15h Anniversary Special: It couldn’t be done without the writers, by George Fiala

Over the years I have learned that the most important part of publishing a paper is assembling a great writing team. Early on I faced an issue with no writers and I had to write everything myself, which was so terrible I made sure it never happened again. Papers like this one have always been a good training ground for journalism careers, and as there are less newspapers around, more great writers for Red Hook.

I think of the paper as having gone through a number of different periods. Matt Graber was one of our early reporters. He has alternated between writing and operating a moving company, with the latter eventually becoming his chosen profession.

He was joined by Kimberly Price, who soon became co-publisher. She wrote some celebrated investigative pieces around the closing of the Long Island College Hospital. She was also a great supporter of local non-profits.

My main business is direct mail, and in those days it was a thriving one. The money from mailing helped support the paper, and at times we were able to afford as many as three full-time reporters, along with both managerial staff and free-lancers.

One fall day in 2016 I got an email from a person named Noah Phillips. His resume was so impressive I didn’t bother reading any of his clips. He came over and I found out he was living by doing chores for a boat docked on John Quadrozzi’s harbor. I told him he needed a full time job so he could get a real apartment, but in order for me to afford to pay him, he would also have to sell advertising.

Noah can do anything—he sold plenty of advertising and wrote a slew of great stories. His piece on Tony, who for many years owned the Red Hook Coffee Shop, won a First Place award from the NY State Press Association.

Along with Noah we had Nathan Weiser, who is still with us! Nathan has a great relationship with the Harbor Middle School, and has provided much of our very local Red Hook reporting. Plus he’s an all around good guy, and a marathon runner.

Emily Kluver lived in Carroll Gardens and wrote a huge number of great stories. One that she worked really hard on was about Father Claudio and Visitation Church. It was called “Celebrity Wedding in Red Hook: Demonic or Dramatic?” There was a uproar among the old schoolers when Claudio rented out the church for a Halloween wedding ceremony, after which the revelers walked down to Pioneer Works for a reception. Here’s a snippet: “However, the bride and groom, Argentinian reporter Nieves Zuberbühler and billionaire heir and New York DJ Julio Mario Santo Domingo, took church leaders and community members by surprise when their guests began showing up in costume.

Noah and Emily were a great pair of reporters, but all things eventually end and another great feature writer, Sarah Matusek, joined us. A real pro as well as a budding actor, she wrote on all sorts of topics, including dead snakes on Valentino Pier, Est4te Four’s unloading of their real estate which led us to the barren UPS site, and Pioneer Works’ garden.

But what I remember her most for was the work we did together exploring the Brooklyn Phoenix newspaper archives at Brooklyn College. Jeanette Walls’ book “The Glass Castle,” was coming out as a major motion picture. The Phoenix was Walls’ first job when she arrived in the city, and I worked with her there. I felt that would be a great and timely story for us, and Sarah did not disappoint. Her story “The Glass Castle author’s time as local community journalist” also won a first place award at the Press Association. Here’s a part of it:

“Her subjects are eclectic; Walls writes about dollhouse and miniatures merchants, a local dance theater troupe, neighborhood celebrations, art exhibit roundups, churches, Brooklyn’s brownstone movement, and beyond. She also pens some service journalism pieces, from how to make that kite to last minute stocking stuffers a week before Christmas. No assignment seems too obscure for the journalist who is avidly training on the job.”

I like to think that Matusek herself has a good book within her. She is currently the Denver bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor.

Erin DeGregorio next joined us. Like Sarah, she was a graduate of the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY. For a couple of years, she wrote about everything interesting in Red Hook as a staff reporter. After COVID, when I had to cut staff, she stayed on as a feature writer, and never failed to come up with interesting stories. She won an award for her story about the Museum of Failure, a pop-up at Industry City.

Erin worked together with Brett Yates, who was amazing to work with. He was such a perfectionist that he not only agonized over every word in his own stories, he insisted on joining me every press night, no matter how long that lasted, to read over every single word on every page. For a couple of years we had very few typos!

Brett is a renaissance man, knowledgable in a whole host of things. I gave him the stories that I always wanted to do but knew that I wasn’t talented enough to give justice to.

One of those was about the Red Hook Initiative. RHI has never been available to us. I once asked them to send us their events to put in the calendar we were doing at the time. The response was that they publicize their events on their window.

I asked Brett to investigate, and he brought in an 8,000 word story called “We Are the Change: A Neighborhood and Its Nonprofit.” I had to print extra pages to run it, but it was worth it. An excerpt:

“RHI board member Brandon Holley extends the ladder of socioeconomic mobility to local kids by hiring them at her startup. “I have employed a number of them, one of whom is now with Goldman Sachs, which is kind of cool. She’ll make more money than I ever will,” she remarked. It’s hard to imagine a clearer distillation of the insufficiency of “opportunity” than this invocation of Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street gangsters whose inveterate greed and criminality just a decade ago helped erase $22 trillion of American wealth, with blue-collar families and immigrants footing the bill in one way or another. (Goldman Sachs Gives is an RHI sponsor.) If, in order to get ahead, a kid from a poor, black neighborhood ends up participating in the system of finance capitalism that works to ensure that the majority of black people in America will be poor forever, we might want to envision a society in which getting ahead is no longer quite so essential.”

Well, I’ve run out of room. You can look at our masthead to see the great talent here now. I am blessed with all these writers, today and yesterday, and I like to think that so is the neighborhood.