A digital broadsheet of news, opinion, and ruminations about the issues that this city faces, contextualizing them within the framework of the nation as a whole.
The very first broadsheets were single sheets of paper: printed on one side, nailed to doors and tavern walls across Europe almost as soon as Gutenberg’s press made commercial printing possible in the mid-1400s. Anyone who could pay a printer could publish one — the Crown announcing a new tax, a merchant hawking imported cloth, a balladeer selling songs, a dissident calling for revolt. The same format carried official power and popular resistance. No editor decided what was news. No institution owned the means of distribution. A sheet went up on a wall and whoever walked past could read it.
By the 1600s, printers figured out that regular publication meant regular income, and the broadside evolved — folded, multi-page, appearing on a schedule. Governments figured out the implications almost immediately. England’s Licensing Act of 1662 required all publications to carry official approval, empowering the Stationers’ Company and government censors to suppress anything deemed seditious or contrary to the established order.1 Licensing lapsed in 1695,2 after which Parliament turned to taxation. The Stamp Act of 1712 imposed a tax of one penny per newspaper sheet and one shilling per advertisement — a levy that hit cheaper papers and working-class readers hardest, since the tax formed a higher proportion of the purchase price.3 The pattern was set: though information wants to be free, power wants you to pay a price.
English-language journalism subsequently developed the practices that would define it for three centuries: regular beats covering government institutions, editorial independence from the subjects being covered, investigative reporting that exposed what officials wanted hidden, and a large enough format to present complex information in detail. The broadsheet became synonymous with serious journalism — The Times of London, The New York Times, The Washington Post — not because of the paper size, but because the editorial philosophy demanded it. You needed room to tell the whole story.
For roughly 250 years, that model worked. Not perfectly — newspaper owners had their own interests, reporters had their blind spots, whole communities went uncovered — but the basic infrastructure functioned. Most American cities had at least one newspaper with reporters attending every city council meeting, reading every budget, following a mayor’s every move, and publishing what they found. The institutional authority of the broadsheet created a shared factual foundation. Citizens could disagree about policy, but they were arguing from the same set of documented facts.
That infrastructure is now thrown into confusion.
The collapse happened quickly. Between 2005 and 2024, American newspapers lost more than 60 percent of their employees — over 45,000 editorial jobs eliminated.4 More than 3,200 print newspapers vanished entirely, at a rate that has accelerated to more than two closures per week.5 The ones that survived consolidated under hedge fund and private equity ownership — Alden Global Capital, the most aggressive, controls more than 200 newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, through its purchase of Tribune Publishing in 2021.6 The business model is extraction: cut reporters, sell real estate, harvest advertising revenue, let the paper die.7 What hedge funds can’t kill, they hollow out. A newspaper that once had forty reporters covering a city now has four, and three of them are rewriting press releases.
Digital platforms pressed into the vacuum. Facebook, instagram, TikTok, Google, and X have no reporters, attend no meetings, file no FOIL requests, and maintain no institutional memory. They are distribution systems optimized for engagement, emotional reaction, for content that makes you angry or afraid. The algorithm doesn’t care whether information is accurate, contextualized, or useful for self-governance. It cares whether you click.
Meanwhile, the economics of digital journalism created a new version of the old Stamp Act problem. Quality reporting moved behind paywalls — the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the major investigative outlets all require subscriptions. If you can afford $30 to $50 a month across multiple publications, you have access to excellent journalism. If you can’t, you’re left with whatever the algorithm serves. Information access is again stratified by income, just as Parliament’s taxes ensured in 1712. Substack, the online publishing platform that allows writers, podcasters, and video creators to send digital content directly to their subscribers’ inboxes while simultaneously hosting it on a dedicated webpage can become even more prohibitively expensive, as subscriptions are to an individual writer or reporter, not a publication with a stable of them, and few cover local news.
The result, at the local level, is what researchers call “news deserts” — communities where no one is watching. No one attends the city council meeting. No one reads the budget. No one files the FOIL request. Officials operate without oversight, not because they’ve earned public trust, but because the infrastructure of accountability has been dismantled. More than 200 counties in the United States now have no local news outlet at all, and more than 1,500 have only one — usually a weekly newspaper.8
Newburgh, New York is one of those places.
A city of roughly 28,000 people,9 and no newspaper covering it in depth. The regional papers cover episodic news well — a stabbing here, a building collapse there, a public official’s pronouncement on a given topic. Writing that builds institutional memory, helps residents understand how their city actually works, who holds power, and what mechanisms keep that power unaccountable is not as readily available.
Newburgh Is America exists to attempt to fill that gap.
NIA is a digital broadsheet — not in format, but in editorial philosophy. It prioritizes depth over speed, original reporting over aggregation, institutional memory over daily news cycles, and accountability over event coverage.
Where NIA differs from the traditional broadsheet model is in what it doesn’t pretend. Traditional broadsheets claimed institutional objectivity — what press critic Jay Rosen of NYU has called “the view from nowhere,” a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer.10 NIA has a named author with a documented point of view. Every essay makes will try to make its reasoning transparent so readers can evaluate the analysis on its merits. Advocacy and journalism aren’t opposites here. Documentation is advocacy, because documents are an argument for accountability.
While I have a long history in the fine arts, site specific art installations, advertising, public relations, advocacy, organizing and a handful of other things, and while some of my art installations can be viewed as a form of journalism, journalism per se is new to me. This will be a learning process, and I will definitely make mistakes. That said, I hope this will be the start of something that will serve the community well as we try to move forward in times that even the 1960s — which I am old enough to remember — cannot match in turbulence. Please subscribe and participate. It will be only as good as we can make it together.
NIA for the next few months is free. Sometime in May, we will be accepting pay as you can subscriptions. More paying subscribers means that I can devote more of my time to looking for and writing stories. It is my intention to post at least one article per week, with guest essays and interviews by other writers, commentators, experts and political figures.
The original broadside was a single sheet nailed to a wall where anyone could read it. Five hundred years of technological change, media consolidation, and economic disruption later, the need it served hasn’t changed.
Footnotes
(1) Licensing of the Press Act 1662 (14 Cha. 2. c. 33). The act required all printed materials to be registered by the Stationers’ Company and approved by designated authorities. See “Commentary on the Licensing Act 1662,” in Primary Sources on Copyright (1450–1900), eds. L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, copyrighthistory.org.
(2) The Licensing Act lapsed in 1694 after the House of Commons rejected its renewal on 11 February 1695. John Locke’s arguments against the statute were influential in its demise. See “England’s Licensing Acts,” EBSCO Research Starters.
(3) Stamp Act 1712 (10 Ann. c. 18), passed 1 August 1712. The initial tax was one penny per whole newspaper sheet, a halfpenny for a half sheet, and one shilling per advertisement. The stamp tax hit cheaper papers and popular readership harder than wealthy consumers because it formed a higher proportion of the purchase price. Enforced until repeal in 1855. Wikipedia, “Stamp Act 1712”; see also Harris Manchester College, Oxford, “Duties and Taxes.”
(4) Northwestern University, Medill Local News Initiative, The State of Local News 2024: “Since 2005, more than 266,000 newspaper jobs have been lost in the U.S., a decline of 73%. Over that same period, newsroom positions — editors and reporters — saw a loss of more than 45,000 jobs, a decline of more than 60%.” localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu.
(5) Northwestern University, Medill Local News Initiative, The State of Local News 2024: “Since 2005, more than 3,200 print newspapers have vanished. Newspapers continue to disappear at a rate of more than two per week.” See also Fortune, 16 November 2023, “America has lost one-third of its newspapers.”
(6) Wikipedia, “Alden Global Capital”: “By mid-2020, Alden had stakes in roughly 200 American newspapers. The company added more newspapers to its portfolio in May 2021 when it purchased Tribune Publishing and became the second largest newspaper publisher in the United States.” Alden’s purchase price was $635 million. See also NPR, 21 May 2021, “‘Vulture’ Fund Alden Global, Known for Slashing Newsrooms, Buys Tribune Papers.”
(7) McKay Coppins, “A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms,” The Atlantic, October 2021. University of North Carolina researchers found Alden-owned newspapers cut staff at twice the rate of competitors. See also PBS NewsHour, 22 October 2021, interview with Coppins.
(8) Northwestern University, Medill Local News Initiative, The State of Local News 2024: “There are 204 counties in the United States with no local news outlet, and 1,562 with only one, usually a weekly newspaper.” See also Fortune, 16 November 2023.
(9) U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census: Newburgh population 28,856. Current estimates (2024) approximately 28,181. See also Data USA, datausa.io/profile/geo/newburgh-ny.
(10) Jay Rosen, “The View from Nowhere: Questions and Answers,” PressThink (pressthink.org), November 2010: “In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer.” Rosen is associate professor of journalism at New York University and has used the phrase since 2003. The concept derives from philosopher Thomas Nagel’s 1986 book The View from Nowhere.
About Newburgh….
This city’s story stands at a crossroads that many American communities face — how to heal from the urban renewal policies of the past while charting a course forward that honors our heritage and embraces an innovatively sustainable future.
The Weight of the past
Our city carries both the privilege and burden of historical significance. The streets that witnessed pivotal moments in our nation’s development later endured systematic dismantling of neighborhoods, severing of community bonds, and the displacement of families, all in the name of progress. The scars of urban renewal remain visible in our landscape — in vacant lots where vibrant homes once stood, in neighborhoods divided by resentments, and in the collective trauma of generations who watched their communities transform not through organic evolution but through external decree.
This is not a local story. It is America’s story. Across the nation, communities like ours continue to grapple with the after effects of policies that prioritized development over dignity, efficiency over equity, concrete over connection.
Beyond Binary Politics
Conventional political frameworks of “conservative” vs “liberal” or Republican vs Democrat are increasingly inadequate in addressing these legacies, reducing nuanced community needs to partisan talking points and marketeer’s slogans. We feel that the renewal of our city — and by extension, our nation — requires transcending traditional political boundaries to embrace a holistic bottom up vision of community development, and solutions that draw from diverse perspectives rooted in the lived experiences of our residents.
A Laboratory for National Renewal
Our city’s modest size is an advantage — it is large enough to face the challenges of urban America yet small enough to imagine and implement innovative solutions that map the lives lived. What we learn and build here can serve as a template for communities nationwide. We will examine issues ranging from the seemingly mundane — traffic patterns, zoning codes, and waste management — to the profound: how built environments shape human connection and behavior, how housing can foster civic engagement. When we discuss traffic rules, we talk about how people move through shared space: how children safely walk to school, how the elderly maintain independence. When we explore industrial policy, we consider not just economic metrics but the dignity of meaningful work, the environmental legacy we leave for future generations, and the resilience of our local economy amid global shifts.
Healing Through Design Intentionality
The trauma of urban renewal wasn’t just architectural. Families lost homes, businesses lost customers, and communities lost gathering places. The physical reorganization of our city disrupted social networks, cultural traditions, and economic relationships that had evolved organically over generations.
True healing requires acknowledging this history honestly while refusing to be defined by it. We must recognize that just as poor design choices fractured our community, thoughtful design can help restore it — not to some idealized past, not to some preordained present, but to a more connected, equitable, and vibrant future.
Michael Lebron
Newburgh Is America
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About the author….
At Water’s Way
I was born by the river
In a little tent
Oh, and just like the river,
I’ve been running ever since
— Sam Cooke
Some folks were born in the city of Newburgh. Some have families that go back generations. And some had to get ourselves here, one way or the other.
I was born by that river. The Mississippi River. In St. Louis, Missouri, about 350 miles north from Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Sam was born. To circumstances not as humble as Sam’s tent, but modest all the same.
1954 was not a good year to be born a Lebron. It was especially not a good year to be born a Lebron in St. Louis, a city known as the Budweiser brewery town but was in fact home to McDonnell Aircraft. That was the year this air force contractor began developing the legendary F-4 Phantom II. By the mid-1950s, McDonnell was the city’s largest employer and a key player in the Cold War defense industry.
That was the beginning.
From there, my family left for New Jersey: first a shotgun shack rental on a farm in Oak Ridge, then more rentals in Butler — a two-family ranch, another shotgun shack, and then an American gothic. Finally, my dad bought a small ranch in Hamburg, home of the Gingerbread Castle.
In 1972, I left the family at age 18 for the East Village in New York City, a bigger city on a smaller river, where I studied art, learned that I was of Puerto Rican descent, and did the kind of stuff some artists do: make trouble with their art.
The East Village was affordable in those days. An artist could make trouble with his art, make mistakes, and still pay the rent.
Some 44 years later, I am walking my dog. I see a new men’s boutique clothing store open up on Lafayette Street. I go in. I see a sports jacket that I like. I try it on. I look at the price tag: $2,700. I look down at my dog: “Mitsy, it’s time to MOVE!”
When I first came to town
They brought me drinks of plenty
Now they’ve changed their tune
And hand me the bottles empty
Through the woods I go
Through the boggy mire
Straight way down the road
‘Til I come to my heart’s desire
If I was where I would be
Then I’d be where I am not
Here I am where I must be
Where I would be, I cannot
— Karen Dalton
Moving to Newburgh, another city on another river, was Liz’s — my wife’s — idea, so I guess the journey to Newburgh started with her. And the journey to her started at The Nuyorican Poets Café.
We left our jobs, came here to fix up some distressed historic buildings to near passive house standards for half the cost, and show the local communities how it’s done.
For the rest of this story, you will have to come back. Maybe in a few days, no more than a couple weeks. Promise (Fingers crossed).
