Why is Local News Disappearing in the Bronx?

**Kusha Navadar** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, I'm Kusha Navadar filling in for Brian.
Local news in the Bronx is in a tough spot. This week, Norwood News announced that the publication would be going on an indefinite hiatus after 38 years covering the Northwest Bronx.
It is just one of the latest in an ever-shrinking news ecosystem in the Bronx. The Bronx Times, which has been around since 1975, is down to one full-time reporter as of this month. News 12 Bronx was virtually eliminated through layoffs earlier this summer, and many of the other remaining outlets are running on skeleton crews of just a handful of reporters. Of course, WNYC and Gothamist are committed to being a reliable source of local news, but our coverage is wide, and hyper-local outlets do reporting that many other outlets can't. Norwood News broke reporting that changed legislation around NYPD transparency and exposed shady tactics by housing developers in the borough. Bernard Stein at the Riverdale Press won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage in the Northwest Bronx.
Student journalism has taken up the mantle for many years in the Bronx, but even that seems to be shrinking. The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY has historically staffed and operated the Mott Haven Herald and the Hunts Point Express. But as of this fall, there is no longer a dedicated class and supervising professor to staff the outlets. The school does note that they will continue to publish student work that covers the Bronx. So how did we get here and what happens to a neighborhood when they lose local news? Our guest today is Eileen Markey. She's an associate professor of journalism at Lehman College CUNY and has been a lot of her career covering the Bronx where she's also lived for decades. She's also the director of the Bronx Observatory, an investigative journalism and public policy project that is documenting the impacts of federal policy in the borough. Eileen, welcome back to WNYC.

**Eileen Markey** (2:09)
Hello. Great to be with you.

**Kusha Navadar** (2:11)
And listeners, we want to hear from you. How do you use local news? Bronx residents, are you worried about the decrease in coverage in your neighborhood? Maybe your local paper, that's your favorite local paper, is now defunct. Tell us about it. Or shout out your favorite local news that's still doing good work in the borough. What stories do you wish more people were paying attention to in the Bronx? We're here for all of it. Give us a call. Send us a text. We're at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692.
Okay, Eileen, are you a reporter? Or sorry, let's hang on here. Eileen, you've lived in the Bronx since 1994, and your very first work study job as an undergraduate at Fordham was actually working at Norwood News, the outlet we lost this week. What was that job like and what was the Bronx like then?

**Eileen Markey** (3:01)
That was such an excellent job, and I think about it a lot now. I work with students and I'm really passionate about making sure that as many students as are eligible take part in work study and do this really hands-on work.
It was part of my financial aid package that I got to have a work study job, and Fordham had a relationship with the Norwood News because the then editor, Jordan Moss, knew he needed more hands on deck. That was a great job because in my first year, as a kid from the suburbs suddenly living in the Bronx, I got to learn the neighborhood through what happened in the neighborhood and through this great, really embedded community newspaper. I wrote stories about city services, I wrote stories about big land use issues, I learned how the ULURP land review process works. I actually wrote stories about the Kingsbridge Armory, something that is still going through, still in the news periodically. So it was an amazing way as a young reporter, it wasn't my first journalism, but it was my first New York City bylines, and it was an amazing way as a young reporter to understand how a city works, how a neighborhood works, how people belong to each other in a neighborhood, and how the news has a role in constructing and maintaining the health of a community. That it's not an outside force, but that it is part of the ecosystem of a healthy community, is a reliable and committed news organization.

**Kusha Navadar** (4:24)
How people belong to each other really struck me just now. Can you tell me more about that as a journalist?

**Eileen Markey** (4:30)
I think so much of what the struggles that our country is going through right now, the anemic and feeble state of our democracy, has to do with, in many ways, it has to do with many things, including the topic of your last segment. But in many ways, it has to do with tremendous breakdown in relationships, breakdown really actually in the secondary and tertiary relationships that make communities healthy. So it's not that your best friend and your family, but the people next door and down the street from you and the people you buy coffee from. You might not have everything in common with, but you have something in common with, such that you don't want to be at their throat.