An internationally trained journalist, Nic Dawes, executive director of the nonprofit news organization The City, believes in a two-pronged approach to service journalism as one of the most effective ways to cover the biggest city in the United States at a time when local news organizations are falling by the wayside.
“When I learned about the opportunity at The City, putting together the idea of mission-oriented journalism that is really driven by a desire for impact and a better civic and democratic conversation on the one hand, and local accountability on the other hand, that struck me as one of the most exciting jobs to do in global journalism right now,” he says.
With a team of 30 people tasked with covering New York City, choices still need to be made in order to report the most important bits of information among the publication’s readers. “We have to be clear about what our lane is.”
For The City, that lane is shaped by two pillars. “We bring really serious high-caliber investigative reporting skills to the table and we cover campaign finance, we cover the impact of public policy choices like marijuana legalization, we cover the NYPD with a mix of data skills and deep investigative reporting skills no other local outlet can bring,” Dawes says. “The other piece is our service and explanatory reporting. New York is a complicated place, not only very big, but very complicated.”
One of the most accessed parts of The City’s website is the “How To New York” section, which Dawes calls “our library of service journalism. It’s constantly being updated. … We get incredible feedback from our readers about how they’ve used these articles,” which provide advice on everything from how to pay rent in New York City to how to register to vote, how to get a tree planted on a particular block and other public services.
It’s also a way for The City to build trust among readers and potential donors alike. “It’s very hard, as a reader, to verify the truth of anything we write in an investigative piece. If we say this is how you get your criminal record expunged and you do it, you can put our advice to the test. You know whether we show up accurately. Our hope is when we do investigative reporting, we’ve pre-established that we are to be trusted,” Dawes says.
The dedication to dogged reporting and becoming a trusted source of investigative news is already paying off: Reporter Rosalind Adams spent half a year building up sources covering the rollout of legalized marijuana across New York State with an emphasis on New York City. After months of building trust, she was able to access an important, previously secret document that stated private equity firms would receive all the benefits from legal dispensaries opened by people who had been previously incarcerated for drug charges but had applied to receive assistance and state support to open their own business.
“It was a complete bombshell. Her reporting led to Governor (Kathy) Hochul to suspend the program and multiple state legislators to call for an investigation and a complete cancellation of that program,” Dawes says. “Spending a long time looking at what was going wrong in the rollout, really building sources and ultimately affecting, causing one of the most consequential pieces of legislation of the last five years, it’s a huge result from having the patience to put someone on that beat.”
Nic Dawes, executive director of The City, discuses how the independent, nonprofit newsroom fills the gap in local news coverage of New York City, following the closures or shrinkage of the New York Daily News and DNAInfo.
