New York’s newspaper problem

A New York moment:

Today the sight of a person reading a print newspaper is an oddity—but in New York City, the subways and buses are still packed every day with people reading the local tabloids, the New York Post and the New York Daily News. These tabloids are city institutions: The Daily News once had the largest circulation of any paper in the country.

But, like many local news organizations losing ad revenue to companies like Google, the paper’s revenues have been declining. On Monday Tronc, a media conglomerate that bought the Daily News last year, laid off half of the paper’s editorial staff, including the editor in chief.

New York’s government leaders sensed public outrage toward the layoffs and responded characteristically. Mayor Bill de Blasio said Tronc’s decision was “greedy” and that the company should get out of the journalism business in New York. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Tronc should have asked the state for help, adding that “these layoffs were made without notifying the state.” Cuomo has a history of handing out state money to pet industries. Most recently the state poured $15 million into a movie studio that failed and just sold for $1.

The Daily News was my first journalism gig, and I remember the newsroom was full of frantic activity, even well after hours. I learned a lot from my editor there in a short time. In 2008 I was reporting on county government and education at The Indianapolis Star, and there I watched the newsroom of a great local paper go through major layoffs.

After I left, no one was there to cover the school board meetings I covered. I often think about how dozens of reporters would be covering the same event in Washington, D.C., while no one was covering that school board meeting in Indiana.

The Daily News has its share of tabloid sleaziness, but it won a Pulitzer Prize last year for its local reporting on the abuse of eviction rules. With the removal of experienced reporters and the demand for website clicks, the local investigations will disappear and the sleaze factor will likely go up.

Worth your time:

The story of the Vermont town that hid Alexander Solzhenitsyn for 20 years, after the KGB tried to assassinate him and then the Soviet Union stripped him of his citizenship. Children in town apparently knew to give any outsiders the wrong directions to Solzhenitsyn’s house.

This week I learned:

While the debate about President Donald Trump’s tariffs rages in the United States, the European Union and Japan just signed a major trade deal removing almost all tariffs. How odd for the EU, and not the United States, to be moving in the direction of free trade!

A court case you might not know about:

A man saw the 2011 movie Drive and was so mad about how the film differed from the trailer that he sued under consumer protection laws. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected his lawsuit entirely.

Culture I am consuming:

Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s cookbook, Jerusalem.

Email me with tips, story ideas, and feedback at ebelz@wng.org.