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The news still came as a shock, even if expected, like hearing that an elderly family member has died. The end had been coming for a long time. Skinny and sickly, the Jersey Journal was finally being taken off life support. The paper will fold in February. Seventeen employees, including nine full-timers, are being laid off.
Jersey City, the second-largest city in New Jersey, a faded industrial center now filled with modern skyscrapers and million-dollar brownstones that sits directly across the Hudson River from Manhattan, will no longer have a daily.
Founded in 1867 as the Evening Journal (the name changed in 1909), the paper was an early stop in many illustrious careers, including those of Game of Thrones writer George R.R. Martin, a raft of New York Times staffers like Tracey Tully, who covers New Jersey now, and Jim DeRogatis, the Chicago Sun-Times writer who broke the R. Kelly story. It was a medium-size paper with big-city problems and dreams.
I worked there for three years in my mid-twenties, one of a staff of two dozen reporters, many of them Columbia journalism grads transplanted from faraway places like Colorado and California. The city and the surrounding towns, townships, and cities of Hudson County had all kinds of troubles and made all kinds of news. It had a long history (and a continuing plague) of political corruption (Frank Hague, the city’s boss for decades, famously once said “I am the law!”), the Mafia, AIDS, homelessness, a crumbling medical center and jail, toxic waste. You name it. It all happened on the densely populated streets of Hudson County.
“I’ll never forget one news day,” DeRogatis, a former Jersey Journal assistant city editor, told me. “State Senator David Friedland had gone underground to escape indictment and the Mob and had just resurfaced in the Maldives. A two-headed baby was born at the Jersey City Medical Center. And one of Hudson County’s politicians was indicted. And that was just a normal Tuesday.”
Most of the reporters were passing through, cutting their teeth, learning the basics, getting clips good enough to move on to a bigger paper. Certainly, they weren’t going to get rich working here. You could tell how long ago someone had arrived on Jersey City’s shores by the name they used for the newspaper. Most of these recent arrivals called the paper, with a certain air of fake respectability, “The Journal.”
I called it The Jersey.
My father, a checker at a frozen-food warehouse, and my mother, a DMV clerk, dutifully read it every night after work to see what politician was going to jail or what distant cousin had died. Or vice versa. I learned how to read by poring over its smudged columns. At a very young age I knew all about political corruption, the Mosquito Commission trial, the crimes of Mayors John V. Kenny and Thomas J. Whelan and North Bergen power broker Joey Mocco. I learned to spell those tricky spelling-bee words, indictment and subpoena.
Maybe because their stomping grounds stood in the shadow of New York City’s skyscrapers, the politicians in Hudson County felt like no one was watching and thought they could just steal whatever they wanted. They had big-city chutzpah but small-town skills, the worst of both worlds. They were always getting caught, and the Jersey Journal was always there to write about it.
Whenever we went to the movies in the city’s center on Journal Square (named after the paper, naturally), we passed the Jersey Journal, the unlucky thirteen battered red letters tall and towering above us. I passed them on my way to high school every day and on the way back home.
When I landed a job there, in 1989, the place seemed frozen in time. On my first day, I made my way down the long hallway from the elevator past wooden doors with frosted glass stenciled with names, just like in an old Sam Spade movie. Some joker had drawn a K on the newsroom door. So now it read KNEWSROOM. I passed a gaggle of reporters who were having an afternoon smoke in the vestibule. By the end of the day, the entire building began to shake as if on some fault line. I realized the back of the building held the paper’s printing press.
Once inside the KNEWSROOM, I was surrounded by a cast of characters: the night city editor with a mohawk who wore black leather and chains; the mumbling copy reader with his flannel shirt buttoned to the top, who barked like a dog; the narcoleptic editor who fell asleep at his desk, head slumped; the copy chief (or “slot”) who had famously worked for the New York World-Telegram and the Sun for a week before it closed, and who occasionally wore a whiplash collar for unknown reasons; and the sports columnist who hadn’t used his byline on news stories since the Newark riots of 1967 because, on that occasion, he wasn’t given one.
The stars of the paper were its columnists: Pete Weiss, a little hobbit of a guy with a spark in his eyes, who nervously chewed on his tongue when he was on deadline, and Earl Morgan, the paper’s only Black columnist, who wore a fedora and smoked a pipe. These guys knew everyone in town, carried the city’s culture in their bones, and went deep with their columns and stories. They’ll never be remembered like those columnists across the river, guys with names like Breslin, Kempton, and Hamill, although they should be.
I was afraid to approach them as a cub reporter, but wound up learning so much from them—not just how to write a good lead, but about decency and bravery. When I got attacked for a piece I wrote about racism at a local church feast, Earl came to my defense in his column.
The politics were so corrupt and so crazy in Hudson County that Pete traveled from Brooklyn every day to write an incredible inside-baseball account several times a week. The year before I got there, the editor, Steve Newhouse, fired a reporter for double-dipping on the city’s payroll. This was not 1920. This was 1988. It was around the same time the paper finally switched to computers from typewriters, and from afternoon to morning publication. (My checks still came from the Evening Journal Association.)
I could be grumpy about some of the editing and the salary, but in that dusty KNEWSROOM I learned a whole lot of what I needed to know, not just about journalism but about life.
I learned courage from having to deal with the police department every day, patience from the all-night planning-board and city council meetings, and compassion for those inside the crumbling jail and once grand art deco Medical Center, a ziggurat that is still a part of Jersey City’s skyline. I learned about the law while covering the trial of Mayor Gerald McCann, convicted on fifteen counts of fraud, including swindling a Florida savings and loan out of $400,000. And about science, when writing about the chromium waste buried beneath the baseball fields on which I had played as a kid.
One day a police captain called to yell at me for a headline I hadn’t written. I yelled back, called him an asshole, and then hung up. A few minutes later, the city editor, George Latanzio, came over and perched on the edge of my desk. The chief had called and asked, “Why did that little girl just call my captain an asshole?”
George was calm and cool to the point of being taciturn. But he gave me some advice I’ve followed many thousands of times since. “Next time,” he said, “hang the phone up, then call him an asshole.”
The police were furious, not unreasonably, when a fatal heart attack claimed one of their own and the Jersey Journal announced the news with the terrible headline COP DROPS DEAD. Their response? They ticketed all of our cars in the alley behind the building.
Not all the headlines were that bad. When a judge loudly humiliated a young pregnant woman in court, he was memorably called “The Haranguing Judge.”
The reporters formed a tight bond, sitting down for breakfast before we headed out on our stories, drinking late into the night. I even learned about love at the Jersey Journal. I started dating the obit writer, Wendell Jamieson, in 1990, years before he went on to work as the metro editor of the New York Times. I was covering the cops. We met over the Bayonne Knife Toss Murder. (That’s another story for another day.) We’ve been married for thirty years.
I knew it was time to leave the Jersey Journal when I started to come across my relatives while reporting: my Mafia consigliere cousin, who popped up in secretly recorded FBI tapes at the Mob trial I was covering. And my institutionalized uncle, whose name was used to vote by an especially skanky politician in Secaucus.
I went on to literally write the book on Jersey City, a memoir that would move me up and out of my hometown. While I was gone, the waterfront was redeveloped, the toxic waste paved over, and the burnt-out piers replaced with glass office towers and condos. More newcomers moved in. They read, but they didn’t read The Jersey.
Whenever I visited my mom, who at ninety-three still lives near Journal Square, she would tuck a copy of the Jersey Journal in the bag of leftovers she sent home with me. It grew skinnier and skinnier every year, went from a broadsheet to a tabloid. Home delivery ended. Jobs were cut. The building was rented out. Readership was down from 50,000 when I was there to just over 2,600 a day when the decision was made to completely fold. The Star-Ledger, the Jersey Journal’s big-sister publication, also announced it would stop printing but will remain online, as will other papers affected, like The Times of Trenton, the South Jersey Times, and the Hunterdon County Democrat.
Hudson County’s problems are still there. Just look at the recent coverage of the bribery trial of Senator Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat, earlier this year. Not having a local paper to keep people in check is frightening. Who will call out the haranguing judges? The shrinking and shuttering at local papers has been happening across the country for decades now, our democracy slowly being sucked into the black holes they leave in their wake. But losing the Jersey Journal is personal, for me and all my fellow journalists who started their writing careers on the banks of the Hudson River.
“Kerouac’s On the Road starts here,” DeRogatis reminded me. “Looking at the river, that big bulge of America spreading west—it’s like America starts here.”
And ends here, too.
