As far as we know, no major media outlet in this city has a waterfront beat reporter. (If we’re wrong; please tell us. We want to talk to this person.)

There are reporters specializing in restaurants where you can get dinner for under $25, gardening, and fashion shows, but there’s no waterfront reporter in a city that includes the nation’s third largest port and that has seen billions of dollars of federal, state, and city money invested in the waterfront in just 8 years.  If journalists aren’t experts in covering the waterfront, they don’t know to look for an issue unless they’re told.  Enter the press release.

Much media reporting today is based on press releases. Someone issues a press release, the media follows up with a story. If the issue has no press release, less chance of a story. If the journalist is not an expert on the topic, and is rushed as all journalists are today, the story line rarely gets deeper than connecting the dots between quotes from well established or easily findable talking heads. 

How to educate yourself as a media consumer? (this applies to all areas of journalistic reporting) A first check for the quality of reporting and the reason for reporting is to compare a news story with the press releases from the major entities quoted in the story. In the era of the web, this is now easy to do.

Who wrote this?  Carolina Salguero, founder and director of PortSide, a former journalist who left the profession as in-depth feature stories (her specialty) were on the wane, and no media outlets wanted real reporting about NYC’s waterfront (her growing area of interest and expertise).

Having finished with that heads-up, back to discussion of the mayor’s new sustainability project PlanYC 2030. back