BREAKING NEWS: Media Consolidation Rocks Brooklyn

Brooklyn Paper Bought By News Corp & Greenpoint Courier Marked For Death

Just when I thought it was a slow news day in Brooklyn, Rupert Murdoch comes along and turns the borough on its head.

Today, Murdoch, who already owns the Brooklyn Courier-Life chain of newspapers, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal, gobbled up The Brooklyn Paper too. In an article posted just over an hour ago on the The New York Observer's website, The Brooklyn Paper's editor Gersh Kuntzman declares, "We're very excited."

Good thing Gersh is happy, because Brooklynites I called for quick comment are deeply disturbed at the total media consolidation of New York City's biggest borough - especially since all the papers will now be under the control of the ultra-conversative FOX News baron. "It's likely to put a stanglehold on independent reporting and on the ability for people to find out what's going on in their community and influence it," said Carroll Gardens resident Glenn Kelly.

And it's not just the residents of Brooklyn that are reeling from the sudden bombshell. There's likely to be a dramatic shake-up in both the Courier-Life and Brooklyn Paper newsrooms as News Corp. eliminates overlap between the two papers.

According to one of the Optimist's inside sources, the ax already fell today on some of the Courier-Life's unfortunate staffers and the Greenpoint Courier has been slated for extinction within the next two weeks. The Williamsburg Courier will survive annihilation for the time being because it's a cash cow for advertising, but other local Courier versions might end up on the chopping block.

Dear readers, have the Brooklyn blogs ever been more important? We're the only source of true, independent news left in the borough.

The Brooklyn Optimist Sounds Off On Eric Gioia

The Optimist played pundit this week, giving his two cents to Katharine Jose of The New York Observer about all-but-announced candidate for Public Advocate Eric Gioia. I first met Gioia in the early days of his first term as Councilman to Sunnyside, Woodside, and Long Island City when I was managing editor of The Queens Courier, and though I no longer cover Queens I have kept up-to-date about Gioia and his two media savvy terms in the Council.

If you aren't familiar with Gioia, you should certainly read Katharine's fine profile of him in today's Observer. Though I'll likely end up supporting Norman Siegel in his bid for Public Advocate (full disclosure: I've already attended one of his fundraisers), I respect Eric Gioia. Unquestionably, he has been a responsive councilman and an effective representative for his constituents - a rarity in this day and age. At the same time, however, Gioia has made sure to never do anything without being noticed by the media for doing so.

For many, these are the qualities of a model politician. As for me, I don't condemn ambition. Often ambition can be a virtue in politics, for it generally compels the politician to take into account the needs of the people - if for no other reason, but to calculate their own self-interest.

Mediocre politicians tend to be as tiny as their aspirations. They maintain the status quo simply out of convenience. In the Bush era, we've not only come to tolerate widespread mediocrity from our elected officials, we've come to embrace it. At a time when everything our President touches turns to dust, we're just happy if an elected official doesn't make things any worse.

Politicans like Eric Gioia, for good or for bad, at least challenge their colleagues in government to do better.

The Brooklyn Optimist Interviews Park Slope Poet Lynn Chandhok

When the New York Observer weighed in with its top 100 Brooklyn writers a few weeks ago, one of its most glaring omissions was Park Slope poet Lynn Aarti Chandhok. Chandhok is not just one of my favorite Brooklyn poets, she ranks among the most gifted poets of contemporary American literature.

Perhaps it is presumptuous to make such a grandiose appraisal of a poet's work with only one book of verse under her belt, The View From Zero Bridge (Anhinga Press), but as is the case with my beloved Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, who has only 250 or so published poems to her credit, it is quality that defines a writer's opus, not quantity.

Despite the Observer's myopia, the quality of Chandhok's poetry has not gone overlooked. The View From Zero Bridge was awarded the 2006 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and, perhaps more impressively in this lyric-less age, it even found a readership, ranking #8 on The New York Times' best-selling, small-press poetry books this past January.

Staged in a noetic realm spanning her ancestral land of Kashmir, India and her home in Park Slope, Chandhok spins lush, tactile tapestries at once traditional and wholly her own. It is her ability to draw us into her silken saffron-hued memories, so carefully observed and imagined, and then to illuminate the universality of her personal reverie that makes Chandhok's poetry justly important. I need only glimpse Zero Bridge for its most vibrant images to reawaken in my mind - fields of marigolds, singed scraps, a leaping magnet - as if they were recollections of times I myself had lived or dreamt.

It is my great pleasure to share this humble interview Lynn was kind enough to grant me. After the video has played, please take a moment to watch the clips above of Chandhok reading her poems "Long Meadow" and "Confetti, Ticker-tape". I requested that she read these two poems, both set in Brooklyn, because I was particularly moved by them. I believe that you will be as well.

Last, but not least, I would like to thank Catherine Bohne profusely for granting me the use of the Park Slope Community Bookstore for this interview. If you have not lost yourself in the cozy confines of the Community Bookstore you have been adrift in Brooklyn.