I Never Thought I'd Be Here
About JAMESTOWNY: Local news and features. Produced by humans. In Jamestown.
“I never thought I’d be here.”
It was the early 10s, the before times, and myself along with a couple other New York City journalists — I personally consider “journalist” a too-precious term for how I make my bones (I have been a reporter since the turn of the century and a reporter/editor since not long afterward; I don’t journal; I have never journaled), but most civilians don’t perceive the difference and (rightly) wouldn’t care if they did and it’s not as clunky as “reporters and editors,” so: “journalists” — were swapping six-word stories on Twitter, with one another and our readers.
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” You know the deal.
I was born and raised in the rural south. My first home was a trailer, as the euphemism “manufactured housing” was not yet invented. It was a single-wide. In a trailer park. Rented.
On this day decades later, at my desk in my apartment in Manhattan (Inwood 4EVR) — possibly the last place I ever imagined I’d visit, much less live — I was an editor and reporter for a non-profit news site focused on urban planning, public transport and related issues. We were the first publication to cover, and the only one to unequivocally endorse, the idea of importing congestion pricing from London to the city, during Mike Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor. We came within a Sheldon Silver of getting it approved in Albany, laying the foundation for its eventual implementation roughly 15 years before the stanchions were finally installed.
We helped marshal public support for the bike-share program that would become Citi Bike, and were the only publication in the city to push for the pedestrianization of Times Square. The tabloids — the Daily News, the New York Post, and probably others — reactionary and change-averse as always, were opposed to all of the above.
We beat the tabs, winning bike-share and helping reclaim Times Square as a place primarily for walking, rather than driving, over the course of four years.
I’m new around here, so I don’t expect you to take my word for it. Luckily, it’s in the book.
I have worked in media since high school, when I had a part-time job as a 17-year-old “on-air personality” at the AM station in the tiny town where I was born and raised. Getting paid to spin yacht rock 45s every weekday afternoon was hands-down the coolest high school job ever. A noticeable improvement from McDonald’s, where I lasted six weeks. (McDonald’s was my first job, unless you count that day I tried priming tobacco.) Being comfortable around microphones has served me well as a print reporter, as I’m sometimes invited to talk on the radio or, once they became a thing, a podcast about something I’ve covered.
I got into journalism in the 1990s as a freelance music writer (perhaps you recall my review of “Garbage 2.0”), mostly for what used to be called “alternative weeklies.” That term doesn’t mean as much today, not only because news travels instantly on paperless devices we carry in our pockets, but because in many cases the weeklies that managed to stay alive as the internet ate their ad revenue are no longer an “alternative” to much of anything, since the news outlets they historically competed with — a.k.a. Legitimate Media, distinguishable by fear of cuss words and bigger fear of offending the powerful — have gone extinct, or are on life support and will cease to exist the minute the capital ghouls suck the bones dry.
Jamestown is one of many small markets, certainly across New York but also around the country, hit especially hard by the decline of corporate media. Still, when talking news deserts, many others are worse off than Chautauqua County and environs.
Sometime during college, which I completed as a young adult and finished paying for in middle age, I turned to news reporting. My first full-time journalism job was for an established weekly in a southern college town made famous by football and the local music scene, maybe or maybe not in that order, depending on who’s doing the telling.
As a news reporter and editor at an alternative weekly in the Y2K era, I was obligated to throw stones at the local Legitimate Newspaper, which upon my arrival was still printing two daily editions (!) for a town of about 100,000 people.
Even so, the daily was owned by a corporation in another city, and its button-down access-addled editors were out of touch with much of the town’s populace of students and professors.
I had a popular editorial column, and I pummeled the daily relentlessly. In the process the weekly helped get a bunch of municipal candidates elected — people the daily did not endorse, including a new mayor.
But the joke was on me. What I didn’t know yet was that once a person gets elected, they become an elected. And once on the inside, party notwithstanding, their top concern is remaining there, regardless of what they promised before getting their hands on the keys. In 20+ years covering politics and politicians, I have encountered but one exception: an elected who did exactly what he said he would do, then noped out after one or two terms (I forget which), just as he said he would. Though he lived here for a time, that person is unfortunately not in New York. (Hi Carl.)
I had been at the weekly only a short while before the daily I would later pummel offered me a job. I was invited to their palatial downtown offices, with conference rooms and unsoiled carpet and everything, for an interview, where it was made clear a reporter position was mine for the asking.
By the time I left that southern college town for NYC years later, I had internalized some lessons. One was to never trust a practicing or would-be politician (hence: no more endorsements). Another was that I was good enough at my job to go “legit” should I so choose.
I never went legit. After Dr. J (my spouse), our four cats and I landed in Manhattan, not knowing a soul, I quickly picked up freelance work. This led to a connection at the Village Voice, legendary progenitor of alt-weeklies everywhere, where I contributed a long-form urban planning feature that hit the streets just as the Voice’s then-owners “laid off” much of the staff, including the editor who assigned me the piece. Thus ended my relationship with the Voice.
For the next 11 years I worked as an editor and reporter for Streetsblog, the aforementioned non-profit site that soon became (and still is, I guess) the most widely-read urban planning news source in the country.
Below is a still from a Zohran Mamdani mayoral campaign ad, from earlier this year. It’s a Streetsblog headline of mine from 2008, pertaining to a Midtown Manhattan city bus project the Bloomberg administration ultimately failed to deliver.
Along with transit, planning and development, I covered traffic crashes. Specifically, collisions that resulted in serious injury or death to city pedestrians and cyclists.
On average, a New York City motor vehicle operator — cab driver, bus driver, NYPD patrol officer, truck driver, delivery worker or commuter — kills someone walking or biking in the boros about every 33 hours.
This includes people fatally struck in ostensibly car-free areas, like sidewalks, parks, greenways, and inside restaurant dining rooms. It does not include crashes that cause non-fatal, permanent life-altering injuries, like TBI and amputations, which in NYC are much more frequent than fatal collisions.
I maintained a database of fatal crashes, with details on attendant criminal court cases, which I reported on in the extremely rare instance a motorist was charged, or even ticketed, for killing someone.
I was the only reporter in the city compiling such data, and it earned me another call from above. When Jill Abramson, the first and as-yet only woman to lead The New York Times as executive editor, wrote about the 2007 collision with a Manhattan box truck driver that changed her life forever, she consulted me on background.
Infants, children, parents, grandparents, grandchildren, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, boyfriends, girlfriends, fiancés, friends, food delivery workers, college professors, executives, artists, actors, tourists, pets, journalists — no one was immune. This remains the case today.
After I eventually left Streetsblog and went back to freelancing — like my father and his father before him, self-employment is my natural state — I successfully pitched a NYC-centric animal welfare story that (eventually) served as the springboard for The Scoop New York, which will keep me busy when not working on JAMESTOWNY.
A news site/newsletter platformed on Substack, like JAMESTOWNY, TSNY covers the intersection of New York politics and companion animal welfare statewide — from Buffalo to Brooklyn, as the tagline says. The Scoop New York (subscribe today!) gained non-profit status in early 2025.
A word about TSNY, which is not a little bit sharper in tone than JAMESTOWNY will be: A different objective with different stakes and different players requires different tools. And downward-punching bullies like the ones who run many prominent New York animal “shelters” get what they get. Moving on.
Back in that Manhattan apartment, after a couple decades sharing walls and floors and ceilings with heavy-steppers and DJs, Dr. J and I were ready for something else. Lacking the millions required for a brownstone or other single-family home in the city, as I worked on building TSNY, Dr. J secured a job in Jamestown. We landed in Western New York with three cats and one dog, not knowing a soul, in 2021.
We were drawn to Jamestown by its Goldilocks size (not too big, not too small) and proximity to major metros. Buffalo of course, but — I don’t know quite how to say this — mostly Pittsburgh, in part because yours truly grew up a Steelers and Pirates fan. It’s also one of our favorite cities to visit.
Mi esposa came up in her native Miami before there was an MLB team, and adopted my long lost Pirates (sell the team Bob) via domestic osmosis. She roots for the Dolphins, naturally, but also the Steelers, giving her one team to follow that wins something every once in a while. (Dr. J is not a violent person but she lifts and I will get a shoulder punch for this.)
No city in the world has anything remotely resembling, or rivaling, that museum in Jamestown, New York. The Blue Room itself might be the single greatest tribute to American culture ever to exist.
It is said that America’s greatest inventions are baseball and jazz. Ask me, stand-up comedy belongs on that list. It is the genre’s purest incarnation, it is multi-cultural, and thanks to the First Amendment — which isn’t going anywhere, despite what you might have heard — no nation on the planet has ever enjoyed such an art form.
It’s not that you could plop the National Comedy Center on Central Park West and no one would bat an eye. That much is a given; the Upper West Side should be so lucky. It’s that no city in the world has anything remotely resembling, or rivaling, that museum in Jamestown, New York. The Blue Room itself might be the single greatest tribute to American culture ever to exist. LaWanda Page alone — I mean, come on.
In the years since we arrived, we’ve also come to recognize how much Jamestown and CHQ have going for them beyond the comedy center, Lucy, Desi, Justice Jackson and 10,000 Maniacs, our Gen Xer favorite.
Jamestown has thorny problems to tackle, for sure, most of them not of its making. Steady work that pays a living wage is hard to come by. There is rampant derelict housing alongside rampant homelessness. Dr. J and I have never felt unsafe here, but many do. People in Western New York are hurting, same as everywhere.
That’s one side of the ledger. On the plus side, Jamestown is close to major cities in three states. It has a walkable urban core — a rarity for American towns of any size. There’s a vibrant and diverse restaurant scene. Scores of similarly-kick ass retail shops and other small business. Chautauqua Lake, the river walk and other natural attractions too numerous to mention. Summers so gorgeous they make up for the nearly-Subarctic winters (you can take the boy out the south …). The existence of Southern Tier. The existence of BPU (again: infrastructure nerd). Jamestown Farmers Market. Jamestown farmers. The Labyrinth/Brazil benevolent empire. To say nothing of the Reg Lenna, Chautauqua Institution and other havens for culture and the arts. And lest we forget: Tarp Skunks, who on any given day might give the Bucs a run for their money, assuming Skenes is hog-tied in the dugout.
There’s something about living in this jewel of a town, tucked in a corner aaalll the way across New York from that Inwood apartment, that feels like being in on a secret. With JAMESTOWNY, I aim to share that sense of discovery with other recent arrivals and prospective transplants, certainly. I also hope to share it with the many Jamestown residents whose roots here go back generations — those who remember the area’s industrial heyday and long for a return to such prosperity — and those somewhere in between, like me and Dr. J.
I happen to be bullish on Jamestown. Affordable housing, prime location, affordable utilities (BPU FTW!), a ready-made workforce — what’s not to love?
Now to brass tacks. Beginning in January, JAMESTOWNY will post an original, 100 percent local news story or feature two to four times per month, depending on the complexity of the material.
It could be a small business profile (expect lots of small business profiles — entrepreneur recognize entrepreneur); a photo essay (Dr. J will handle as much photography as I can convince her to deal with, for reasons that will become apparent); or an interview with a local leader or luminary, police officer, firefighter, ER surgeon, ER nurse, educator, squatter, social worker, Seneca official, tradesperson, dispensary staffer, or the nice lady working the Burger King drive-thru.
I’m fascinated with the Chautauqua movement from the turn of the 20th century, which I had zero knowledge of before the move here. Expect occasional dives into local history and many trips between Chautauqua Institution and JAMESTOWNY HQ.
It might be a hard news story, like how the actions and inactions of electeds in Albany and DC — electeds who represent Jamestown and CHQ, in particular — affect the citizenry, directly and indirectly, for better and for worse. Or coverage of children lost to traffic collisions, which has happened multiple times in recent years, analyzing the factors that contributed to each crash with an eye toward preventing the next one. (It is never the child’s fault. Not even a little bit. Ever.) There will be victim-centered stories on homelessness, addiction and poverty — causes as well as effects.
What you will never see on JAMESTOWNY: knee-jerk deference to decision-makers, regardless of political persuasion, and press releases presented as news.
Or it may be a personal essay, on that time I got married in Vegas; when R.E.M. invested in my newspaper; shopping for dental floss with Jeff Goldblum; cocktail parties with Meryl Streep and Ira Glass and Wallace Shawn (“Inconceivable!”); my most recent trip to the Blue Room (Hi LaWanda!); or the last thing Spalding Gray said to me before our respective brain surgeries.
What you will never see on JAMESTOWNY: knee-jerk deference to decision-makers, regardless of political persuasion, and press releases presented as news.
As a subscriber, you’ll get stories from JAMESTOWNY delivered directly to your inbox. When I post a piece on The Scoop New York that’s relevant to Jamestown, including in-session coverage of the state legislature, I will also publish it on JAMESTOWNY. TSNY stories cross-posted on JAMESTOWNY will not be paywalled.
Sooner rather than later, if I get a say, there will be a JAMESTOWNY podcast, also accessible to subscribers.
Writing is my livelihood. With a dog, four cats AFAIK, and a baby non-profit to help support, I can’t afford to make JAMESTOWNY free. To make up for that, in part, I hope to make the JAMESTOWNY social media feeds worthwhile to paid subscribers and casual followers alike, with free Instagram news shorts and daily Jamestown/CHQ photos from me and Dr. J.
The JAMESTOWNY Instagram account was activated earlier this month. Our Facebook feed began with this post. From today forward, the JAMESTOWNY Facebook page will also host daily local beauty shots.
JAMESTOWNY subscriptions are $10 per month. Annual subs are $100 per year — 17 percent off the monthly rate. If you subscribe before January, your payment cycle, whether annual or monthly, will be paused after the first payment and restarted when JAMESTOWNY officially goes live.
In other words, regardless of when you sign up in 2025, your subscription will effectively begin in January 2026.
In addition to complete site access, all paid subscriptions come with site commenting privileges and a JAMESTOWNY sticker, mailed to you.
Readers who sign on for an annual subscription through March 20, the first day of spring, also get a $10 ShopLocalCHQ Gift Card accepted by scores of local businesses, bringing the annual-subscriber total discount to 25 percent.
My goal is to make JAMESTOWNY worthy of its name. A community asset. I have a ton of ideas for the site that I’m excited to share with you. If I’m doing my job, that enthusiasm will be infectious.
Down south, I watched a lot of Bills games during the Jim Kelly era. I remember just where I was for “wide right.” As someone who didn’t make it north of Virginia until my 20s (to Three Rivers Stadium, for a Steelers game, natch), Buffalo may as well have been on a different planet.
I never thought I’d be here, but feel very fortunate to have made my way.
I look forward to meeting you.
It’s gonna be great, y’all.
Best.
