I compiled this archive of NY Times coverage through a selective word search via the newspaper’s online search engine of 12 place or event names associated with the Mid-Hudson Valley (Orange, Putnam, Dutchess, Ulster, Columbia and Greene Counties). The terms I searched on were: (1) Beacon (2) Catskill (3) Germantown (4) Hudson (5) Kingston (6) Millbrook (7) Newburgh (8) Poughkeepsie (9) Rhinebeck (10) Rosendale (11) Windham (12) Woodstock. The years I limited my search to were 2002 to 2022.
I chose these names because they’re fairly distinct to the region (if not unique: e.g., Germantown is also the name of neighborhoods in Philadelphia and Nashville). When one of the place names generated a result, that entry typically listed other Hudson Valley locales, including other search terms, which means soon I encountered recurring entries across different searches. An editorial convention of New York Times reporting is that articles will often introduce readers to smaller Hudson Valley towns via their distance from a notable city in the region: e.g., “Another mass transit alternative is the Metro-North train from Poughkeepsie, a 30-minute drive from High Falls” (the latter being the focus of this article).
Since my original 2019 post, which used nine search terms that were in some cases phrased more narrowly (e.g., “Dia:Beacon”), my research assistants have some painstaking work adding five more years combing through noisy results for “Beacon,” “Hudson,” “Catskill” and “Woodstock”. This has resulted in an archive of 694 NY Times articles.
I also searched on “Peter Applebome” — who wrote the much-debated 2011 article “Williamsburg on the Hudson” (and later became the Times’ deputy national editor before leaving the paper) — just to see if he had other Hudson Valley writings. Sure enough, he wrote a recurring “Our Towns” column in the 2000s that added many more articles about small-town Hudson Valley to the archive.
The archive excludes certain kinds of New York Times pieces. Most importantly, I didn’t count Calendar and other event listings that featured the names I searched. (Note that the Times’ Westchester edition began using a new section headline, “What to do in the Hudson Valley,” in 2015). Also, I didn’t include Weddings announcements — a genre that has been quite good to the Hudson Valley.
Other things I excluded: Opinion pieces and Letters to the Editor; Obituaries; sports reporting narrowly focused; art, book, food, and restaurant reviews; electoral events, court cases, and government forums incidentally held in the region; news of events, activities and trends happening specifically within the region’s colleges; articles where the only Hudson Valley reference was expert quotes from the region (Poughkeepsie’s Scenic Hudson and Millbrook’s Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies of Ecosystem Studies are go-to sources); and Hudson Valley articles and references that are mostly historical or scientific in nature.
Sometimes the Times published the same article by the same reporter around the same date but gave it different headlines (for instance, this one and this one from May 22, 2005). Although these result in different search results that could boost the potential number of articles in my archive, I wanted to be conservative when testing various hypotheses that the Times depicts the Hudson Valley as primarily a travel or real estate concern — so I only counted one of these articles. Relatedly, the Times’ online platform often embeds separate slideshows or videos within online articles (particularly the “Living In…” column found in Travel and Real Estate sections), including many pieces about Hudson Valley places. I only included the regular report in my archive and not the accompanying online slideshow if they were published on or near the same date; by contrast, I count both if the article anchors later-published slideshows and videos (see e.g. this real estate article edited as a portal for much Hudson Valley content).
I cited only one piece from news stories that the Times reported over consecutive days in multiple articles (most often lurid law-and-order stories). This may understate the ways that certain Hudson Valley places (like Poughkeepsie and especially Newburgh) seize the attention of NY Times readers — usually in a negative way.
Another convention of New York Times reporting is worth noting: the Hudson Valley and its specific locales were often reported along other sub/ex-urban areas like Long Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. I leave to the reader to decide whether these regions are all alike, and/or whether this illustrate what Times writers and editors presume are the most relevant frames for ‘their readers.’
I made a judgement about including articles where individuals’ biographical connections to the Hudson Valley (e.g., attending college) occurred in the past. You would be surprised and eventually bored by how many people written about in the Times have lived somewhere up here at one point in life; I tended to include these of they conveyed some local feature or view of life in the Hudson Valley.