Charles Dolan Hired Me to Build News 12 The Bronx. Watching It Disappear Feels Like Losing a professional Child.
The late, great Chuck Dolan would have been saddened by what is happening to News 12.
I know because he hired me to build his first New York City News 12 newsroom in The Bronx.
That makes this week's sweeping layoffs and newsroom reductions more than another media-industry story for me. It is personal.
When we built News 12 The Bronx, we weren't simply launching another television station. We were helping create something that barely existed in American television: a 24-hour news operation devoted entirely to one borough and the people who lived there.
The mission was simple and audacious: Tell the Bronx's story, all day and all night, from the Bronx.
The photograph above takes me back to that time. The press release describes News 12 The Bronx as the first 24-hour all-news cable network dedicated exclusively to the borough, promising “around-the-clock borough-wide news coverage.”
We believed in that mission.
We believed neighborhoods deserved journalists who knew them. We believed a school closing in Co-op City, a fire in Morris Heights, a development project in Riverdale, a political fight at City Hall or a community celebration in Fordham could matter as much to Bronx residents as whatever happened that day in Manhattan.
That was the genius of Chuck Dolan's vision.
News 12 wasn't created to compete with New York City television by becoming more like it. It was created to do what the big stations couldn't do: go deeper, get closer and stay local.
Now, decades later, that vision is being sharply reduced.
News 12's restructuring has reportedly eliminated dozens of jobs and dramatically scaled back hyperlocal operations in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Westchester and Connecticut. Separate local newscasts are being replaced by regional programming with shorter local segments, while veteran journalists with decades of service are among those losing their jobs.
For those of us who helped build News 12, it is difficult to watch.
I feel like I lost one of my children. News organizations must evolve. Audiences have changed. Technology has changed. Economics have changed.
But there is a difference between changing the way you deliver local journalism and changing whether you are truly local. Chuck Dolan understood that distinction. He understood that communities aren't demographics. They are people. And he understood something the television industry seems to be rediscovering, sometimes painfully:
Local news matters most when it is actually local. https://bronx.news12.com/
