NBC New York

All The News That’s Fit To Recycle. The New York Times is very good at a lot of things; I love their international coverage and the Lens blog and was totally digging the op-ed last week from guest Ta-Nehisi Coates. But one thing the self-professed home of the greatest journalism in the world never seems to get right is their local New York City coverage, especially if it’s in a borough that isn’t Manhattan. Today’s article about the “new hip scene” in Rockaway, Queens is one of the best examples of their outerborough parachute journalism (it also, as a local resident, made me really mad.) The author seems to have spent about five hours on a five-block stretch of town, after which he came up with some real deep insights: poor people are the only people who live here; there are housing projects, which aren’t that cool; it’s like, so much different than the Hamptons. And, of course, the assertion that the neighborhood was saved by a creative class of people from Brooklyn and Manhattan (false; and we just call these types DFDs.) This type of article isn’t even new, as pointed out by Jen Doll from the Village Voice. I read about the “Rockaway revival” once a year, but at least those articles talked to people who live in the neighborhoods year-round. No such luck here; I guess the reporter thought we’d be too poor to know what The New York Times is. I’ve welcomed the new food stands because I love Thai food and $4 coffees like anybody else. And it’s a public beach, welcome to anybody who wants to take the A or the Q53 down here. It’s worth the trip, believe me. But I don’t dig a reporter referring to me as an “impoverished local” without talking to any locals, and then writing about concerts in a park that is in Brooklyn, not Rockaway. And please, hold off on calling the boardwalk the “new Bedford Ave” until we get a bookstore or something. 

-KH

[NYT, Village Voice, photo: Joe Tacopino, taken inside the Silent Barn]