NY Times to Reporters: Please Stop Comparing Everything to Brooklyn
The Notorious B.I.G once asked: “Where Brooklyn at?” According to the New York Times, Brooklyn is at every urban area in the world.
Beijing is Brooklyn. Queens is Brooklyn. Anything that has little artisanal coffee shops, rustic furnitures, and a high saturation of luxuriant beards is Brooklyn. And the Times is trying to destroy that urban millennial beast they inadvertently birthed.
In a letter to the newsroom, associate managing editor Philip B. Corbett nudged his reporters to stop using “Brooklyn” as a “measuring stick” for things like coolness (and, not-so-subtly, the allure of gentrified neighborhoods) elsewhere in the world. “It’s not news that we write a lot about Brooklyn — especially about a certain selection of Brooklyn neighborhoods,” he admitted, but added: the world is not Brooklyn, Brooklyn is not the world, not everyone lives in Park Slope, etc. “What’s next? Describing Manaus as the Williamsburg of the Amazon? Katmandu as the Cobble Hill of Nepal?”
Here is but one example of an egregious Brooklyn comparison:
Chic organic farms, cowsheds serving fresh-picked herbs and tables made from old electric cable spools. Move over, Brooklyn: the South African city’s artisanal charms are enough to make any New Yorker fall in love.
Granted, the whole conceit of this travel essay was an attempt to impress a jaded New Yorker. But really — is the allure of Cape Town best measured by its resemblance to Williamsburg?
Corbett’s plea may have stemmed from a recent Atlantic article, which found no less than twelve examples of the Times comparing random places to Brooklyn, but only that small part of Brooklyn where the hipsters live, and where the minorities don’t live.
(Real quote from an article titled “Oakland: Brooklyn by the Bay”: “Manhattan is to San Francisco as Brooklyn is to Oakland.”)
[h/t Poynter]
[Image via DrimaFilm / Shutterstock.com]
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