brooklyn-paper-cover-042709.jpgIt’s light fare, but an article about a stolen bench appearing on the Brooklyn Paper website Friday was notable for the fact that it was attributed to Thomas Tracy of the Community Newspaper Group, the publisher of the Courier-Life chain of newspaper; as of last month, the two papers share a corporate parent named Rupert Murdoch. The cross-publication was noticed by the ever-vigilant Norman Oder of the Atlantic Yards Report. Like many observers, Oder is wondering whether the fact that The Paper is now owned by News Corp will mean its critical coverage of Bruce Ratner and the Atlantic Yards project will lose some or all of its edge to fall in line with the pro-development stance of its sister publication and the generally pro-business tack of Murdoch’s empire. The question may be moot if the prediction of an AYR commenter comes true: “My bet is they will merge under the same masthead/website within 6 months and that there will not be a print edition of one of them within a year.”
Brooklyn Paper Begins to Publish Work by Courier [AYR]


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  1. “trust me there are entities working on that one.”

    I’ll take your word for it, but they’d better go into overdrive. Everyone is wants to know the answer to this $100 million question.

  2. ENY:

    aint that a b—-!

    trust me there are entities working on that one.

    some are chasing techno-bits. they are wasting time with eye candy.

    others are digging deep into the social value proposition. like npr.

    what you have never seen is any deep analysis of the cost breakdowns of running the news business. once you see those numbers (a billion dollars for the globe, union contracts for lifetime jobs(daily news), leveraging the employee pension funds(tribune), building buildings instead of doing the news(the times)) you understand that value can be had for less. a lot less. a whole lot less. and since print is dead the cost of entry is low. competition will be high.

    when dinosaurs like pete hamill finally get it the damn is about to burst :

    http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090426/NEWS/904260319

    this aint no evolution. everything big and overleveraged IS going to die first. everyone else is going on a diet.

    cant wait to see the the lean survivors. there will be some hope for them then.

    and shimmi: the brooklyn papers the NYTimes of anything???? HA!

    /end rant

  3. Adam from the Brooklyn Paper Says:

    That’s only because the couriers’ reporters out number the Brooklyn paper reporters by a lot! There is only so much Mike and Ben can cover in a given week so I’m sure you’ll see more of “their” reporters getting published in our paper just for the shear fact that we don’t yet have the adequate man power to cover Brooklyn the way Gersh would like too. And let’s get real there is only so much that happens in park slope & Brooklyn heights that many stories will have duel coverage but delivered with different angles of perspective. I mean nobody went nuts when Murdock bought the wall street journal and owned the post; they both cover national news so most stories have had duel coverage but what separates them was the perspective that they delivered the articles.
    And I can tell you first had the courier and the BP will not be merging- its too separate readerships and there is no way one paper can deliver too, and absorb all those eyeballs; in Brooklyn at least. People her are too dynamic for that and wouldn’t accept it and the ppl upstairs are well aware of that. They see the Brooklyn Papers as the “new york times” of local papers and the courier like the “daily news” (or perhaps The Post) of local papers and their demographics prove that. BP’s readers are of a higher education income and social stature, while the courier is the complete opposite. Another play (or skew) in those numbers is the areas both papers cover; Bk only distributes in “north Brooklyn” (highest income brownstone neighborhoods) while courier covers all of Brooklyn so their numbers get diluted.

    Anyhow I just don’t see what the fuss is about!

  4. “any new voice will most likely come in when there is no competition from remaining main stream media.”

    There’s only one problem: any business has to make money to survive, and the blogosphere has yet to tell us how news media will make money (or, enough money to support a site and news organization) through the medium.

  5. problem is,

    its quite the quandary.

    any new voice will most likely come in when there is no competition from remaining main stream media. so, in one sense, its better that the brooklyn papers/courier beast fall under its own weight.

    then people will not be so dismissive when a limited general interest entity(be it paper/web or web only) sprouts up. there will be nothing to snark against when there is no “establishment” left.

    hopefully something will be ready to fill the vacuum when this happens.

  6. Yes, bkn4life, I do think Brooklyn deserves better press coverage. I would like to see a borough-centric daily. In this economy, however, the best I can imagine is expanded coverage in the Daily News borough insert. By my reading, Norman was not making the broader point that you are.

  7. altervoice:

    and why should we not examine the decline of unrelated voices about issues impacting brooklyn in general?

    your sideswipe against norman aside, do you really think brooklyn doesnt deserve more than these ad-rags?

    i was at a conference in phladelphia over the weekend dealing with many of these same issues ( http://bcniphilly.com ).

    many people other than norman are questioning these issues of larger press entities. you should applaud any effort to shine some light on a process as flawed as atlantic yards. no matter how long it has gone on. if its a war of attrition that ratner thinks will win, well, lets see about that.

  8. What would be the pratical impact (viz. Atlantic Yards) if the two papers merge? Does Oder really think peoples opinions are going to change at this point based on the local media coverage? By my calculation, Oder has written almost 6,000 words (to date) on what is, in my estimation, at best a side bar to this long-running story.

  9. the race to the bottom is picking up speed.

    aggregation for eyeballs under the murdoch clan. yuck.

    i, for one, welcome our untrained, blogging, twittering overlords.

    they may suck for quite a while, but its medicine the industry needs.

    the net result of al the twitter traffic is that public events cant be hidden. but private(governmental) actions/meetings will hold out a bit longer.