Sometimes he was on the scene before the police would arrive.”īy the 1950s, movies such as Sweet Smell of Success revelled in the sleaze, with Burt Lancaster as the conniving columnist JJ Hunsecker, stepping between corrupt cops, philandering politicians and low-life publicity agents, to declare: “I love this dirty town!” “He would sit there drowsing all night listening to the radio and the second something came over he would throw on his jacket and be on the street 20 seconds later.
“He had a police radio next to the bed and a fire bell in his apartment connected to the fire department headquarters,” Bonanos said. So instead of focusing on the burning building, he would aim his lens at the people weeping as they watched their home burn down or, as in a picture he captioned “Their first murder”, a crowd of children fixated on the grim sight of a bloodied body in the gutter. Later, the post-depression-era grit of the freelance street photographer Weegee was a vivid expression of the highly competitive battle to be fast and exciting.Ĭhristopher Bonanos, author of Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous, said Weegee “was shooting to eat” and he knew that getting a picture first and making it evocative would help it sell. The Daily News has been on a roll, winning its 11th Pulitzer Prize in 2017, and it has been clearly galvanised by Trump – it was even inspired by his excesses to reprise the most famous headline in its 99-year history.Īmerican photographer Weegee in 1963.
The Village Voice has closed its print edition and lost most of its staff, while the news website DNAinfo has gone extinct and Gothamist was closed then re-opened by WNYC in a much-reduced form. The move came little over a year after Tronc bought the tabloid for $1, assuming responsibility for all of its operational and pension liabilities.Ī city which once had nine daily titles is now down to Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, what is left of the Daily News and the upmarket New York Times and Wall Street Journal, which have both cut back significantly on reporting their own city in favour of greater analysis, national and international stories. This week, some of the colour and a lot of the scrutiny was lost from the New York journalism scene as Tronc, new owners of the Daily News, abruptly fired half of the editorial staff after a meeting lasting one minute.
Hardly subtle, but certainly in the fine tradition of the no-holds-barred tabloid journalism which has kept the rich and powerful off balance in New York for more than a century.
0 kommentar(er)
