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March 21, 2009
Sign of the times: Forest City Ratner buys welcome ad in the Brooklyn Paper
Atlantic Yards Report
This week, Forest City Ratner welcomed its new tenant, the Community Newspaper Group of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, to its new office at MetroTech.
The Courier-Life chain was well on its way; now that the Brooklyn Paper has joined Murdoch's fold, the landlord ran a full-page ad (above; click to enlarge) on the back page of this week's Brooklyn Paper, as well as an ad in the Courier-Life.
It's the first Forest City Ratner advertisement in the Brooklyn Paper in recent years, at least as far as I remember. The developer has been happy to advertise in the Courier-Life, however.
Will the developer keep advertising in those papers? Will that advertising have any influence on the editorial pages or even news coverage?
We'll see, but I did speculate that the Brooklyn Paper's news coverage of Atlantic Yards will diminish somewhat (as it already has), and its editorial criticism will diminish even more.
NoLandGrab: Also interesting in this issue of the Brooklyn Paper is a page-two full page ad (link to a PDF) for Mike Bloomberg, an Atlantic Yards supporter.
More coverage...
New York Times A Scrappy Local Paper Ponders Its New Parent
“The Brooklyn Paper’s always had a very independent feel, and we’ve been told to continue that feel,” said Mr. Kuntzman, whose paper is peppered with playful headlines with exclamation points. “We’re a scrappy paper. We always have been; we always will be.”
Some media-vigilant Brooklynites are skeptical. For example, while The Brooklyn Paper has been generally critical of the controversial Atlantic Yards development project, other News Corporation publications, such as The New York Post, have supported it.
“I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that The Brooklyn Paper’s news coverage of Atlantic Yards will diminish somewhat (as it already has), and its editorial criticism will diminish even more,” wrote Norman Oder, a critic of the development, on his blog Atlantic Yards Report.
Posted by steve at March 21, 2009 7:51 AM