Tired of Waiting for Their Dream Workplace, These Writers Made Their Own

“For a city that has so many outlets and is filled with so many reporters, for a while, I feel like there’s been a real lack of, I think, the kind of work that we’ve been doing, which is sometimes irreverent, very voice-y, it’s often fun,” Ms. Wang said. “But also really wants to hold people in power to account, right? And in a way that’s not dry.”

The journalists try to balance the heavy with the light. On Hell Gate, stories criticizing the city’s criminal justice system for wrongfully convicting a man are just as common as a semi-regular column rating public bathrooms across New York City or pointing out the new congressional district’s resemblance to a penis.

“​​We would do stories in my previous life on redistricting, or something like that, and they’d be really good stories,” Mr. Robbins said. “But very few people would read them because it’s an incredibly difficult topic — to sort of grab someone by the lapel and be like, ‘Yo, like your, your representatives just changed!’ And so our way of doing that has been like, ‘Yo, they just redrew the maps, and one of these maps looks like a penis. And you should check that.’

“And now we’ve gotten someone to read about redistricting.”

This laid-back, insouciant appreciation of the city’s quirkier side has already set Hell Gate apart from the city’s more self-serious news outlets in its first two months of publishing. And it’s this same attitude that some larger news outlets have already taken notice of.

In a newsletter sent early last month, Hell Gate’s writers poked fun at several outlets that they believe published pieces inspired by their own reporting without crediting them.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/style/hellgate-nyc-launch.html