Upstart in the Big Apple

The moment remains in mind still. My wife and I had just returned to the New York City region after two bucolic years in Vermont, working for The Burlington Free Press. We found a pleasant apartment in Jersey City, a Victorian park across the street, and a West Indian neighbor who welcomed us with a dinner of curried goat.

That night we turned on the local CBS channel at eleven o'clock and caught the news from hell: a nun raped and murdered in East Harlem, three teenagers shot, a child drowned -- pull in camera, tight on the grieving mother -- all served up with jazzy graphics and intercut with anchor-to-anchor happy talk.

Ten primal minutes passed and I shut off the set, longing for Burlington's earnest if sometimes amateurish news broadcasts. Why was it, I wondered, that New York stations offered such dreck while television reporters in my recent sub-Arctic outpost rarely blinked at devoting five minutes to acid rain, a new school board curriculum, or even a new sewer project in the city's south end?

New York 1 News, the city's first all-local-news cable station, offers a muchneeded alternative, twenty-four hours a day. The year-old Time Warner station is the sixth such local or regional cable operation around the country (others are in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Long Island, New England, and Orange County, California, and, coming soon to the Northwest, a station to cover most of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington). It's a high-tech, low-cost, non-union operation, in which reporters serve as their own camera operator, sound technician, and, to some extent, editor.

New York 1's competitors like to dismiss the new station as a bunch of kids with cameras shooting yards of cinema verite footage and slapping it on the air. But that critique seems unfair. When we moved to Brooklyn and began watching New York 1 News (the station is available in at least part of all five New York City boroughs), we found a refreshing seriousness of intent.

Consider the randomly sampled offerings of a week spent New York 1-watching in late November: a five-minute report on the Staten Island secession movement; a segment of a regular low-key video journal by a Queens public school teacher with AIDS; a nightly half-hour look at city politics. This is simply news without wigs and grins.

New York 1 adopted a print rather than electronic model of organization, assigning reporters to beats and bureaus rather than dispatching them to cover the daily menu of urban atrocities. This emphasis helps the station break major stories -- from the ouster of former schools chancellor Joe Fernandez to an exclusive interview with an accused World Trade Center bomber.

New York 1 also puts a refreshing lack of emphasis on that staple of local network news and tabloid coverage: blood and body bags. That said, New York 1's daily report rarely suggests Edward R. Murrow raised from the grave or The New York Review of Books come to the airwaves. Sometimes, New York 1's approach is so austere as to flirt with the dull. Catch the station at the wrong time and watch a blur of every-half-hour "five-borough weather reports," long features on the cleaning of subway stations -- "We're not just talking a little stainless steel here, folks" -- and static camera angles.

The station's reports on city life sometimes carry a breathless journalismschool air of discovery. Chauncey How; ell, a middle-aged refugee from local broadcast television, stands as a street-wise and camera-wise exception. He offers puckish video essays on everything from Brooklyn hairstyles to the sexual healing powers of papaya juice; characters drawn from the city's several million eccentrics populate his pieces like so many vaudeville troupers.

New York 1 offers few in-depth reports or investigative pieces. A recent story on Bensonhurst -- a Brooklyn neighborhood that has long been predominately Italian-American -- provided the outline of a potentially strong story. Bensonhurst has undergone a sea change as Arabs and Koreans rent apartments, buy stores, and send their children to local schools. The New York 1 reporter skillfully mixed street interviews and statistics in a four-minute feature.

Unfortunately, the reporter stopped there. A deeper dive might have explored relations between the Italian-American working class kids who find themselves slipping backward into poverty and their new neighbors, Koreans and Arabs, who seem to be sprinting forward economically. A minute or two more, a tighter focus on a couple of kids rather than a string of sidewalk sound bites, would have given viewers a far more textured sense of the forces underlying urban change.

The station's beat system also has certain inexplicable holes. In a city with 1.1 million people on welfare and perhaps 70,000 homeless, New York 1 has no reporter covering poverty or social services. Nor does a reporter cover the city's massive public hospital and health system, the hundreds of thousands suffering and dying from tuberculosis and AIDS.

That's a shame. For New York 1, with its small cameras, relatively anonymous reporters, and copious airtime, seems uniquely positioned among local news stations to cover such problems with depth and precision.

Still, New York 1 stands out for its basic journalism. Its emphasis on CNN-type live coverage of major political events -- from the monthly surrealism of city board of education hearings to comptroller Elizabeth Holtzman's three-hour-long defense of her ethics -- has forced broadcast competitors into more detailed coverage.

The daily Road to City Hall, which made its debut in March, eight months before New York's mayoral election, also offers a more diverse take on city politics than is commonly found on local channels. These reports continue, post-election, as Inside City Hall; one of them, in late November, featured a twenty-minute discussion of the chances that an all-black political party will be formed. Although the topic was being widely discussed around the city, no other television station mentioned it.

As of yet, however, the station has not brought this same sophistication and analysis to other beats, relying for the most part on breaking news. Until it does so, and until it adds investigative reporting and expands its beats, New York 1 seems more likely to gently nudge rather than break through the sorry parameters of local television news in New York City.

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