasserman: First of all, ma'am, 718-875-4455 is the office of the Daily News and we'd be more than happy to look into that story. Yes, I agree. I sometimes say to people in my office, "I don't want to hear about brownstone Brooklyn anymore. I don't care about brownstone Brooklyn; we have to get beyond brownstone Brooklyn." And it's a challenge that we face. And so the question then becomes how do we find out about it? Do we read the local papers? Yes, we read the local papers. We rely on people who call us. We probably are not as in touch with parts of Brooklyn as we would like to be, but we know it's an issue and we want to get out there and we want to do it. But to a large degree we rely on people to tell us that stuff. And yes, those kinds of disputes are of interest. It might be one of those things we'll take and ask, well what's going on there? Is that part of a trend? Are there other schools across the borough or across the city where that's happening? There's a lot of different ways to cover a story like that. Moses: Father Schroth, can I just ask you, was this an issue for the Eagle as well? Covering a whole borough, did they tend to focus on downtown? Schroth: Well, I use that expression that comes from the 19th century: The Hester family said, "We are a class newspaper," which actually meant very small, but it was read by classy people. So they were as guilty in their own way at that time. They were quite unaware of the population shift, the arrival of immigrants. They were above all that. Now, I'd say when Frank came around, they were much more aware of it, but by that time it was too late. They changed the format of the paper, and remember that made it more sensational, more like the New York tabloids. There was a plan by one of the fellows whose name was Bob Grannis who said, "We'll come back as a tabloid. We'll write for the little guys. We'll have a page in Spanish." But by then it was too late. Prof. Joseph Dorinson: Hi, I'm from LIU. Jimmy Breslin was educated there; Ron Howell was a former colleague there. Come back Ron, we need you. My problem is identity, and that might explain the demise of the Eagle. You have so many different Brooklyns. You have Jewish Brooklyn. You have Italian Brooklyn. You have African-American Brooklyn. You have Hispanic Brooklyn. That's why a great tragedy occurred when the Dodgers left. It gave us some coherence. Recently, the Brooklyn Paramount, where I teach, LIU was closing, at least the buildings. Every major newspaper, I'm not sure if the Post covered it, but every newspaper and TV station came to witness the disappearance of this great national treasure. Now, what can you do to keep this institution alive? The Brooklyn Paramount, where black youngsters and white youngsters learned to live, sing and dance with each other, and there's little or no mention of this important fact. I remember the Brooklyn Paramount with great affection, but how do we get the young people here, the disaffected, the people who know hip hop and the newer culture to come back to Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Breslin: Let me just say one thing about the Brooklyn Dodgers. The attendance for the last two years they were in Brooklyn was so low, I would have pulled them out a year before O'Malley did. The people didn't care. That's a myth that the people were crying, "The Dodgers left. Our hearts are broken." They never cared when they were here. Audience member: We talk about all the communities we have, and children are a very important community. And my question goes to Father Schroth: … You said good business and public service are the same thing, and that's kind of the Brooklyn Eagle's phrase. As educators, we're always telling kids to connect to text, self and world, and what can newspapers do, and I'm asking all of you, what can newspapers do to provide a place for kids to connect to your text. And if we have 365 days in a year and however many schools, can each school have a page in your paper? And that, to me, goes back to Father Schroth - good business and public service are the same thing. I think newspapers can provide help with illiteracy, helping kids connect to text. That's the way you get readership, and I think that's important, so I hope newspapers can do that. Breslin: That's why I pay taxes, for them to learn to read. The newspaper is not a social instrument. Cardwell: Institutionally, I know that we do a lot. As far as turning pages over to the schools? That, as Patrick said, is beyond by pay scale. Wasserman: I hate to be disrespectful, but I agree rather strongly with my colleague here. We're not social workers, and no, we're not going to turn over one page of the newspaper to one school everyday. It's not going to happen. Everybody up here is very serious and committed to what we do, but we're not social workers. On the other hand I think we all are very serious about something I was taught, which is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. And if that means writing stories about schools that don't work or kids who aren't being taught how to read or aren't being allowed to go to the better schools, then yes, that we are more than willing to do. Our job is to show and highlight and to shine light on the problem. Howell: In fact, Newsday used to do a lot of that. They had a Kidsday page and reporters used to like to do that, to break things down and make them elemental, but unfortunately, Brooklyn isn't really in the province of Newsday anymore. Prof. Eric Alterman: I guess what I'm wondering from this discussion, aside from the Dodgers that were here once, Walt Whitman lived here, what's so different about Brooklyn? In other words, all the trends we're talking about are taking place all across the country, and particularly with regard to media it's much easier to get a story about J.Lo on the front page of the Post or the Daily News as it is to get a story about some anonymous person who is much more worthy of coverage according to all of our news judgment. The newspapers are becoming more and more tabloid size, they are becoming less and less important in the scheme of the media companies that own them. Fewer and fewer media companies are owned by people who have any actual interest in news at all, and naturally the kinds of stories that we're talking about are going to get forced out. But the question is that aside from the fact that everyone who lives in Brooklyn finds it to be an amazing place, which I agree it is, what's different about Brooklyn? In other words, this discussion could be taking place in any community across the country that is in the shadow of much larger news-making communities as Manhattan is to Brooklyn. That sort of relationship exists all over the country and all over the world. What makes Brooklyn so special that we're lamenting that these little stories, in terms of the national interest, are not getting the coverage we would like to see them get. Isn't that the way of world more and more as the media is going? Moses: I would go back to that editorial that Father Schroth read where he said, the Eagle's last editorial from 1955. They said Brooklyn would be the largest community in the country without a voice of its own. I think that would be the Eagle's answer. But Jimmy? Breslin: These computers, they have enough stuff there online to make newspapers irrelevant mostly, on many days, and as far as journalism goes, the center cannot hold against this. This is completely new. It's pouring out, a lot of it is absolutely excellent. And stories about Brooklyn would be talked about all over the place. I don't think there are any rules that mean anything anymore. It's going to take a while to see what's going on. Kids come home from school and turn it on - my grandchildren do;I don't have one. And I read it and I'm amazed. And you can get a big story about Brooklyn - a ULURP story - on the Internet and it'll be talked about. I hear more people mention to me they read something on the Internet that they do in the newspapers. Gallahue: I'm not trying to lament that Brooklyn isn't getting the coverage that it should be getting. We're talking about the way Brooklyn is covered. Keith Zackowitz, student: I'm curious as to how much members of the panel think corporate ownership of the newspapers that are now covering Brooklyn affects the quantity and the quality of Brooklyn stories that make it into these daily newspapers. I don't think anyone has to question the valiant efforts being made by journalists who are covering, but more on how much these stories are knocked down by budgetary concerns by the editors or by how many reporters are actually placed to cover, as opposed to something 50 years ago where it was a locally owned paper in Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Eagle. Now we have the Post owned by an Australian and the Daily News owned by a corporation outside. Wasserman: No, it's owned by one guy. Moses: One well off guy. Schroth: I just thought of something else in response to Eric's point there. This book came out in the 70s called Welcome to Brooklyn: Fourth Largest City in America. And you say, well, if we're the fourth largest city in America it ought to have an intellectual center. A voice that would be some sort of media outlet like a newspaper. And I never really thought of this before, but with consolidation, they'd be absorbed into the shadow of New York. And there are other cities across the country, Minneapolis - St. Paul, right? Locally they are in the same place, but they have separate identities. They're separate cities because each one has a focal point of its own. But Brooklyn has never had a focal point that would be the intellectual center. Breslin: Minneapolis and St. Paul don't have a 2 train running back and forth to make it one city. Howell: In response to Professor Alterman's question: It was interesting because it threw me off … But I guess I'm making the assumption that people just kind of feel differently about Brooklyn. There's that sense of nostalgia and history that people have about Brooklyn that's different about the other boroughs. And if I try to think of something tangible, I'm not sure, but maybe because of its position on the harbor, so many families came to symbolize what America was in the mid-20th century, the Italians, the Jews, and so forth, and that they came through Brooklyn so maybe that's part of it. But I do have that sort of feeling that Brooklyn is different, and we did have the Eagle. Audience member: What I'm holding here is today's Brooklyn Eagle… Moses: Yes, we have the publisher here. I've been meaning to introduce him. Audience member: And why I'm here is that when I read notices in newspapers about this conference, it was all about a newspaper that died in 1955. I read the Eagle everyday; I'm a devoted reader. I think the answers to some of these questions about where to you get the info for some of these stories about Brooklyn, about ULURP, zoning, land use - you get them from this newspaper. Easter is approaching, you think "resurrection." This paper has been resurrected for I don't know how many years. The distribution could be improved, but I would say that Brooklyn is very rich in community newspapers of excellent quality. Moses: I should introduce to you Dozier Hasty who is here, who is the publisher of the newspaper you're holding. You traced you history back to the Brooklyn Eagle, the paper we're talking about here, correct? Hasty: Some insights might be gained by asking, say Patrick, the difference between going from a very good weekly Brooklyn paper and then going to the Post, to tell us the difference he felt in terms of the intensity that he felt being involved locally at the Brooklyn paper versus the Post. I think there are two different worlds here and two different purposes being served. His experience may shed some light on the topic we're discussing, because I feel that coverage is still very much alive in Brooklyn. It's just spread out and diffused a great deal. Moses: Interesting point. Gallahue: I guess it's because you never have to ask yourself, "Why is it important?" at a community paper. Because if you're at a very local community paper in Park Slope, anything that happens in Park Slope is of interest to Park Slope. If a store closes down, what's going to come up in its place? It's very interesting. The evolution of 7th Avenue or 5th Avenue in Park Slope is not going to be of much interest to the rest of the city. And because you're so plugged in to the community board, local activists - you really have a great knowledge of what matters to each block, each neighborhood. You really get an incredibly intimate knowledge of the area. And at a city daily, you really have to recognize how that story is going to transfer outside the of the area, or how that's going to become a throb as Jimmy said, that could be of interest to the rest of the city. And yeah, your story about Eduardo Gutierrez was great. When I was reading about Eduardo Gutierrez, I didn't feel like I was just reading about one guy who died in Williamsburg. It really was a throb of immigrant abuse in the city and a hierarchy of ethnicities. Moses: I'm afraid that's all we have time for, I'm sorry to say. It's clear there's a lot more to be said on the subject. Thank you all very much. |