Who’s Left Covering Brooklyn With the Big Newspapers in Retreat?
Liena Zagare had always seen them around the neighborhood. They were at the bus stop, at the corner food mart, and all around Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park. In one way or another, they were part of the community.
But then, last April, Zagare received a distressed message from a neighbor, alerting her that something seemed terribly wrong: “Where have all the crazy people gone?” Zagare knew who her tipster meant and went looking for answers.
“They were neighborhood characters,” Zagare told me. “I saw them in the neighborhood [while] walking the dog. Most of them had mental disorders. Many had been there for a decade or more.” The characters in question lived at the Park Manor Home for Adults, an assisted-living facility at 570 Coney Island Avenue, between Beverley Road and Lewis Place, just two blocks from the cluttered newsroom where Zagare works as the editor and publisher of a small local-news website called Bklyner.
There’s no shortage of personality in the melting-pot neighborhood. Bklyner sits perched above a bar, sandwiched between a diner and a mosque, across the street from a car dealership.
When she saw the text, Zagare took a short walk down the street to the adult home to see for herself. The neighbor was right. The front grates were lowered and padlocked. The “usual parade” of residents hadn’t been seen for weeks, Bklyner reported soon after.
But Zagare wanted to know what had transpired, why an institution was shuttered, how a vulnerable segment of the community had disappeared practically overnight. Finding out was even harder than she thought.
Zagare’s vantage point at Bklyner puts her very much on the front lines of local-news reporting in Brooklyn. With 2.6 million people, the borough would be the fourth-largest city in America—and with only four reporters on her staff, it’s frightening. “I am a little scared about what is not getting covered just because there [are] so few people covering anything in Brooklyn,” she said. “You hardly ever ran into another reporter at a meeting. We try our best to keep track of what’s going on, but we’re very small. And at the same time we’re one of the largest [outlets] around.”
When the New York Daily News laid off half of its in late July, by the city’s great daily newspapers was more or less complete. . At the end of August, the legendary alternative weekly publication online—it had closed its print operation last year. Digital news organizations have proved equally vulnerable, because sustainable ad revenues online have been almost as elusive as rapidly disappearing print advertising.
