gquaglia says:

Also know as “goodspeak”

I live in NJ and Newark is a cespool. They need all the good PR they can get, but not at the expense of the taxpayers.

Hal Jordan says:

Give the city a break, it’s not the city’s integrity that is in question here, it’s the paper. Newspapers and magazines have been known to sell space to advertisers. And local governments have invested taxpayers’ money for tourism and PR. If the paper decides to sell all its pages to promote the city, that’s nothing new – they’ve just decided to become PRO-Government just as PC Magazine had always been Pro-PC. Newark Weekly has ceased to become a newspaper and has become a trade paper packaged as a news tabloid.

dandee says:

Being an adopted Jerzoid, living in a city that shares some of Newark’s characteristics and history, and being responsible for my town’s media relations, I was disturbed by the tenor of some of the comments. Thankfully, I decided to come back later to post a comment. In the meantime, a highly respected Op-Ed columnist for the Star-Ledger–Newark’s and NJ’s largest newspaper–did a take on the situation which I am appending below. It says more about the complexities of urban life and issues than I could in as many words–and says it better. Here is the OpEd, and at the end the link to the piece.
——————————————
Newark 40 years later … still the elephant in the room
Thursday, October 27, 2005

Newark: So far in 40 years — but still so far to go.

That, the topic of a staged “conversation” of sorts between a former New Jersey governor, Thomas Kean, and a Rutgers history professor, Clement Price, on the university’s Newark campus the other day.

Sparsely attended, even by Rutgers-Newark standards. In the middle of a storm, in the middle of a campus that makes the search for a parking space a personal “Survivor” episode, just a few hours after the death of Rosa Parks.

Some strange moments. Kean, a Republican — granted, an atypical Republican — calling the people who ran Rutgers 40 years ago “old-fashioned white liberals, good people who didn’t understand what was going on.” That, in the context of talking about his own efforts to establish the Educational Opportunity Fund in New Jersey.

Tom Kean — urban Republican radical? LaGuardia, with a Massachusetts accent?

And Kean, the son of extraordinary wealth, talking about how art institutions transform urban neighborhoods, says this about his own residence on New York’s West Side, before it was transformed by Lincoln Center:

“I was living there because I was a graduate student and graduate students have no money.”

True, most graduate students don’t have money, but let’s carve out exceptions for those, like Kean, whose Colonial-era families owned banks and utilities.

Yet, despite these moments, the 90-minute conversation had poignancy because it recalled a time when prospects looked so grim but hope and energy radiated out like steam floating from summer sidewalks after the rain.

Kean caught the moment precisely right when he said this of the 1967 disorders:

“The idea that people were dying, being shot by their own police, that tanks were rolling in the streets — it was absolutely traumatic. It gave you the sense that we must have done something terribly wrong and we have to work to make it right.”

Kean — at Rutgers because, in retirement as president of Drew, he is a visiting professor — did his part, both as legislator and governor. Higher education reform, urban aid, full funding of the school aid formula, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. No one can take that from him.

Still, Newark is not as it should be. Price himself had it right when he described the “odd, counterproductive relationship between New Jersey and its largest city.”

As a young reporter here in 1964, working the 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift, I’d go out, walking, to lunch at 11 p.m. — and have a number of places to choose from, no need to cross the tracks to the Ironbound. It wasn’t an adventure, just lunch.

I often accompanied a friend and colleague, Bob Christgau — now music editor at the Village Voice — while he indulged his passion for pinball machines downtown at all hours of the night here. Downtown Newark was alive and ambulatory at night.

Now we’ve got a 24-hour Dunkin’ Donuts and that’s about it.

Downtown, in the largest city of the eighth largest state in the union.

New Jersey is not a state that cares overly much what happens to its cities because its leadership, Republican and Democratic, is suburban. And, when it feels the need to indulge in urban pleasures, New York and Philadelphia beckon.

Kean noted that when he attends a function at some privately supported art temple in New York, he reads the names of major contributors. “I keep seeing the names of people and corporations from New Jersey who should be making contributions to Newark institutions.”

Price and Kean both arrived at the same conclusion: leadership. “We should have a leadership that develops policies to drive people back to the cities,” said Kean.

OK, here’s a trivia question: Who was the last New Jersey governor who lived in a city — his or her entire life, not just a few hours after birth — before taking over the Statehouse (and moving into the governor’s mansion which, of course, is in Princeton)? For those who can remember, it was A. Harry Moore.

It’s a state that cares little about cities. If the future of our cities — urban development — has come up as a major issue in the current gubernatorial election, I haven’t seen it. And we have city leadership whose definition of vision is buying its own pretend newspaper to tell it what a great job it’s doing. Real mirrors just insist on showing those signs of aging and decrepitude, don’t they?

After all these years. After all the pain. After all the hope. Still so far to go.

Bob Braun’s column appears Monday and Thursday. He may be reached at (973) 392-4281 or at bobbraun@verizon.net.

and the link:

http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/braun/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/113039355386480.xml&coll=1

Mike Anthony says:

This is a revised version of an earlier post.

I really must jump into this thread. I am a reporter with the Newark Examiner, one of several weekly newspapers serving the city. First, let’s get something straight, Newark is not a cesspool and if you are going to insult the city, the least you can do is to spell the word correctly. There are still many problems that need to be dealt with, but the city has also made great progress over the last few years.

The Examiner is the only general-market weekly newspaper in the city, and yes, we do write serious articles about what is going on in the city. More to the point, the Newark Weekly is not now, nor has it ever been a general market paper.

The publication has never really been a newspaper either. They freely admit they don’t have reporters, they don’t cover very much, the publication is a breeding- ground for mediocre writers and most important, they do not cover news. No true newspaper could accept such a deal with a municipality. Newspapers are supposed to be the average citizen’s watchdogs and you cannot do that if you are in the city’s pocket. For the record, Newark Weekly did not honestly step forward; the Star-Ledger broke the story.

What amazes me is that the city’s so-called political leaders have so little regard for the people they were elected to represent, they are spending tax dollars to feed the populace a pack of half-truths and slanted, one-sided stories.

This publication will have almost no positive impact on the city’s image because everyone is going to know that the “good news” being reported is nothing more than a carefully planned and orchestrated piece of propaganda. Even when the city does accomplish something exceptional, people will doubt the validity of the facts because they will doubt the source. Newark citizens will continue to look at legitimate newspapers like the Examiner and the Star-Ledger to learn what is really happening in the city

Judging by many of the comments I have read here and on other web sites, this decision will probably do more harm than good. As some people here have already concluded that things must really be bad in the city if they have to pay for “Good News.”