America's Watchdog Is Dying

New York City and its environs are home to 20 million people, Wall Street, Broadway, the fashion and media industries. And yet news organizations operating in this singular metropolis barely have enough reporters to cover the Bronx or Queens.

On Monday, the New York Daily News, one of the city’s three daily newspapers, said it would slash its news staff in half, a draconian cut that continues the long, slow bleeding of newspapers and reduces still further the amount of local news coverage in the nation’s largest city.

According to an article by Paul Farhi in The Washington Post, the story is largely the same across the United States as publishers have gradually pared their staffs amid the ongoing economic tumult wrought by the digital delivery of news and information. The news industry has shriveled far faster than coal mining or heavy manufacturing, as exhaustively documented by the news industry itself. Employment in newspapers alone has sunk by more than half since the beginning of this century, tumbling from 424,000 people to 183,300 in mid-2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The colorful Daily News, long known for its attention-grabbing covers and headlines, employed 400 journalists when investigative reporter Tom Robbins started there in 1988, with bureaus scattered throughout the city’s boroughs. At its peak, it published about 3 million copies a day.

With its latest retreat, the money-losing tabloid will have a newsroom staff of just 45, according to people at the paper.

The New York Times wouldn’t reveal how many reporters it devotes to metropolitan coverage, but the Columbia Journalism Review said it has shrunk from about 90 people a decade ago to about 40 today. The Wall Street Journal cut back its once-ambitious Greater New York section in 2016, chopping it from six pages to two. The New York Post, which like the Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., has been a perpetual money-loser.

“It’s astonishing that this is happening in the media capital of America,” said Robbins, now a journalist in residence at City University of New York. “Local news is a direct link between a community’s safety and preservation, whether it’s putting a spotlight on the need for a new stoplight on the corner or on a corrupt city council person. We don’t have the legs to do that in New York anymore. The community doesn’t have the watchdogs it once had.”