Fulfilling the promise of CITY

BY DAVID ANDREATTA @DAVID_ANDREATTA DANDREATTA@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM

ver since CITY reported that Leah Stacy would succeed me as editor, I’ve been inundated with letters from readers offering their condolences on my demotion.

They went something like this:

“I’m sorry to see you go. I hope it’s what you wanted.”

“That’s too bad about your job. What are you doing next?”

“Do your bosses know what they’re doing? Where are you going?”

These sympathies, while sincerely appreciated, reinforced for me the inconvenient truth that few people read beyond the headline. For crying out loud, the second sentence in the article announcing Stacy’s hiring read, “Stacy succeeds David Andreatta, who will become the investigations editor at WXXI News, a new position in the newsroom.”

So, to answer your questions, readers of headlines only, yes, this is what I wanted, and as my new title suggests, I’m going to oversee investigative reporting for WXXI, and I’m going nowhere.

I’m not even changing seats in the WXXI newsroom that overlooks the third floor of the High Falls Garage with its outdated signage advertising attractions that no longer exist, like “Frontier Field” (Innovative Field), “PAETEC Park” (That was five naming rights agreements ago), and “Lodging” (Um, where?).

As for whether my bosses know what they’re doing, I couldn’t be more optimistic about the future of journalism at WXXI and, by extension, CITY. The commitment to investing in journalism here is real.

While newsrooms around the country are shrinking, ours is growing. In case you missed it, my position of investigations editor is brand-new.

I started my new job in earnest in late April, after overseeing much of the editing for the May edition of CITY to help Stacy ease into her new role and plan for the June edition. This will be the last issue of the magazine with my fingerprints on it.

Next month, the fingerprints will belong to Stacy, a friend and journalist whose aptitude for forging her own path in this fickle industry I have long admired. I believe she is the right person to lead the magazine, at the right time.

When WXXI acquired CITY in 2019, it said the point of the merger was to not only preserve and expand the quality and depth of WXXI’s local reporting, but also to prioritize coverage of the arts, culture, and life in the Rochester region.

CITY has been evolving to be all about the latter. It has endured a bit of an identity crisis along the way, to be sure, thanks in no small part to a pandemic that upended its business model as a weekly newspaper.

But the identity crisis has ended. CITY is poised to fulfill its promise as WXXI’s source for arts, culture, and life news, and Stacy, who has a background in arts journalism and coordinating media for the local food and drink scene, will get it there.

She will get it there with the help of talented and committed journalists and designers and support and sales staff, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. They have been at various times over these last four years my confidantes, my inspiration, and my saviors in equal measure.

AN HONOR AND A CHALLENGE

Editing CITY has been a tremendous honor, but not without its challenges. When the painful decision was made to cease publishing CITY as a weekly newspaper, my heart sank.

I had been in the job for six months, and we were humming. I came to CITY looking to make it more relevant to more people by doing a few things differently.

First, we started aggressively pursuing “scoops,” the industry term for exclusive stories that can’t be found anywhere else. The best scoops break new ground and are of such import that they are shared by readers and followed by other media outlets.

Secondly, we began publishing our stories online immediately, instead of waiting to publish them in the weekly newspaper.

Lastly, and this dovetails with the second point, we sought to meet our readers where they increasingly were, which was on social media on their phones.

The impact of implementing those changes was immediate.

In those six months before the pandemic, CITY had broken stories that were picked up by local and national news outlets, from the Democrat and Chronicle to The New York Times . Our internal metrics showed year-over-year increases in visitors to CITY’s website of 60 percent and 40-percent growth in page views.

More people were reading CITY than ever before, at least online. There was a buzz about CITY.

But that success was hobbled in a single week in March 2020, when the pandemic forced the closure of the businesses and cultural institutions that had historically hosted CITY newsstands. The closures proved a double whammy for CITY, because those places were also the newspaper’s most loyal advertisers.

In the blink of an eye, those operations no longer had the disposable income to spend on advertising, which was and remains CITY’s primary source of revenue.

To those readers who asked whether my bosses know what they are doing, I would also say this: There would be no CITY today but for the legal and financial gymnastics that WXXI pulled off to keep CITY afloat.

The endeavor kept CITY staffers employed and searching for opportunities to return to newsstands and fulfill its promise. Reinventing CITY as a monthly magazine was that opportunity.

When the rebranded CITY Magazine launched in September 2020, it picked up where its weekly predecessor left off — holding a mirror to greater Rochester for an enlightening, entertaining, and honest reflection of life in our community.

Each issue sought to blend an array of news and commentary with street-level coverage of the arts, music, food and drink, and culture, to galvanize people around shared interests and ignite important conversations.

We did some excellent and impactful work.

After our investigative report on the relative scarcity of public funding for the arts, Monroe County raised its annual allocation for small arts organizations to $1 million from $45,000, and the city revived its long-dormant “percent for art” program.

Our deep dive into Rochester police overtime, which found that some officers were regularly logging upward of 90 hours a week, prompted the incoming police chief to cap the number of consecutive hours an officer could work.

The city rethought its policies on permits for community gardens and testing potential employees for marijuana after we shined a light on the matters.

The WXXI newsroom will continue to produce that kind of work. My new job is to see that it does.

A Marriage Of Multiple Platforms

Norm Silverstein, the president of WXXI, said of the merger with CITY four years ago, “This helps WXXI to better serve our community through enhanced coverage of arts and culture, education, neighborhoods, and events. It’s an example of what a modern media organization should be.”

Modern media organizations use multiple mediums to reach their audience. They are not just a radio or television station, or a newspaper or a magazine, or an online publication. The best of them are all of the above.

WXXI has all of those tools and uses them in ways that best meet the needs of its audience.

The merger between WXXI and CITY was always meant to be a marriage, a collaboration, and in every marriage, there is compromise and a natural division of labor.

Those types of impactful stories that I mentioned earlier can run over the radio airwaves, on television, online, and in the pages of CITY. Where they run will be determined by the people who manage those mediums.

One thing is for sure: They are not going away. Not on my watch.

Thank you for your support.

May 2023

Vol 51 No 9

280 State Street Rochester, New York 14614 feedback@rochester-citynews.com phone (585) 244-3329 roccitymag.com

PUBLISHER

Rochester Area Media Partners LLC, Norm Silverstein, chairman

FOUNDERS

Bill and Mary Anna Towler

EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT themail@rochester-citynews.com

Editor: Leah Stacy

Outgoing editor: David Andreatta

Deputy editor: Jeremy Moule

Senior arts writer: Jeff Spevak

Arts writers: Daniel J. Kushner, Rebecca Rafferty

Contributors: Gino Fanelli, Patrick Hosken, Steve Orr, Lauren Petracca, David Raymond, Max Schulte, Mona Seghatolaslami, Raquel Stephen

CREATIVE DEPARTMENT artdept@rochester-citynews.com

Director, Strategy: Ryan Williamson

Art director: Jacob Walsh

ADVERTISING DEPARTMENT ads@rochester-citynews.com

Sales manager: Alison Zero Jones

Advertising consultant/

Project manager: David White

OPERATIONS/CIRCULATION

Operations manager: Ryan Williamson

Circulation manager: Katherine Stathis kstathis@rochester-citynews.com

CITY is available free of charge. Additional copies of the current issue may be purchased by calling 585-784-3503. CITY may be distributed only by authorized distributors. No person may, without prior written permission of CITY, take more than one copy of each monthly issue.

CITY (ISSN 1551-3262) is published monthly 12 times per year by Rochester Area Media Partners, a subsidiary of WXXI Public Broadcasting. Periodical postage paid at Rochester, NY (USPS 022-138). Address changes: CITY, 280 State Street, Rochester, NY 14614. Member of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and the New York Press Association. Copyright by Rochester Area Media Partners LLC, 2021 - all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, photocopying, recording or by any information storage retrieval system without permission of the copyright owner.

WXXI Members may inquire about free home delivery of CITY including monthly TV listings by calling 585-258-0200.