I miss New York Newsday (the tabloid in a tutu), which from 1985 to 1995 had terrific city reporting and a collection of good local columnists who wrote with a sense of style.
The New York Times decision to neglect the city is shortsighted, not to mention a terrible dereliction of civic responsibility. There are a large number of local Times subscribers who pay a lot of money and want to know what’s going on in the city. Why the decision to eviscerate local coverage? Ginia Bellafante is first rate. She’s got a sense of humor, an acute awareness of class, and also does actual on the ground reporting. At her best, she’s the closest thing we have in the city to a successor to Breslin (and she’s less of a blowhard than J.B. Number 1).
The local columns of Michael Powell, Jim Dwyer, Clyde Haberman are missed. The Times could find worthy successors if it chose to do so—although they’d have to reach beyond the cloistered Ivy League confines of writers and reporters they employ. It’s a real shame the Times has chosen to abandon the city it is named after. The demise of local reporting is a national tragedy.
I think the NYT is acutely aware it's got a lot of local subscribers who live in "the city" and want to read coverage of it; the problem is defining "the city." Is "the city" is Manhattan and, post-2000, the northwestern tip of Brooklyn? If so, there's lots of coverage of "the city." Maybe too much coverage, even! (I still don't know why I was supposed to care about "Dimes Square.")
But if the city is all five boroughs, and particularly the Bronx or Staten Island or anywhere east of Flatbush... well, I would love it if the NYT covered those places, but I suspect most of their local subscribers don't live there, and most of their reporters have never set foot there! So we get stuck with TV news (which is bad) and whatever is left of local papers post-enSchneppsification (which is, somehow, even worse).
Thank you for this. I miss the writing, and was delighted when I found out that for a paid subscription to the NY Daily News online I could access its archives with all of Breslin's work just sitting there waiting to be read and re-read. I truly wish we had a Breslin now (imagine him covering the Trump trials.)
This was excellent. Tributes too often fail to acknowledge the flaws and failures of their subject, but this one has Breslin's full measure. He was great. And flawed. And funny. Viciously, brutally funny. His punchlines were TKOs.
He managed to write about ordinary people and lives without pandering or cliched platitudes. I hear echoes of him in some of Timothy Egan's or Isabelle Wilkerson's writing. But nobody today is writing with his power and punch. Thanks for the reminder.
They always talk about the great rock band that heaven is sure to have. I'd much rather be in the barroom at the table with Molly Ivins, Hunter S. Thompson, Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin are knocking a few back and telling stories!
Breslin may have been working-class himself, and he may have grown up in a working-class strata of Richmond Hill, but the neighborhood as a whole was solidly middle-class in his day, and remained so through the 60s at least.
I miss New York Newsday (the tabloid in a tutu), which from 1985 to 1995 had terrific city reporting and a collection of good local columnists who wrote with a sense of style.
The New York Times decision to neglect the city is shortsighted, not to mention a terrible dereliction of civic responsibility. There are a large number of local Times subscribers who pay a lot of money and want to know what’s going on in the city. Why the decision to eviscerate local coverage? Ginia Bellafante is first rate. She’s got a sense of humor, an acute awareness of class, and also does actual on the ground reporting. At her best, she’s the closest thing we have in the city to a successor to Breslin (and she’s less of a blowhard than J.B. Number 1).
The local columns of Michael Powell, Jim Dwyer, Clyde Haberman are missed. The Times could find worthy successors if it chose to do so—although they’d have to reach beyond the cloistered Ivy League confines of writers and reporters they employ. It’s a real shame the Times has chosen to abandon the city it is named after. The demise of local reporting is a national tragedy.
Which is frankly short-sighted. New York is home to so many of it's reader by class that the neglect is a missed business opportunity.
I think the NYT is acutely aware it's got a lot of local subscribers who live in "the city" and want to read coverage of it; the problem is defining "the city." Is "the city" is Manhattan and, post-2000, the northwestern tip of Brooklyn? If so, there's lots of coverage of "the city." Maybe too much coverage, even! (I still don't know why I was supposed to care about "Dimes Square.")
But if the city is all five boroughs, and particularly the Bronx or Staten Island or anywhere east of Flatbush... well, I would love it if the NYT covered those places, but I suspect most of their local subscribers don't live there, and most of their reporters have never set foot there! So we get stuck with TV news (which is bad) and whatever is left of local papers post-enSchneppsification (which is, somehow, even worse).
Thank you for this. I miss the writing, and was delighted when I found out that for a paid subscription to the NY Daily News online I could access its archives with all of Breslin's work just sitting there waiting to be read and re-read. I truly wish we had a Breslin now (imagine him covering the Trump trials.)
This was excellent. Tributes too often fail to acknowledge the flaws and failures of their subject, but this one has Breslin's full measure. He was great. And flawed. And funny. Viciously, brutally funny. His punchlines were TKOs.
He managed to write about ordinary people and lives without pandering or cliched platitudes. I hear echoes of him in some of Timothy Egan's or Isabelle Wilkerson's writing. But nobody today is writing with his power and punch. Thanks for the reminder.
Loved this.
Thank you. Legend.
They always talk about the great rock band that heaven is sure to have. I'd much rather be in the barroom at the table with Molly Ivins, Hunter S. Thompson, Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin are knocking a few back and telling stories!
"working-class Richmond Hill"
Breslin may have been working-class himself, and he may have grown up in a working-class strata of Richmond Hill, but the neighborhood as a whole was solidly middle-class in his day, and remained so through the 60s at least.
The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez. Amen.