In mid-December, the staff of the Brooklyn Eagle gathered for an office holiday party. Some staffers said they had not been paid for at least two weeks—another worker was still missing a paycheck dating back to mid-November. Late payments were a common occurrence in years’ past, according to a former staffer. Eventually they’d get paid, sometimes with envelopes of cash.
But instead of paychecks, the paper's owner and publisher, Dozier Hasty, approached his employees at the party with a stocking full of scratch off lottery tickets, according to multiple people present.
“We were all owed thousands of dollars in paychecks and instead he walked around the office with a bag of scratch-off tickets, and of course, I won nothing,” said one former staffer, calling it “offensive” and “out of touch.” Another said it was a “slap in the face.”
A month later, on January 17th, Hasty laid off four journalists at the Eagle, all on the digital team.
The layoffs included digital editor-in-chief Ned Berke, managing editor Sara Bosworth, reporter Meaghan McGoldrick, and audience and growth manager Cambria Roth. A severance package was not offered to at least three people, according to sources familiar with their dismissals.
The cuts were made as the Brooklyn Eagle seemed to be flourishing—readership was growing, the newsroom had received more than $100,000 in grants, and the website had secured big-name media partnerships.
“People were starting to read the Eagle anew and respect it more,” a former staffer said.
The Eagle had gone from the fifth most-read Brooklyn news site in 2018 to the most-read in 2019, the year when Berke took over the website, Berke said on Twitter after he was let go. “The number of people who visited multiple times a week in 2019 increased nearly 160% from the year prior,” Berke wrote.
The Eagle’s website had won a $25,000 Facebook grant to cover gun violence, had two fellows in the Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship with up to $50,000 in funds each, and was a part of WordPress’s Newspack program. Roth, the laid-off audience and growth manager, had at least part of her salary paid for with the Facebook grant.
“I’m not sure why I was still being paid late if that grant paid part of my salary,” said Roth, who was still behind a week’s worth of pay until Wednesday. “I think I was lucky to be only two weeks behind most of the time.”
Hasty told Gothamist that the lottery ticket handouts were a company tradition, and that the layoffs were a result of a failed investment deal. He had been in talks with Brooklyn Brewery co-founder Steve Hindy for nearly two years about investing in the company, but the deal never came to fruition, Hindy confirmed to Gothamist. Hasty also said there were other layoffs in addition to the digital news workers, though he did not provide any more details.
The Eagle was originally founded in 1841 and at one time counted Walt Whitman as its editor. The paper won four Pulitzer Prizes before it shuttered in 1955. Hasty revived it in 1996 under the Eagle banner after he acquired the trademark. Its print edition, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, still runs five days a week. (Hasty declined to provide its circulation.) Along with the Brooklyn Eagle, Hasty publishes about a half a dozen other papers, including the Brooklyn Reporter, and is a co-publisher of the Queens Daily Eagle.
A stack of Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspapers at Brooklyn's Central Court Building on Schermerhorn Street.
The digital team aimed to bring stories to a "borough-wide audience and do more in-depth hard hitting reporting,” a former Brooklyn Eagle staffer said. “And to me, it seems like Dozier gave up on that. And I think the two reasons are financial and power.”
Interviews with more than a half dozen current and former staffers at the company described disagreements between the editor and publisher about the paper’s editorial direction. All sources declined to be named for fear of burning bridges or retaliation.
In the weeks leading up to the firings, Hasty began to take issue with the website’s “woke journalism,” sources said. The owner and his editor had intense meetings between the publisher and Berke about what reporters gleaned was either late pay, a changing editorial vision, or both.
“We had been following Ned’s editorial vision,” another former staffer said. “And Dozier didn’t like it and didn’t think it was financially stable."
Hasty allegedly prefers “shock value” in news stories; two sources said he had pushed staffers to search for young gang members who would tell reporters they had guns and were willing to shoot people. That type of reporting, one former staffer said, “seemed to negate the entire point” of covering gun violence. Some said that Hasty suggested profiling the Patriot Front as a follow-up to an article about the hate group dropping a banner over a highway in Bay Ridge; a former staffer said this raised concerns because the team did not want to be a mouthpiece for the group.
Under Hasty’s vision for the paper, current and former staffers worry there will be less of a firewall between the publisher and journalists. There would be nameless bylines on copy-edited press releases with little reporting and less coverage of communities of color in Brooklyn, one Eagle source fears.
“I don’t think [the Eagle is] going to cover deep Brooklyn anymore—Bed-Stuy, East New York, Crown Heights," the Eagle source said.
Hasty, who declined multiple requests for a phone interview, and relayed some answers to our questions through his attorney, maintained the Brooklyn Eagle’s digital news entity was an “experiment gone bad.” The website had been struggling financially throughout 2019, he said, and had not grown “appreciably” since July, he said through an attorney.
“Facing financial difficulties that affected many facets of the Brooklyn Eagle company, the publishers felt forced to cutback the digital team, which had operated independently,” Hasty said in a statement. “It was a sad, regretful day for many who were so determined to change the flight direction of the existing Brooklyn Eagle.”
Hasty added, through his attorney, “Despite increase in eyeballs, the publisher and the digital entity did not agree on the nature of engagement and the means to monetize it.”
The Eagle publisher said that the Brooklyn-based investor had been “unable to add financial support to the project.”
Last year a well-known Brooklyn business leader, who had a background in journalism, approached me about producing a more vigorous website for Brooklyn Eagle. To accommodate his ideas, and to test whether or not he wished to get more involved, we created a new company called Brooklyn Eagle Digital, tasked to produce more content and manage a new direction for the website brooklyneagle.com. He brought in leadership of very talented anddedicated journalists, and the project produced many improvements to the existing website. But burdened with many other responsibilities, including his role of leadership on an international scale in his industry, he was unable to add financial support to the project. Indeed, he became a paid consultant to the project for part of 2019. But the difficulties faced by publishers of all sizes--finding a commercial solution to pay for the additional, costly efforts--was not achieved. Facing financial difficulties that affected many facets of the Brooklyn Eagle company, the publishers felt forced to cutback the digital team, which had operated independently. It was a sad, regretful day for many who were so determined to change the flight direction of the existing Brooklyn Eagle. Now, the original staff, working closely with the publishers, are more determined than ever to help the Eagle soar in flight paths and landing places that are more closely aligned to the Eagle’s historic role as a content producer. It is a role that is writing about people of Brooklyn doing things bigger than themselves, exploring solutions to problems as well as exposing the problems, and through it all, engaging and entertaining our readers.
Hindy told Gothamist he had been talking to Hasty for nearly two years, and had been paid about $10,000 as a consultant over that time. (Hasty declined to confirm this.)
“I had always kind of dreamed of getting back into the news business,” Hindy, a former journalist, said. He and Hasty could never come to an agreement on how much control Hindy would have over the company, and Hindy ultimately never provided any capital.
“I’m very sorry that this didn’t work out, I can tell you that,” Hindy said. “I thought we could come to an agreement but ultimately we did not. I’m very sorry about that. I do think that Ned and his team did a fantastic job, and they proved that serious local journalism can draw an audience because readership is way up.”
The Brooklyn Eagle’s downsizing comes as older community newspapers struggle to monetize websites and maximize dwindling revenue from print advertising. Over the past few years, an Eagle competitor Schneps Media has led local news consolidation, buying Community News Group in 2018, and last year, the city’s two freebies, amNewYork and Metro, purchases that resulted in more local media layoffs.
Five editors and seven reporters remained on staff after the layoffs, according to an updated count of staffers on the website.
“There’s very little high quality but narrowly focused journalism in New York City,” said Gersh Kuntzman, the editor of Streetsblog who worked as an editor for Hasty for about a month before being let go in 2018.
“It’s a cyclical thing,” Kuntzman said of Hasty’s management of the paper. “Short bursts of real journalism and then a crash.”
A former staffer added, “It’s just disappointing people worked really hard for [Hasty] and he just dumped them.”
