Rediscovering New York

News of New York sometimes seems to be the last thing New Yorkers can count on finding in their six newspapers. While the big local stories rate appropriate headlines, the routine local events that reflect the life of the city are all too often relegated to routine treatment in the back pages. But lately the Herald Tribune seems determined to make amends. With commendable journalistic enterprise, it is focusing its attention on its own home town.

For the past few months, local news has earned its way onto the Trib's front page. New recruits to the paper's team of columnists have run down much of their material within the confines of the city. A revamped Sunday magazine, New York, keeps on top of the city's fast-changing fads and fashions; one recent article gave city housewives much the best of it in comparison with their sisters in suburbia. Most impressive of all, for the past eight weeks the Trib has been running an incisive daily series on New York's brutal and burgeoning big-city problems.

Back to the People. Such stepped-up local interest is the Trib's most recent attempt to find a niche for itself among powerful competitors. It can hardly hope to match the Times's massive concern with foreign and national news; it would be equally hard put to compete with the brisk, once-over-lightly coverage of the Daily News. As for the afternoon papers, the Trib is not about to join their flashy-headline hunt for the attention of the harried commuter. But by concentrating on local news, says Trib Editor James G. Bellows, the paper is at last acquiring a "distinctive personality."

A team of six full-time reporters, headed by Bronx-born Barry Gottehrer, has been poking into all the city's grimy corners, digging up stories of the grim conditions with which most New Yorkers are all too familiar. Articles have appeared on blighted schools and hospitals; on urban renewal, which is administered so haphazardly that some people do not know from one day to the next whether they will be allowed to stay in their homes; on the long-debated Lower Manhattan Expressway, which has been hanging fire since 1941. "This series demonstrates," says Managing Editor Murray M. Weiss, "that the city has lost touch with the people."

The series has also stirred readers more than anything the paper has printed in years. As soon as the stories started, the Trib installed two extra telephones and practically pleaded with people to call in with complaints. For the first week and a half, the paper received more than 100 calls a day.

Calls are now down to 30 or 40 a day, letters come in at the rate of 50 a day. Many reader complaints, checked out by the staff, have grown into Trib stories, and under Trib needling the city administration has been moved to action. It has cleaned up sewage that had been accumulating for weeks in the basement of a city-owned building; towed away autos that had been abandoned for more than a month, clogging residential streets while they were gradually stripped of parts; stepped-up housing inspections of heatless, waterless slum buildings; installed a long-deferred central telephone to process housing complaints.

Spurred by the Trib, 70 of the city's and world's largest corporations recently set up an organization to fight the exodus of small industry from New York. Says I. D. Robbins, president of the City Club, a group of civic leaders:

"Though not extraordinary detective work, the series has got the city up in arms. Sure, the Times ran an article now and then on bad conditions, but the Herald Tribune runs them bang-bang every day, and that's what does it."

Here to Stay. City officials grumble predictably that the Republican Trib is politically motivated, that it is trying to undermine Mayor Robert Wagner in an election year. But Managing Editor Weiss contends that the timing of the series is coincidental; last year the Trib ran an equally hard-hitting series on conflict-of-interest scandals in the Republican-controlled state legislature. "By definition," says Weiss, "we don't talk about the good things in such a series."

One of the mayor's aides told Gottehrer: "We know as long as we don't answer back, you're eventually going to go away." But the Trib has no intention of going away. It plans to continue the series indefinitely, hopefully provide New York with the kind of sustained city coverage it sorely needs.

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