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The virus, the news, and New York City

In early January, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism published my report, “Media Mecca or News
Desert?” Covering Local News in New York City,” which examined how citywide and hyperlocal news
organizations allocate diminishing editorial resources, and the challenges they face filling gaps in
coverage. In the weeks and months following publication, two of my interview subjects left their jobs as
editors of community and ethnic media outlets to join the staffs of well-funded, citywide non-profit
news organizations. Another two, who helmed the digital editions of daily newspapers, were laid off. A
few publications received new grants that would allow them to expand their reporting capabilities.

And then covid-19 hit.

Since then, nearly every aspect of the newsroom dynamics I had described, like so much of our lives, has
been transformed. New York’s journalists are learning to report while socially distancing, and, in some
cases, are putting their lives at risk to cover what has become the epicenter of the global pandemic.

One of the main findings from my previous report was that health and healthcare issues were going
underreported. Particularly lacking, several newsroom leaders noted, was coverage of a seemingly niche
topic: the municipal hospital system. Now, every reporter has become a health reporter. “New York
used to be a city filled with stories,” began a recent New York Times magazine piece about the city’s
municipal hospital system. “Today it is a city with a single story: its hospitals.”

Despite understaffed newsrooms, many editors noted in the previous report the importance of fielding
reporters to attend city council and community board meetings, where officials are questioned and
sources are cultivated in hallways. In the era of governance via Zoom, it is unclear when those
opportunities will return. Given the severity of the current financial crisis, it is even less clear how many
outlets will be around to cover them when they do. With shrinking access and decreasing numbers, the
work of journalists to hold the powerful accountable may become even harder.

Fourteen media outlets featured in the previous report, as well as four additional news organizations,
spoke to me in March and April about how they’ve navigated these and other challenges of covering
the covid-19 epidemic in New York City. While providing only a snapshot of the city’s media landscape,
the interviewed media professionals painted a vivid portrait of local news organizations, many of whom
were already struggling, adapting to cover an unparalleled crisis.

Key Findings

1. All the interviewed news outlets are now operating remotely, with a minority still engaging in in-
person reporting. The better-resourced news outlets are providing their staff with some level of
PPE and several have strict guidelines about approving field reporting. For many of the small
community outlets, these decisions are being made based on the discretion of the few, or sole
employees, who are responsible for protecting themselves.

2. The most disruptive element of remote work for the digital and print outlets has been balancing
the demands of a 24/7 breaking news story along with parenting responsibilities. The move to
remote operations has been far more challenging for the broadcast organizations, who over the
course of several weeks have undergone an unprecedented experiment in establishing the
infrastructure for remote radio and TV newsrooms.

3. All the interviewed news outlets have realigned their editorial strategies to cover covid-19. With
few exceptions, most newsrooms have abandoned all non-COVID related coverage.

4. In some cases, such as with education, real estate and transportation, beats and editorial
mandates are being filtered through the lens of covid-19. In others, reporters are being
reassigned to cover the public health and ensuing financial crisis. The reassigned reporters come
from beats that are generating less news, ranging from sports and arts, to energy and the
environment and political campaigns.

5. Many of the interviewed news outlets said that a lack of past coverage of healthcare issues and
the municipal hospital system, and the resulting deficit in institutional knowledge and sourcing,
have complicated coverage of covid-19.

6. Many of the interviewed news outlets are concerned about the impact of social distancing on
accountability reporting. Besides the immediate frustration about lack of access to New York
City hospitals, many journalists and editors said their ability to cover government actions is
limited when those activities are held virtually.  Conversely, some reporters complained about
Governor Cuomo’s insistence on maintaining in-person press conferences, rather than virtual
ones, like Mayor de Blasio. Almost none of the interviewees are attending Cuomo’s press
conferences for safety reasons and said they are missing a crucial opportunity to interrogate the
Governor’s statements.

7. Beyond public-facing events, there was concern that city and state politicians are using the crisis
to deny the public information about important political negotiations, like the state budget or
the use of stimulus funds. They worry that this lack of transparency could last after the crisis
ends. 

8. Despite an initial dramatic increase in traffic, most of the interviewed outlets were concerned
about the impact of the financial crisis on local news. Many of the bigger commercial outlets
that depend on advertising have already instituted layoffs or furloughs. The community and
ethnic commercial outlets said they were only surviving thanks to city government advertising
related to covid-19 or the census. Some of these smaller outlets also said they were ineligible for
the Paycheck Protection Program because they only work with freelancers.

9. Some of the community and ethnic media outlets have turned to grants or fellowships from
programs like the Facebook Journalism Project and Report for America. In comparison to when
the previous report was published, those funds are now reaching some of the smaller outlets
that were previously unfamiliar with these grantmaking circles. Still, some of the smaller news
outlets interviewed worry about being left out of any programs designed to help local news
during the coronavirus.

10. Without the dependence on advertising revenue, non-profit news organizations have been
more shielded thus far from the financial fallout of covid-19. They are all bracing, however, for
eventual impact. On the immediate horizon is the cancellation of fundraising galas and
reductions to corporate sponsorship programs and donations from wealthy individuals. In the
medium-to-long term, there is significant concern about how the crisis will impact the financial
activities and grantmaking priorities of philanthropic foundations. Many of the interviewed
workers at nonprofit outlets said they hesitated originally to send out fundraising appeals tied to
the covid-19 crisis, for fear of appearing opportunistic. Eventually, they all did so, deciding it was
in line with the missions of their organizations.

11. Whether from a financial or an editorial perspective, all of the interviewed news outlets agreed
the most challenging aspect of the covid-19 epidemic was not knowing when or how it might
end. Journalists who had covered past crises in New York City recommended not losing sight of
the long term or less obvious stories while getting bogged down in day-to-day reporting.

12. To achieve the previous goal, there is an opportunity for far more collaboration between news
outlets. While collaboration exists, mostly between nonprofit organizations, there is still little
evidence of more far-reaching cooperation between citywide organizations with hyperlocal,
community and ethnic news outlets. Citywide organizations could benefit greatly from the
knowledge of the organizations with deep ties to local and ethnic communities, many of whom
have been the worst hit by the covid-19 crisis.

Abandoning the newsroom 

Like many New Yorkers, all of the journalists and editors interviewed for this piece are now working
remotely from their homes. While many missed their colleagues and the atmosphere of the newsroom,
the majority of the journalists with print and digital news outlets said the move to remote work was not
terribly disruptive to basic operations. Most have adapted to Slack chats and Zoom meetings, and had
already performed remote work in some capacity, or, at a few smaller organizations, worked from home
entirely. Garry Pierre-Pierre, founder and Editor-in-Chief of the English-language, Brooklyn-based, online
newspaper The Haitian Times, said that, thanks to the implementation of regular virtual meetings and
conference calls, communication between him and his entirely freelance staff had actually improved.

Broadcast media, however, faces more significant logistical challenges. “Everything takes twice as long
to do and execute,” said Sean Bowditch, acting news director of public radio station WNYC. “It has just
required another level of communication and coordination that we have never had to engage in
before,” he said. “We have done more in the last three weeks operationally, technologically, than we
have done perhaps in the last two years.”

At the cable news channel NY1, the  newsroom emptied in stages. First, said Dan Ronayne, a senior
executive for the channel group, Spectrum News, “We identified the people who could transmit their
content back from the field without ever stepping foot in the newsroom—reporters, MMJ [multimedia
journalists] and truck operators.” From there, he said, they extracted their operations team from the
newsroom, facilitated by a system that allows remote access to their servers and infrastructure. “We
began to do master control and ingest from the field [capturing and transferring video content to a
technical hub prior to transmission], and within two or three weeks we had a newsroom that was down
from about 250 people to one with six or seven people in it at any time,” he said. The last step was
transitioning anchors to remote work, he said, “and as of today there were maybe four people in the
newsroom.”
The work of the operations team in building the “technical infrastructure for us to do television remotely
has been remarkable,” said Helen Swenson, the Vice President of Content at NY1. “But this has been the
most challenging experience of my career,” she said. The news team has to meet the demands of
covering a major story but without “the systems you are used to having,” she said. “You have to learn
how to do your job in a completely different way overnight.”

Reporting while social distancing 

The majority of the interviewed news outlets are conducting all of their reporting remotely, either
online or on the phone. “There’s no reason at the moment to make people go out,” said Adam Nichols,
managing editor for the New York City vertical of Patch, a local news and community information
website. “I don’t think the subjects of the interviews want that to happen. I certainly don’t want that to
happen and the reporters don’t want it to happen,” he said.

Several news outlets, however, said that some reporting was still occurring in person. POLITICO New
York, the New York State vertical of the politics and policy news website, has  one reporter who regularly
attends Governor Andrew Cuomo’s press conferences. Other organizations said in-person reporting was
based on the comfort level of the reporters, or only allowed after approval by senior management.

“You step foot outside your house for professional reasons, we need to know about it,” said Bowditch,
of WNYC. “Every field assignment has to be pre-approved, and we have been very selective about what
field reporting we let go forward.” As examples of that work, Jen Chung, founder and executive editor of
the WNYC-owned Gothamist, cited reporting inside a Brooklyn hospital scrambling to treat covid-
19 patients by journalist Gwynne Hogan. Hogan also reported from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where
companies have pivoted to produce PPE.

Bowditch and Chung said that, at the advice of Jill Jackson, news director of Seattle public radio station
KUOW, they had mailed “grab bags” to all of their reporters that included masks, gloves, hand sanitizer,
and a medical gown. Ronayne of NY1 said that, while interviews are conducted mostly remotely, there is
still on-scene reporting happening every day. Field crews are outfitted with masks and gloves, he said,
and use boom mikes when necessary so as to keep a distance from people.

For many smaller community and ethnic media outlets, in-person reporting was happening at their own
discretion and without the luxury of a “grab bag” or other necessary safety equipment. Javier Castaño,
the founder and editor of Queens Latino, a Spanish-language news website with a monthly print edition,
said that he and his wife, with whom he runs the publication, occasionally venture outside to talk to
people or take pictures. But many of their regular freelance reporters were staying home out of fear.

“Maybe the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal is able to implement safety protocols for their
reporters and photographers,” Castaño said. “But we are on our own here in Queens, which is basically
ground zero for the Coronavirus…we don’t have the resources to buy masks or gloves, or even know
how to safely interview a person. But this is a story we need to tell.”

Personal safety was the principal concern for many community and ethnic media outlets. “I’m just trying
to keep my people healthy,” said Liena Zagare, editor and publisher of the daily Brooklyn-wide news
website BKLYNER. If either she or her one staff reporter fell sick, she said, the publication is “done for.”
Carl Glassman, editor and sole editorial employee of the Lower Manhattan newspaper-turned-
website The Tribeca Trib, said that while he has gone out occasionally to photograph, he’s been
frustrated by his inability to do the kind of interviewing and frontline reporting that characterized his
coverage of past crises, like 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy. “I have asthma and I’m 71 years old,” he said.
“My wife is scared to death of me going around outside. I can’t get to the… most important stories right
now. It’s really hard not to be able to report on the human toll of this on people…and be the kind of
reporter that I wish I could be right now.”

While editors at publications that regularly field reporters to war zones might be used to worrying about
and planning for the physical safety of their staff, this was new territory for Ben Max, Executive Editor of
the Gotham Gazette, a digital non-profit news outlet that specializes in  wonky coverage of local politics
and policy. And while the mechanics of newsgathering may not be so difficult remotely, Max said that
his new at-home parenting responsibilities have greatly disrupted his news organization’s workflow. “My
reporters are getting a lot more late-night edits than they’re used to,” he said.

Chung of the Gothamist agreed with Max, noting that, besides all the other logistical and editorial
challenges, “we are trying to remote-teach our kids.” She said that protecting her staff’s mental health
and taking measures to prevent burnout had become a priority. Editors across the interviewed
newsrooms echoed these concerns. After the initial chaos and 24/7 coverage of the first weeks of the
crisis, several editors said they began implementing reporter rotations, assigned days off and regular
“check ins” to discuss personal wellbeing.

The only other time I remember waiting like this was when I was a teenager and the Soviet Union was
falling apart. … [and] we were just waiting for the tanks to come in.
—Liena Zagare, BKLYNER, on her childhood in Latvia

For news outlets that are part of wider networks, the best practices and advice they received from
colleagues in West Coast markets who experienced a covid-19 outbreak before New York, have been
crucial. These New York City organizations have then, in turn, they said, passed on the same tips to their
sister outlets in cities that are experiencing later waves of outbreaks.

Bowditch and Ronayne mentioned the safety and logistical advice that was shared between the network
of public radio stations and Spectrum News-owned television channels, respectively. Others have shared
editorial guidance. Amy Plitt, editor of the New York section of the real estate and city life
website Curbed, said that her colleagues at Curbed San Francisco, where the country’s earliest shelter in
place rule was instituted, explained to editors in other cities the implications of that order. In turn, Plitt
said, her team had been able to provide colleagues elsewhere with guidance on how to cover news
about renters’ and tenants’ rights movements, many of which had originated in New York.

At Patch, Nicols said he and editors from the site’s network of local newsrooms had created a Slack
channel dedicated to the virus, where they could share ideas, resources and contacts. He said they also
drafted a national style guide for coverage of the virus.

At the nonprofit education news website Chalkbeat, journalists and editors across the organization’s
seven geographic markets also immediately created a dedicated Slack channel, according to Carrie
Melago, managing editor for local news. In the channel they worked together to create an editorial
boilerplate (should they call it the novel coronavirus? covid-19?) and guidance for sensitive issues like
how to photographically illustrate virus-related stories (should they show people wearing masks? Avoid
using stereotypical photographs of Chinatown?).

As school districts closed across the country, the outlet developed a nation-wide plan to cover remote
learning. They were “falling like dominoes, ” Melago said, “but whenever one happened, we were able
to say ‘okay, here’s how we’re going to handle it.’”

Shifting beats, reallocating resources and following the story 

In my previous report, newsroom leaders discussed the ways in which, with limited resources, they
prioritized and defined beats and differentiated themselves from their competition, and where they saw
gaps in coverage. Many of these distinctions and strategies have vanished as all newsrooms, no matter
their size or editorial focus, grapple with covering one of the most significant and wide-ranging stories of
our lifetime.

“Our DNA has been to fill the gaps—whenever everybody is talking about one thing, to be talking about
something else and to try to draw attention to what’s not in the spotlight,” said Jarrett Murphy,
Executive Editor of the nonprofit news organization City Limits. “But we have abandoned that strategy
now. We are all COVID, all the time,” he said. “There’s no reason to be talking about anything else and
it’s very difficult to be reporting on anything else. And the story is so sprawling.”

With very few exceptions, all of the interviewed newsroom workers said they had set aside all other
areas of coverage and were now exclusively reporting on covid-19. Adam Nichols of Patch said he had
assigned his one journalist who covers citywide issues to report major breaking stories from state and
city government officials. The rest of his six-person editorial team are “neighborhood reporters,”
covering specific geographic areas.

“I want to keep the neighborhood focus, because that’s the core of our business,” Nichols said. “But of
course there is very little appetite for any stories that aren’t coronavirus-related anymore,” he said. “We
are not covering as much of the real hyperlocal stuff at the moment because we are so busy with the
health stuff, which I think is the same for every news organization in the city right now.”

Due to the expansive nature of the story, many reporters at citywide outlets are covering how the crisis
is affecting their previously defined beats, such as education or transportation. Others, who covered
beats now generating less news, like sports or culture, have been reassigned to help cover the epidemic.
For POLITICO NY, beats like education, real estate, and transportation, are producing ample coverage,
according to Angela Greiling Keane, deputy managing editor and editorial director for POLITICO’s US
states and Canada coverage. But some of the reporters covering energy, the environment, and now
mostly dormant political campaigns (a staple of the outlet’s coverage) have been repurposed to help out
with covid-19-related and breaking news, she said.

Some editors said they had restructured their newsroom completely. In my previous report, WNYC’s
former vice president for news, Jim Schachter, said the radio station focused its efforts on specific
investigative beats like immigration courts, and surveillance and community relations issues within the
NYPD. Now, said current acting news director Sean Bowditch, the station has been “organized around
three main topic areas for the past couple weeks: How do we deliver healthcare in the middle of a
pandemic; the unprecedented experiment of trying to educate millions of children remotely; and jobs
and the economy. We have reassigned all reporters to these three topics and have basically said ‘You
weren’t a health or economic reporter before, but now you are: go.’”

For single-subject newsrooms, or media outlets with a particular area of focus, that has meant filtering
their editorial mandates through the lens of covid-19. The Queens Daily Eagle, a borough-wide daily
print newspaper that focuses on the local criminal justice system, has covered the covid-19 outbreak
inside the city’s only private jail, the process of moving to virtual arraignments in civil courts, and
tracking exposure to a Queens Supreme Court judge who tested positive for covid-19.

City Limits and Gotham Gazette, both citywide nonprofits that focus on policy, have mostly eschewed
breaking news in favor of deeper analysis. Murphy of City Limits said his outlet was primarily covering
“how the most vulnerable are being affected. So, while we have obviously listened to the Governor and
the Mayor’s press conferences and we’ve done some of that kind of general stuff, we have focused a lot
on the jail population and senior citizens and the homeless shelters, public housing, undocumented
immigrants.”

Max, of the Gotham Gazette, said his staff was trying to find undercovered stories, like ones related to
domestic violence or New York state and city’s lack of an official ventilator triage policy. One challenge,
Max said, was that with conditions changing so quickly, even in-depth pieces were quickly becoming
outdated, requiring him to institute new rules about updating published material.

Chalkbeat, according to Melago, found themselves racing to cover a breaking news story—an infrequent
occurrence for the outlet—as cities across the country dithered about closing school districts. The
outlet’s first story about the virus appeared on February 26 with the headline “No immediate plans to
close New York City schools as coronavirus threat escalates, officials say,” which, Melago said, “is sort of
amusing in retrospect.”

At the time of the article’s publication, Melago said, the outlet received some pushback from readers
who questioned whether the headline was overblown and, by elevating what seemed to be a non-
existent threat, might cause undue panic. Weeks later, Melago said, reporters were monitoring
government officials’ statements around the clock, waiting for the imminent announcement of school
closure.

Since then, Chalkbeat has transitioned away from breaking news to more analytical and investigative
pieces, examining the patchwork roll-out of remote schooling. Education reporting, Melago said, usually
has a normal cadence structured in large part around annual events like student testing, teacher
evaluations and the release of related data. “That’s all been scrapped,” she said. It went from being a
story “we were keeping track of,” to becoming weeks later, “literally the story, even for a subject-
specific place like us.”

At Curbed NY, Plitt said her newsroom adjusted coverage to examine covid-19’s effects on the real
estate industry, the moratorium on non-essential construction and evictions, and the tenants’ rights
movement. Other articles explained how to move homes or buy a house during the epidemic, and
looked at how narrow sidewalks impede social distancing.

Curbed was one of the few publications interviewed for this research to say it was maintaining non-
COVID-related coverage, balancing real estate listings and fluffy interior design pieces with the
Coronavirus-focused explainers and deep dives. “We put a call out to our readers recently,” Plitt said.
“And we asked them, ‘what do you want to see from us in this time? How can we best serve you? And
interestingly, a lot of people responded, ‘your coverage of coronavirus has been great, but we still want
the listings. We still want to see what’s available on the market. We still want to have the beautiful
homes to look at,’ because I think everybody needs a little bit of escapism,” she said. “That being said…
I’m anticipating there could be a point where nobody’s listing homes anymore, and we have to figure
out what that’s going to look like for us.”

A handful of the community and ethnic outlets are maintaining some coverage of the 2020 census, but
otherwise said they had pivoted to covering exclusively how the covid-19 crisis was affecting their
communities. BKLYNER has published a series of round-ups of local restaurants open for delivery in
neighborhoods throughout the borough, and a story on the difficulty of observing Jewish and
Muslim burial traditions during an epidemic. Both Castaño of Queens Latino, and Roberto Lacayo, news
director of NY1 Noticias, the Spanish-language sister channel to NY1, said they were focused on
providing guides to available health and financial resources for Spanish-speaking immigrant groups.

All of these smaller organizations said they were publishing obituaries of members of their communities
who had died from covid-19. Glassman, of the Tribeca Trib, said obituaries were one of the ways in
which he felt his outlet was serving a real purpose. Most of his coverage of the crisis was taking the form
of a running set of daily briefs, rather than stand-alone stories, which he said has been the only way to
handle the deluge of news. One exception, he said, was a long obituary for a beloved local restaurant
owner, which inspired an outpouring of responses and personal recollections of the man from residents.
“It showed that, even under these kinds of circumstances, we can do something that’s valuable … and
serves a purpose” for the community, he said.

Vania André, former editor-in-chief and current board member of The Haitian Times, said the paper was
“putting a face to Haitian healthcare professionals who are on the frontline.” As Pierre-Pierre, the
paper’s founder and current editor-in-chief, explained, “the Haitian community is overrepresented in
the healthcare industry, from home health aides to nursing assistants, registered nurses, surgeons and
everything in between, so their exposure is tenfold. That’s in addition to underlying health issues like
high blood pressure, diabetes and other respiratory illnesses that dominate the Haitian community,” he
said. “We are a very vulnerable group so there is a lot of attention that needs to be paid.”

Pierre-Pierre said the publication was also covering the inability of many “mom and pop shops” in the
Haitian community to access Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds because they don’t operate
payroll systems. The Haitian Times itself, he noted, falls into this category, because its staff is entirely
freelance-based.

The Chinese-language press’s coverage of covid-19 has been particularly unique because of the
community’s early awareness of the epidemic and its effects. Rong Xiaoqing, a journalist in the New York
bureau of the Chinese-language newspaper Sing Tao Daily, said her paper started covering covid-19 as
early as late January. At the time, she wrote about the cancellation of celebrations for the Chinese New
Year due to fears of the virus, long before events were being suspended across the city. (A translated
version of the article was the first piece about covid-19 to appear on the website of City Limits, which
operates an initiative called Voices of New York that translates ethnic, non-English-speaking local press
into English).
Rong said it was at this time that she started covering the question of mask use, which would gain
importance over the coming months. According to Rong, she asked government officials about wearing
masks three times between late January and mid-March, long before their usage was mandated in April.
Rong’s first reporting on masks, she said, was about discrimination against people in the Chinese
community who were wearing masks before they were widely adopted. When she asked the city’s
Health Commissioner about this at a press conference in late January, she said she told her the city
didn’t recommend that people wear masks as an effective measure against the spread of the virus.

In a February panel moderated by Rong at the CUNY Journalism School, Rong said that Dr. Syra Madad,
the city’s senior director of the system-wide special pathogens program, told her again that the city did
not recommend mask usage. Finally, at Mayor de Blasio’s March 10 press conference at Bellevue
hospital, she asked again about the contradictory nature of saying masks were vital for healthcare
workers, but were not effective in preventing healthy people from getting infected. This time, she said,
Health Commissioner Barbot mentioned for the first time the need to prevent a shortage of PPE for
healthcare workers. After the press conference, Rong said, she wrote an op-ed in Sing Tao “questioning
all of this mask propaganda.”

Later Sing Tao coverage included the closures of restaurants in Sunset Park’s Chinatown— several days,
and in some cases, more than a week before Mayor de Blasio mandated shutting restaurants citywide.
In our interview for my previous report, Rong mentioned her frustration that many stories in the ethnic
press are ignored by or never reach a wider audience, and that accountability reporting doesn’t have
any impact until it appears in English. While some of her Coronavirus stories have involved debunking
disinformation that was circulating on the Chinese social media platform WeChat, in general, she said,
the Chinese community was “better prepared. They were closely following the news in China. They knew
how to prepare and protect themselves. They took precautions earlier than everyone else.”

When every reporter becomes a health reporter 

A consensus emerged from the interviews for my previous report that two topics were going
underreported in New York City. The first, courthouses, had been documented in other articles
and reports about the city’s media landscape. The second, for me, was less expected: healthcare issues,
broadly speaking, and the public hospital system in particular.

“If I had an extra reporter, I would have somebody covering health and the municipal hospital system,”
Joel Siegel, managing editor at NY1 News, told me in 2019. “It bothers me as a New Yorker, and as a
journalist, that that system is not covered.” NY1 political journalist Errol Louis agreed, telling me in 2019,
that the public hospital system, “is basically not covered, even though it is essentially bankrupt.”

Several months after these interviews, the city announced that NYC Health + Hospitals (the city agency
that operates the hospitals) had managed to reverse course financially, closing the fiscal year on budget
and with a surplus. Our limited research found no coverage of this development in any of the
interviewed English-language news outlets.

Now reporters at news outlets across the city are quickly readjusting to cover a beat that has been
neglected for years. This lack of coverage has resulted, in many cases, in a significant dearth of
institutional knowledge and sources. In addition to being at the center of the initial crisis phase of the
epidemic, Health + Hospitals has controversially been charged by Mayor de Blasio with leading the city’s
contact tracing program—a duty traditionally performed by the city’s health department. The agency
will thus likely remain at the forefront of recovery efforts for some time.

Jere Hester, Editor-in-Chief of The City, an online nonprofit news outlet that launched in the spring of
2019, identified the convergence of public health with other beats when we spoke for the previous
report. “We know from what’s happened in public housing that public housing is not just a housing
beat,” he told me in 2019. “Thanks to lead, mold and other issues,” he said, “it’s a health beat.” The
major shift now, he said, in light of the covid-19 crisis, “is that every beat we have is essentially now a
health beat.”

While coverage of the health beat was generally lacking, some news outlets mentioned previous
coverage, particularly related to Mayor de Blasio’s 2019 push for universal healthcare, that gave them
some familiarity with the healthcare landscape. POLITICO NY, unlike the majority of interviewed news
outlets, has a designated New York City healthcare reporter with experience covering the hospitals, and
the broader outlet covers the healthcare industry extensively for subscriber verticals at the federal and
state level. “There’s a lot of interest, and therefore subscribers and money, behind the healthcare beat,”
thanks to the amount of regulation and legislation on healthcare issues and money in the insurance and
pharmaceutical industries, Keane said. Because of these subscribers, “we’ve been able to prioritize” that
coverage, she said.

For local outlets that don’t benefit from the revenue of a highly developed and successful subscription
model like POLITICO’s, it’s been harder to get health coverage off the ground. Murphy, of City Limits,
said he has presented a few grant proposals related to healthcare issues and the public hospital system
in recent years, but that none have yet come to fruition.

The Gotham Gazette had more luck, when, as part of a grant application to the Altman Foundation, the
outlet pitched a list of potential topics about which they could develop in-depth series. Among that list,
which was submitted months before the covid-19 crisis hit, and ultimately accepted, was the city’s
public hospital system. Max acknowledged that “it’s definitely been a challenge to quickly develop
sourcing and our institutional knowledge about what the system is, how it works, what it looks like,” he
said. Public health in New York is a complicated constellation of public, private and city-run healthcare
facilities, according to Max. “I think first and foremost some of what would be helpful to people and that
we’re working on, is to produce a good, solid explainer on what the city’s hospital landscape even looks
like, and what the city’s public hospital system looks like within that,” he said.

David Brand, Managing Editor of the Queens Daily Eagle, agreed, noting that he’s spent a lot of time in
recent weeks reaching out to friends and potential sources who might be able to help him “get up to
speed about just what these places look like,” he said. “I’m thinking about the layout of one of these
hospitals in Queens. I don’t really know” what that looks like, he said. “And so, having to learn that, in
the process of learning how different medical centers are handling this crisis … I think people are more
familiar with the jails. We’re familiar with the courthouses. But I think there is a lack of institutional
knowledge about the hospitals.” Brand said he’s had success reaching out to people on Facebook,
acquaintances and strangers alike, who have taught him more about the hospital system.

Bowditch said that WNYC and Gothamist have reassigned two reporters, Fred Mogul, who was covering
state politics but had previously been a health reporter, and Gwynne Hogan, who had reported on the
city’s 2019 measles outbreak, taking advantage of their issue expertise and contacts. Other reporters at
the two outlets without health backgrounds also jumped quickly into the mix, churning out deeply-
reported stories like one about Governor Cuomo’s plan to unify the city’s public and private hospital
system.

Hester, of The City, said that a number of his reporters had in the past written stories that touched on
issues related to the public health system, such as Medicaid, nursing homes and the mental illness and
homeless crisis. This coverage, he said, gave the reporters some familiarity and a “foot up from which to
jump into this context.” The City has produced a number of stories related to the hospital system in
the covid-19 crisis, including how a plan to combine three Brooklyn hospitals had been halted,
and dispatches from mostly anonymous sources within the hospitals about chaotic conditions on the
ground. But, he said, “I think, for our team and probably many reporters across the city, we’ve had to
become very quick studies on some of the intricacies of the system.”

For many of the ethnic media outlets, those contacts and sources within the hospital system were
already known to them in their communities. “It’s not via official channels,” according to Rong of Sing
Tao Daily, who said ethnic media outlets often don’t have their phone calls to high-ranking officials
returned quickly. Rong said the paper has longstanding relationships with organizations and clubs
devoted to Chinese medical personnel. “Take the Chinese Cardiologists’ Club, or something like that,”
she said, “maybe we covered their anniversary celebration. and took some photos and they were happy
[with the coverage]. Now, when we want to locate some doctors in a particular hospital, we go to them
and say ‘can you help us find someone?’ and they help us.”

Pierre-Pierre said that, thanks to the overrepresentation of Haitians in the healthcare system, and his
longstanding ties in the community, that his paper hadn’t struggled at all to find sources. Castaño of
Queens Latino and Lacayo of NY1 Noticias also both said they had been able to find sources within
Queens hospitals from among their communities relatively easily.

At NY1 Noticias, local reporters are told they must live in the neighborhoods they cover for the network.
“Traditionally reporters receive an assignment from the station, “ Lacayo said, “ but in our case, it is the
other way around. The reporters tell us what is going on in that neighborhood and make assignments.
So when covid-19 happened, we already had the sources and network in place in Queens,” he said.
Among NY1 Noticias’s coverage, Lacayo said, was an interview with the director of the embattled
Elmhurst hospital.

As the initial phase of the crisis has passed, some news outlets are beginning to produce stories that
look past current conditions to dive into the history of the city’s public hospital system. In mid-April, City
Limits examined how “Decades of Shrinking Hospital Capacity ‘Spelled Disaster’ for New York’s COVID
Response.” The same day, the New York Times magazine published an interactive piece that featured
vivid photographs by Philip Montgomery from a week spent inside the public hospitals during the covid-
19 crisis and reporting by Jonathan Mahler. In his wide-ranging accompanying text, Mahler combined
deep historical background on the origins of the city’s public hospital system, with the challenges it has
faced in recent decades and the unprecedented nature of what the system is experiencing during the
current crisis.

Mahler told me the idea for the piece originated with the magazine’s photo director Kathy Ryan, but
that he used his assignment as an opportunity, as he did with 2018 feature on the MTA, to take a
sweeping look at an institution that has allowed the city to prosper, but whose own health has suffered
due to budget cuts and infighting. “I felt it was an important and powerful thing to remind people about
that history, and the mission and role [the hospital system] has had,” he said. “They have been
embattled, but have kept up the fight.”

A month later, the Times published a behind the scenes account of the events leading up to de Blasio’s
controversial decision to move the city’s covid-19 contact tracing program to NYC Health + Hospitals. 
The article, which featured four bylines and quoted from damning, previously unpublished emails
written by the agency’s director, Dr. Mitchell Katz, was the kind of deeply-reported exposé rarely seen in
recent years about the agency.  While it may have preferred the more forgiving coverage of the
magazine piece, the municipal hospital system should have one clear take away from the publication of
both articles:  the agency is now being treated as a significant beat and has the full attention of the
country’s leading newspaper.

Shrinking access in the virtual space

For their New York Times magazine piece, Montgomery and Mahler received extensive access to the
physical facilities and senior leadership at NYC Health + Hospitals. But in other cases, access to hospitals
and healthcare workers across the private hospital system has been tightly limited. POLITICO NY, along
with other news outlets, reported that “Mount Sinai Health System and NYU Langone Health are among
the private hospitals that warned workers against voicing their concerns about the nightmarish scenes
playing out in emergency rooms across the city.”

Besides the interest in limiting a public relations crisis, some journalists wondered about the impact of
the years the hospital system spent relatively free of sustained media scrutiny. As Errol Louis told me in
the previous report, “coverage of the Department of Education and the NYPD, for example, may be
imperfect. But people are diligent, and important stories tend to not get missed. And more importantly,
the agency knows that they are being watched by a group of reporters who can’t be swatted away or
bullshitted.” In comparison, “nobody can post up a reporter to keep track of what is going on in these 11
hospitals,” he said in 2019.

Limitations on hospital coverage are often related to HIPAA privacy rules, Hester of The City, noted.
“They have a legal excuse, in a lot of cases, not to deal with the press,” he said. But “we’ve had a huge
contraction of the press as well, and there hasn’t been anywhere near the same day in and day out
coverage of the system and other health issues.”

Journalists and academics have worried that the press’s inability, with few exceptions, to visually show
the public what is occurring inside the hospitals has limited their understanding of the severity of the
crisis. In April, the NYPD seized the drone of a photojournalist documenting mass burials of people who
had died from covid-19 on Hart Island, the city’s public cemetery. In comparison to well-documented
wars or other public health crises, we are missing a “visual archive of the staggering human toll of the
crisis, wrote art historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, in an editorial in the New York Times. “For society to
respond in ways commensurate with the importance of this pandemic, we have to see it.”

While hospitals have been the focus of coverage during this initial phase of the crisis, many journalists
are worried about the broader limitations on press access that are occurring during the era of social
distancing, and potentially could persist long after. In some cases in other states, the restrictions have
been explicit, such as when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis barred a reporter from attending a covid-19-
related press conference. Several federal and state agencies have declared a moratorium
on processing FOIA requests while the crisis is ongoing.

New York City journalists’ concerns about access limitations were more nuanced. The restrictions appear
based on some justifiable measures that had been taken to stem the outbreak, but interviewees feared
those measures might be opportunistically used to thwart transparency. “There’s obviously a public
health emergency,” said Max of the Gotham Gazette. “But at the same time, we want to get information
out to people. We can’t stop holding government officials accountable for being open and transparent
with the public,” he said.

Many of the limitations have stemmed from the necessities of social distancing and the sometimes-
uneven rollout of virtual governance. David Brand of the Queens Daily Eagle said that holding city
council and community board meetings online meant the loss of a crucial space for cultivating sources
and generating story ideas. “Sometimes the best way to get information is to hang outside and talk to
council members or staffers as they are coming and going before after a press conference,” he said. Or
at a community board meeting discussing land use, “you can see the official presentation, and then
afterwards talk to the people who are there demonstrating against it. That’s going to be a challenge
now,” he said.

At a recent virtual press conference related to state bail reform, Brand was unable to make personal
connections with potential future sources, or ask them questions related to different issues, he said.
Moreover, the press conference itself was “zoom bombed” and “invaded by online racist trolls,”
according to Brand.

Hester, of The City, said one of his reporters had wanted to cover a proceeding being held via video
conferencing at Family Court. But to watch the video conference, the journalist was told, she would
have to physically be at the courthouse, while even the judge wouldn’t be present, Hester said. “It was
not worth [the risk] for me to send the reporter down to family court to put her in a public building, for
the absurdity of watching something on a screen that she could be watching from her living room,”
Hester said.

While Hester said he was very cognizant of security issues in allowing people to log into a court
proceeding, he said the episode brought home to him “how quickly public life and civic life is changing. A
lot of us are very facile with getting on to Zoom and whatnot, but the people who are running the
government may not be.”

Conversely, some reporters complained about the access implications of  in-person events. Governor
Cuomo has maintained in-person, televised press conferences, which almost none of the interviewed
news outlets were sending reporters to. In consequence, a few journalists said, they were missing a
crucial opportunity to interrogate the Governor’s statements.

These journalists praised Mayor de Blasio’s embrace of virtual press conferences, which they said
opened up the opportunity for them to land questions. Several journalists at the smaller nonprofit,
community and ethnic media outlets cited specific questions they had been able to directly ask the
mayor about the city’s covid-19 response that had advanced their reporting.
One Chalkbeat story gained significant impact thanks to a question asked by a reporter at the Mayor’s
press conference, Melago said. In March, journalist Alex Zimmerman asked the mayor’s opinion about
internet service providers who were blocking New York City families with unpaid bills from remote
learning deals. De Blasio responded that the practice was “unacceptable” and that it “really pisses me
off, to tell you the truth.” The company decided it would change its policy hours after Chalkbeat
published its story detailing the practice and quoting the mayor’s comments.

Beyond public-facing events, there was concern that politicians were using the crisis to deny the public
information about important political negotiations. “As much as it seems that the governor and the
mayor have been fairly transparent around the public health crisis, on something like the state budget,
that’s not the case,” Max said. “The state budget process has always been shrouded in secrecy, and
even more so this year. Some of that, they can’t help. And some of it, they can. So it’s very tricky,” he
said.

“Obviously, journalists depend on being able to ask people in power questions to hold them
accountable,” said Keane of POLITICO. “Once you take something away, it can be hard to get it back. I
don’t want a lack of access for legitimate reasons right now to translate to less access for journalists in
the future, which means less access to information for the public,” she said.

“There’s a lot of public stimulus money that’s going to be rolling in,” said Melago, of Chalkbeat. “It’s
really going to be a time for us to step up and hold people accountable… Journalists need to be paying
extra attention right now,” she said. “The times of crisis are when the rules get changed.”

The looming financial crisis

Nearly every interviewee described “significant,” dramatic” or “sky-high” increases in traffic to their
websites since the covid-19 emergency began. (These interviews occurred during the first few weeks of
the crisis, research shows traffic has decreased in subsequent weeks for many news outlets). Many feel
a renewed sense of purpose and public appreciation for their work. Yet all are aware of how the ensuing
financial crisis has been devastating the already critically weakened local news industry across the
country.

Many of the for-profit outlets depend on advertising revenue that has vanished. The consequences have
been swift. In April, Vox Media, which owns Curbed, announced it was furloughing roughly 100
employees for three months. Amy Plitt, the editor of Curbed NY who I had interviewed a few weeks
before, wrote on Twitter that she was among them. Less than two weeks after the furloughs, Vox said it
would merge Curbed into New York magazine, another Vox property.

While a few of the small, hyperlocal organizations said they weren’t yet concerned—“it couldn’t be
much worse than it already was,” as one put it—for the majority, the impact has been acute. Rong
said Sing Tao Daily  relies heavily on advertising from Chinese travel agencies, restaurants and
supermarkets, most of which is now gone. The Hong Kong-headquartered newspaper has already shown
signs of financial stress, closing its Australia bureaus earlier this year.

Several hyperlocal and ethnic media outlets said that advertising from local businesses had never, or had
long ceased to be, a significant revenue source. More important, however, were the suspended
advertising campaigns related to now-cancelled big events, like university conferences or music festivals,
said Pierre-Pierre of The Haitian Times.

Most of these outlets said the only thing keeping them afloat was city government advertising, thanks to
a 2019 City Hall executive order mandating that city agencies spend at least half of their annual print
and online advertising budgets on community and ethnic media outlets. Some of those ads were related
to health issues and covid-19, they said, while the most significant support was tied to 2020 census
campaigns. “Without city government advertising we’d close,” Pierre-Pierre said. “That is the one line
we have.”

“We are in survival mode,” said Castaño of Queens Latino. With the help of city advertising and some
ads from local lawyers, he said he would put together the next month’s print edition. After that, “let’s
see what happens,” he said.

Zagare of BKLYNER also said city advertising was crucial, in addition to subscriber support. Zagare
launched a subscription system in 2016 that saved her from going out of business, but, like many other
outlets, took her paywall down for covid-19 coverage. Ten days after removing the paywall in mid-
March and making an appeal for more reader support, she wrote they’d gained 100 new subscribers for
a total of roughly 1300 and an additional $500 in revenue per month. In April she reinstated the paywall.

“If we didn’t have subscriber support, we would no longer be around,” Zagare told me. “But it’s a
fraction of what we need to continue. So I am very much going day by day. I don’t know how much
longer we’re going to be around,” she said. “This is not a fun time to be running a local news business.”

While the subscription model and other forms of reader revenue have been embraced across the news
industry, they can be hard sells for community and ethnic media outlets. Pierre-Pierre said The Haitian
Times had roughly 500 paid subscribers, 20 of whom had deactivated their subscriptions since the covid-
19 crisis began. The founder of the West Side Rag,an online newspaper/blog that covers the Upper West
Side of Manhattan told New York  Magazine this month that, “Eventually, we’ll need to set up a
subscription system, but everyone else is hurting a lot more, so we’re not even asking for donations
now. Once we get over the hump, we can think about that. My concern is mostly the health of the
neighborhood.”

In addition to the loss of advertising and subscriptions, news outlets have been forced to cancel the in-
person events with the public that have served as an increasing source of revenue for the for-profit
media outlets, and the basis for “community engagement” grants for the non-profits. Both sectors are
now experimenting with online versions of these activities. Their success in achieving either objective via
virtual means is yet to be determined.

At the time of our interviews, print publications Sing Tao Daily and the Queens Daily Eagle  were
continuing to put out their daily editions, in addition to online content. But as printing and distribution
have been disrupted across the country, it’s unclear how long that will continue. This could add another
level of financial duress: Many newspapers rely on the revenue generated from legal notices, which are
required by law to appear in print publications. The family-owned Schneps Media company, which has
rapidly acquired and owns 50 community newspapers and magazines throughout the five boroughs,
announced it has laid off or furloughed about 30 employees, or 20% of its workforce, the New York
Times reported.
The city-wide daily tabloid newspapers have also suffered from the decline in advertising and newsstand
sales as fewer people commute to work. The New York Daily News, already hurting from previous
rounds of deep layoffs, was subject to furloughs and pay cuts instituted by owner Tribune Publishing in
late April. A week later, the New York Post laid off more than a dozen staffers, furloughed others, froze
hiring and eliminated most freelance budgets, according to reporting by The Daily Beast.

Schneps Media, The New York Daily News and the New York Post did not respond to requests to be
interviewed for this report. Daily News Editor-in-Chief Robert York told  Vanity Fair that “The closure of
retail outlets and reduced transit traffic in the five boroughs, Long Island, Westchester, and New Jersey
has not been good for our daily single-copy print volumes…this level of disruption is unprecedented.”

Some local news outlets are beginning to look to the Paycheck Protection Program for a critical infusion
of funds. An editor’s note attached to the April 20 newsletter of City & State, the New York politics and
policy print and digital publication, said that “thanks to a loan under the federal Paycheck Protection
Program, we are able to resume this weekday email.” But many of the smaller outlets that rely on
freelancers are ineligible for this support, denying them another potential lifeline.

Like many of their colleagues in news organizations of all sizes across the country, some New York City
outlets have turned to grants from nonprofit organizations, or tech companies like Google and
Facebook. The Haitian Times previously announced it would be receiving two Report for America (RFA)
fellows, a fellowship program that places young reporters in local newsrooms for two years and pays
half of their salaries. Pierre-Pierre and former Editor-in-Chief Vania André said at the time of our
interview that they were concerned in light of the crisis that they might no longer be able to fulfill their
part of the financial obligation. In late April, RFA announced The Haitian Times would be receiving one
fellow as part of the next year’s cohort. Pierre-Pierre said the second fellowship had been postponed for
editorial, not financial reasons.

In addition to previous programs to fund local journalism, Facebook and Google have announced
hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency grants for local newsrooms to cover the covid-19 crisis. In
my previous report, several community and ethnic media outlets said they felt excluded from the
journalism and grantmaking circles necessary to access those funds. Pierre-Pierre worried this would be
the case with the covid-19 grants as well. A lot of the support for local journalism “bypasses the small
operations…[because] they don’t know our universe,” he said, “So I’m afraid we will be left out.”

While previous rounds of Facebook grantmaking has often been slanted towards the bigger metro daily
newspapers and more prominent local news outlets, the list of covid-19 grants notably included many
smaller outlets. In addition to citywide organizations like WNYC and The City, among the New York
City Facebook grantees were BKLYNER, Queens Latino and City Limits.

City Limits was also among the news organizations selected for a Report for America fellowship, but had
to scramble to raise money to meet its part of the financial obligation. After sending out a series of
fundraising appeals in April that specifically sought funds for the reporter’s salary, City Limits was
included in the publications announced as part of Report for America’s 2020-2021 cohort. Many of the
interviewed nonprofit outlets said they hesitated originally to send out fundraising appeals tied to
the covid-19 crisis, for fear of appearing opportunistic. Eventually, they all did so, deciding it was in line
with the missions of their organizations.
Without the dependence on advertising revenue, non-profit news organizations have mostly been
shielded thus far from the financial fallout of covid-19. But Murphy said they were preparing to feel the
impact in some form eventually. If the economic downturn is severe, membership revenue will likely
drop, he said. Even worse would be if a continued outbreak requires them to cancel their fall gala, a
significant source of their fundraising, he said. “And then the biggest question mark,” he said, “is the
foundations.”

Throughout the nonprofit world there is the concern that grantmakers may adjust their levels of support
in relation to the stock market’s effect on their endowments, or pivot their philanthropic strategies to
meet different societal needs that have been elevated by the crisis. While the non-profit outlets said
their funders had so far been supportive and had not announced any changes at the time of our
interviews, they remained worried. “There’s no way to predict how it’s going to break,” Murphy said.

In a letter to her staff posted on Medium, Chalkbeat founder and CEO Elizabeth Green outlined three
potential scenarios for how the organization might be affected by the covid-19. The best case scenario
imagined how the crisis might cause people to value local news as an essential good, leading to
“unprecedented investment” in Chalkbeat. In the second scenario, Green wrote, “we manage to sustain
today’s Chalkbeat through emergency support, and we avoid cuts. But we hit the brakes on our growth
plan,” to scale up from seven to 18 local bureaus by 2025, and that the organization announced last
year. The worst case scenario involved pay cuts, furloughs, or layoffs.

At the time of our interview, Max of the Gotham Gazette said that he was “hopeful that we’re not going
to hear any bad news… [but] it’s a precarious time.” In a fundraising appeal several weeks later,
however, Max wrote that Gotham Gazette was “projecting damaging financial shortfalls given changes
to planned fundraising events and reductions in expected foundation grants.” The drop in funding was
significant, he wrote, meaning that while the outlet continued to cover the covid-19 pandemic, “Gotham
Gazette is facing its own crisis.”

The City, which launched a year ago with an impressive 10 million dollars in funding from the Leon Levy
Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Charles H. Revson Foundation, among others, is
“luckily not in dire straits,” according to publisher John Wotowicz. But, “if I didn’t express concern about
the medium to long term for us,” he said, “I wouldn’t be being honest in my answer.”

Like the other interviewed non-profits, Wotowicz said that donor foundations so far had been very
supportive, but “the secondary effect of the virus on both foundation endowment and people’s net
worth, certainly impacts and has put a much more challenging umbrella over our major donor activity.”
The City’s corporate sponsorship program, which was supposed to become an important source of
revenue, had already been directly affected by the economic crisis, he said. “I wouldn’t say we threw out
the old plan,” Wotowicz said, “but we’ve gone back to the drawing board….We’re in a good place, but
it’s a nervous time.”

Planning for an uncertain future

Whether from a financial or an editorial perspective, all of the interviewed news outlets agreed the most
challenging aspect of the covid-19 epidemic was not knowing when or how it might end. “There is no
predictable arc for this story,” said Hester of The City.
Past New York City crises like 9/11 or Hurricane Sandy had a clearer “linear structure,” according to
Melago of Chalkbeat, which made them somewhat easier to cover. covid-19, according to Mahler of
the New York Times, feels “more existential and more mysterious,” he said. “It’s created more
uncertainty about the future than anything I’ve lived through.”

“The only other time I remember waiting like this,” said the BKLYNER’s Zagare, who is from Latvia, “was
when I was a teenager and the Soviet Union was falling apart. … [and] we were just waiting for the tanks
to come in,” she said. This pandemic, she said, presents a “much longer waiting period.”

The uncertain prognosis and expansiveness of the story makes editorial (and financial) planning
particularly challenging, said all of the interviewees. The majority were concentrating on the short or
medium term, or even just taking it day by day. “We are in survival mode,” said Castaño of Queens
Latino. “Like first responders,” said Pierre-Pierre of The Haitian Times, “we are in the rescue stage.”

Even for better-resourced outlets, the unpredictable timeline of the crisis is daunting. Chalkbeat and
POLITICO are used to planning their editorial calendars around seemingly consistent events, like school
years and political campaigns. What happens when, for the foreseeable future, there is no school and no
active campaigning?

Despite the uniqueness of this crisis, some of the journalists said their experiences covering other major
events had taught them lessons that were applicable to covid-19. Murphy of City Limits said Hurricane
Sandy had shown him that “you have to be aware that what you’re seeing is just one slice of the city’s
reality…. That awareness and making sure that tunnel vision doesn’t set in are key to understanding that
a crisis like this is sprawling and evolving by the moment,” he said.

Ned Berke, former Editor-in-Chief of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and previously the founder of a digital
hyperlocal publication in Brooklyn, said he had learned from Hurricane Sandy that working with others
to get out the basic, immediate information is crucial. For small and local publishers, he said,
“collaborating with others to make those most essential resources will help remove a lot of workload,
and open up a lot of resources” for deeper reporting.

While there have been isolated examples of collaborative reporting on covid-19 and some of the


community outlets continue to republish available content from the nonprofit news organizations, New
York City has not seen wide-scale collaborative efforts like the kind that have emerged in recent weeks
in Chicago, Oklahoma, Colorado and Oregon.

The local news ecosystem in New York City is different from any other market in the country, but, as
Berke pointed out, there is still room to foster more newsgathering alliances. My previous report
concluded that, while collaboration is flourishing between the better-resourced, nonprofit journalism
organizations, the lack of partnerships between these sectors and the community and ethnic media is a
missed opportunity. In the current context, these collaborations could be even more critical, providing
reporting for citywide news outlets that don’t have deep ties to many of the communities that have
been most affected by this pandemic. Community and ethnic media outlets have already demonstrated
they are deeply sourced in the neighborhoods and institutions at the frontlines of the crisis. As these
same groups struggle with a “return to normalcy,” that knowledge and local coverage will continue to be
crucial.
“How do we recover from this?” said Hester of The City. “It’s really going to be kind of a battle for where
New York goes from here socially, politically and economically…This is where our job becomes vital once
we’re out of kind of the immediate crisis mode,” he said. Then “we really go into the long-term game.”

An earlier version of this article misidentified Chalkbeat reporter Alex Zimmerman as his colleague
Reema Amin, based on an interviewee’s recollection, which Amin and the interviewee corrected.

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