Gotham Gazette, New York, NY
This summer I worked at Gotham Gazette, a politics and policy news website based in Manhattan. Due to my total lack of previous experience in journalism, I was slated to primarily conducting research and helping out senior staff on their projects and articles. However, within a few weeks I began interviewing politicians, attending press conferences, and writing my own articles. Though I don’t know yet whether I want to continue with journalism as a career, these 12 weeks have been hugely informative as I seek to better understand the world of New York politics (and myself, of course).
Gotham Gazette is an unusual publication in that it is entirely funded by the non-profit group, Citizens Union, and does not charge readers for articles or subscriptions. While this is of course good for accessibility to the public, it makes for a rather threadbare staff: an editor-in-chief and two full-time reporters. As I quickly discovered, they fill in the gaps through interns. At the peak of the summer, there were seven interns to supplement the staff, putting out the majority of the content published by Gotham Gazette.
My longest and most ambitious story which has yet to be published is a 6,000-word opus on Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, co-written with another intern. I began my research on Adams, a retired NYPD captain and longtime politician, at the start of my internship. I dug into his state legislative record, made a database of every newsletter he’s released since 2015, and conducted an hour-long interview with Adams himself (my coauthor handled most of the supplemental interviews). The result is a hefty piece aiming to track the ideologically nebulous Adams throughout his many years in politics and give voters a complete picture of him heading into 2021.
I also wrote an article on the taxi medallion crisis which was highly intriguing and earned me the most attention of any of my pieces. The New York Times ran an investigative story in May on how predatory lenders and city officials caused thousands of taxi drivers to take on immense debt in order to buy enormously inflated medallions which allows them to legally drive a cab in New York City. I wrote two follow-up pieces on that investigation, detailing what City Councilmembers and the main taxi drivers’ union, among others, had proposed to do. My reporting involved attending several press conferences, going to a City Council hearing, and interviewing a City Councilmember and a former city official. The day after my story was published, I got called by a taxi medallion lobbyist about the subject and retweeted by the author of the original New York Times story—signs that, at least in small ways, my reporting was having an impact.
I also did several odd jobs for Gotham Gazette, including compiling lists of upcoming political events and writing prep pieces for the editor-in-chief prior to interviews or conferences. This second task has been especially informative, as it has forced me to look deeply into topics which I knew absolutely nothing about. One day of research on New York City’s extensive and complex charter school system, for example, taught me an extraordinary amount on a topic on which I had been entirely ignorant.
This, in fact, was one of the main reasons why I decided to intern for Gotham Gazette in the first place. I had done some previous work for campaigns, and I greatly enjoy following national political races, but I was mostly quite clueless about municipal and state-level policy issues that actually affect my daily life. The research and reporting at Gotham Gazette has greatly increased my understanding of how local politics works.
There are obvious insights to be had about working at a news website in this day and age, and just how important the First Amendment and other such rights are. But this summer has taught me the equally important lesson that reporting is hard. An article that would take five minutes to read may well have taken several days or weeks of researching, interviewing, emailing, and finally writing.
I don’t know whether journalism will be the path I go down, but I know that this experience will be helpful in my new job as news editor for The Williams Record, as well as my position as the political coordinator for the recently-formed campus voting group EphVotes.
Though I know everyone at Gotham Gazette and Citizens Union will be too busy to ever read this, I want to thank them all for the work they do, and for giving me an opportunity to learn and grow. I’d also, of course, like to thank the Estate of George Mead for helping me take advantage of this opportunity, and the ’68 Center for Career Exploration for establishing the connection that allowed this summer to happen.