In 2019, I posted on this blog about how the New York Times has written about places, people, issues, and changes in the Hudson Valley since the new millennium. The piece seemed to hit a nerve with HV readers on social media, maybe because they had encountered one too many lifestyle/real estate profiles about the region that appeared to be written for New York City residents, not the locals of this exurban/rural hinterland. (Here’s the latest such Times article, barely two weeks old.) The blogpost included an archive of some 400 Times articles that I compiled as just one source of data for the multi-pronged, mixed-methods study that Joshua Simons and I published in City & Community on the Brooklynization of the Hudson Valley. But the response to the blogpost suggested to me that I should take up a more systematic investigation of how the Times reports on the Hudson Valley.
Then COVID-19 hit, leading (among other things) to the introduction of “pandemic exodus” and its corollary “pandemic gentrification” into public discussion. New waves of metropolitan migrants appeared in the Hudson Valley, first in second homes and Airbnb units, then in local schools and real estate markets. When the dust settled and a new normal arrived, the Hudson Valley had become an unmissable fixture in the NYC metropolitan galaxy — or at least the Times’ editorial style guide.
Consequently, I’ve revisited and expanded the archive of New York Times reporting on the Hudson Valley for analysis in a new academic article. I’m delighted to share some preliminary results of this work — starting with the archive of 694 articles, published between 2002 and 2022, that the New York Times has written about some place, person, or news item associated with the Hudson Valley. These have been formatted into pages of headlines and sample quotations that, read together, comprise some sort of uber-narrative about the Hudson Valley, if not one that locals would necessarily recognize from their everyday world. If you subscribe to the Times, log into the paper’s website, then click on any headline in the links below to pop out the story in question.
How did I assemble this archive?
This archive is 58% larger than the one that originally accompanied my 2019 blogpost, for two reasons. First, it includes five more years of Times articles, found in a search of the Times website through 12/31/22 — a reasonable point, by my estimation, to presume the new normal of post-pandemic life and economy had settled in. As a case in point, the last entry here was originally published on December 7, 2022 in the Real Estate section: “High Falls, N.Y.: A Tiny Place That Makes a Big Impression.” Sure, I can keep collecting more articles, but I have to stop somewhere, and I figured through 2022 is a point sufficient to capture any post-pandemic changes in the Times’ reporting.
Second, I added new place-based search terms to add more articles about the Hudson Valley. A methodological digression: the Times doesn’t necessarily tag its articles about any particular municipality, individual, activity, or news item connected to the Hudson Valley with a simple “Hudson Valley” tag. These articles are scattered (albeit unevenly — see below) across the newspaper’s many sections, from U.S. and Business to Arts and Food, and they have to be retrieved via the Times website’s search engine. My archival search strategy relies upon the paper’s editorial convention of introducing readers to smaller Hudson Valley towns via their distance from a notable city in the region. For instance, in the aforementioned High Falls article, this hit from the fourth-to-last paragraph: “Another mass transit alternative is the Metro-North train from Poughkeepsie, a 30-minute drive from High Falls.”
This archive draws upon twelve place-based search terms: (1) Beacon (2) Catskill (3) Germantown (4) Hudson (5) Kingston (6) Millbrook (7) Newburgh (8) Poughkeepsie (9) Rhinebeck (10) Rosendale (11) Windham (12) Woodstock. I can’t overstate how much noise-to-signal are generated by the most generic of place-names in this region: Beacon, Catskill, Kingston, Hudson, and Woodstock. It took three undergraduate students a whole academic year to weed through the false positives yielded by such names (“a beacon in these dark times,” “this Manhattan property overlooks the majestic Hudson,” “baby boomers nostalgic for the Woodstock era,” etc.) and arrive at only articles that mention specific places of the Hudson Valley. And even the resulting archive of 694 articles is most likely not as large as if I instead searched on each of the approximately 125 names of the region’s municipal places. For more methodological discussion, including the kinds of articles that I don’t include in the archive (wedding announcements, obituaries, art reviews, etc.), click here.
Some preliminary findings
Over this summer, my undergraduate assistant Neil Kotru Gode and I will use the method of content analysis to discern and analyze patterns that can be observed from the explicit references and implied meanings of the hundreds of thousands of words that constitute this archive of n=694 articles. In a nutshell, content analysis involves making quantitative measurements of the meanings that literature scholars and other humanists qualitatively interpret. The subjective element of a reader’s interpretation can’t be eliminated entirely, particularly when dealing with latent content, that is, themes and references that aren’t reducible to the appearance of specific words, but which competent readers can nonetheless discern out of a basic reading. So, Neil and I will have to reach a certain level of intersubjective agreement about, e.g., the genre that any particular Times article represents. But other content is manifest, that is, “objectively” observable as explicit textual patterns. Two such categories of NYT articles can be read at the very top of any article: the year it was published, and the newspaper section it is assigned to.
Sifting through the archive by year shows that the Times hasn’t produced a consistent volume of articles about the Hudson Valley. It generally published more in the early years of 2022-2022, with a peak of 54 articles in 2006. (Put differently, those first five years in the period under review here account for a third of the entire archive.) The volume would drop to its lowest point of 18 articles ten years later. The year of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter, 2020, coincides with a new burst in volume with 43 articles. The first year (2002) and the last year (2022) both correspond to 45 articles each year. (For those who follow the statistics, the mean in this distribution is 33.0, with a standard deviation of 10.8.)
From just the number of articles produced each year, it’s very difficult to reach any explanations for the “why” behind this pattern. It may reflect some patterns in population: the region’s population grew slowly and unevenly in the period before the pandemic, with the biggest increase in exurban Orange County masking stagnation/declines in rural counties. But such a hypothesis presumes that the Times “writes for” its subscriber market across the metropolitan region — a difficult account to accept, given the vast size of the Times’ non-metropolitan (indeed international) market as well as the number of competing Hudson Valley newspapers (which sadly struggle to stay afloat).
This chart categorizes the newspaper section shown on the NY Times website (normally in bold capitalized font at the top navigation bar) for each of the 694 articles. It collapses the 50 different section names that can be found across the archive. So, Art & Design, Music, Performances in N.Y.C. etc. are now just Arts; New York includes what used to be called Metro and is sometimes still called N.Y./Region; Fashion, Food, and T Magazine now fall under Style; and Travel includes Escapes and Weekends. Other is a miscellaneous category including venerable sections like Opinion, World, and New York Times Magazine that account for just 19 articles (3%) in the archive. Importantly, I separate Real Estate from the other Business sections (Commercial Real Estate, Dealbook, Entrepreneurship, etc.) — a coding decision that reflects the contrast of personalized profiles (e.g., “They Fled for Greener Pastures, and There Were Weeds”) and gossipy quality of most Real Estate articles to the dollars-and-sense orientation and expert sourcing of Business articles.
What does the chart show? First, a steadily declining volume of Hudson Valley articles in the Times’ New York and Business sections. The New York section is the editorial descendant of the old “Metro” moniker that once corresponded to the last few pages of the print newspaper’s A section, right before the Opinion pages. Although New York was never just limited to news only — the section used to run the human interest column “Our Towns” through about 2011, while its analogues in the Westchester County and Long Island print editions regularly featured a bric-a-brac of article genres that still appear under New York on the website — its historic appearance in the A section associated with “hard news” and “serious editorialism” surely say something about the editorial standards for this section. It should be noted that today, aside from a slim Metropolitan section in the Sunday paper, New York has no designated home in the print edition; the section title mostly operates as a free-floating signifier on the website for articles that may appear anywhere across the print version.
Second and relatedly, the chart shows an increasing volume of Hudson Valley articles in the so-called “soft news” sections. Real Estate has grown steadily, peaking with 21 articles by 2022 (or 48% of that year’s total output). Arts remains small but vigorous, with absolute peaks of 6 articles in 2003 and 2021 that grow proportionately more substantial toward the latter year (15% and 18% of the respective years’ output). If Travel diminishes in its Hudson Valley coverage noticeably after 2008, it appears that many of its old editorial beats — “Havens,” “Living Here,” “Weekender” — evolve around this same time into HV “House Tours” and “What You Can Get For…” coverage under the Real Estate section. Did the archetypical “Hudson Valley traveler” of the New York Times subscriber market become the archetypical “Hudson Valley second-homeowner”?
This is a piece of the “Brooklynization” picture that our content analysis is still drawing. Newspaper sections are not the same as article genres, and valuable, even-handed reporting can appear under any section; we can investigate these theses more carefully. But as I see it:
Conventional news reporting and human interest writing of the kind often found in the New York section has tended to depict Hudson Valley places and communities as settings where family, work, school, social problems, politics, and other familiar concerns of metropolitan life happen. The volume of this kind of reporting has declined, with a precipitous drop after 2011 relieved mostly by coverage of hurricanes, elections, BLM, and of late COVID.
By contrast, articles in the Real Estate section have modestly grown, and articles in Arts and Style sections and Lifestyle genre have held steady, across the period examined here. This kind of coverage reports the Hudson Valley as settings where NYC residents participate in (or at least aspire to) private activities charged with cultural capital: remote work, homeownership, outdoor recreations, culinary and cultural activities in a celebrated region where New Yorkers can “get away from it all.” The livelihoods, concerns, and politics of the Hudson Valley’s existing communities receive less attention.