I Never Thought I'd Be Here
Your editor humbly submits his bona fides.
The Scoop New York is a website and newsletter covering the movement for a true no-kill New York State, from BUF to BK. NYC ACC KILLS, published by TSNY, enumerates and memorializes adoptable cats and dogs who were exterminated by Animal Care Centers of New York City.
The Weekly Poop will return in January, as The Scoop New York upgrades our facilities at TSNY HQ. TSNY will post not-TWP material once a week through December and will be active on social media as time permits.
The original version of this essay was published by JAMESTOWNY, a new Substack from The Scoop New York prime mover Brad Aaron covering Jamestown, New York, and the surrounding area, home to TSNY HQ.
The following version has been tailored for The Scoop New York, and incorporates some material published previously.
See JAMESTOWNY for the unabridged original version of this essay.
“I never thought I’d be here.”
It was the early 10s, the before times, and myself along with a couple other New York City journalists — I personally consider “journalist” a too-precious term for how I make my bones (I have been a reporter since the turn of the century and a reporter/editor since not long afterward; I don’t journal; I have never journaled), but most civilians don’t perceive the difference and (rightly) wouldn’t care if they did and it’s not as clunky as “reporters and editors,” so: “journalists” — were swapping six-word stories on Twitter, with one another and our readers.
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” You know the deal.
I was born and raised in the rural south. My first home was a trailer, as the euphemism “manufactured housing” was not yet invented. It was a single-wide. In a trailer park. Rented.
On this day decades later, at my desk in my apartment in Manhattan (Inwood 4EVR) — possibly the last place I ever imagined I’d visit, much less live — I was an editor and reporter for a non-profit news site focused on urban planning, public transport and related issues. We were the first publication to cover, and the only one to unequivocally endorse, the idea of importing congestion pricing from London to the city, during Mike Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor. We came within a Sheldon Silver of getting it approved in Albany, laying the foundation for its eventual implementation roughly 15 years before the stanchions were finally installed.
We helped marshal public support for the bike-share program that would become Citi Bike, and were the only publication in the city to push for the pedestrianization of Times Square. The tabloids — the Daily News, the New York Post, and probably others — reactionary and change-averse as always, were opposed to all of the above.
We beat the tabs, winning bike-share and helping reclaim Times Square as a place primarily for walking, rather than driving, over the course of four years.
But don’t take my word for it. It’s in the book.
I have worked in media since high school, when I had a part-time job as a 17-year-old “on-air personality” at the AM station in the tiny town where I was born and raised. Getting paid to spin yacht rock 45s every weekday afternoon was hands-down the coolest high school job ever. A noticeable improvement from McDonald’s, where I lasted six weeks. (McDonald’s was my first job, unless you count that day I tried priming tobacco.) Being comfortable around microphones has served me well as a print reporter, as I’m sometimes invited to talk on the radio or, once they became a thing, a podcast about something I’ve covered.
I got into journalism in the 1990s as a freelance music writer (perhaps you recall my review of “Garbage 2.0”), mostly for what used to be called “alternative weeklies.” That term doesn’t mean as much today, not only because news travels instantly on paperless devices we carry in our pockets, but because in many cases the weeklies that managed to stay alive as the internet ate their ad revenue are no longer an “alternative” to much of anything, since the news outlets they historically competed with — a.k.a. Legitimate Media, distinguishable by fear of cuss words and bigger fear of offending the powerful — have gone extinct, or are on life support and will cease to exist the minute the capital ghouls suck the bones dry.
Sometime during college, which I completed as a young adult and finished paying for in middle age, I turned to news reporting. My first full-time journalism job was for an established weekly in a southern college town made famous by football and the local music scene, maybe or maybe not in that order, depending on who’s doing the telling.
As a news reporter and editor at an alternative weekly in the Y2K era, I was obligated to throw stones at the local Legitimate Newspaper, which upon my arrival was still printing two daily editions (!) for a town of about 100,000 people.
Even so, the daily was owned by a corporation in another city, and its button-down access-addled editors were out of touch with much of the town’s populace of students and professors.
I had a popular editorial column, and I pummeled the daily relentlessly. In the process the weekly helped get a bunch of municipal candidates elected — people the daily did not endorse, including a new mayor.
But the joke was on me. What I didn’t know yet was that once a person gets elected, they become an elected. And once on the inside, party notwithstanding, their top concern is remaining there, regardless of what they promised before getting their hands on the keys. In 20+ years covering politics and politicians, I have encountered but one exception: an elected who did exactly what he said he would do, then noped out after one or two terms (I forget which), just as he said he would. Though he lived here for a time, that person is unfortunately not in New York. (Hi Carl.)
I had been at the weekly only a short while before the daily I would later pummel offered me a job. I was invited to their palatial downtown offices, with conference rooms and unsoiled carpet and everything, for an interview, where it was made clear a reporter position was mine for the asking.
By the time I left that southern college town for NYC years later, I had internalized some lessons. One was to never trust a practicing or would-be politician (hence: no more endorsements). Another was that I was good enough at my job to go “legit” should I so choose.
I never went legit. After Dr. J (my spouse), our four cats and I landed in Manhattan, not knowing a soul, I quickly picked up freelance work. This led to a connection at the Village Voice, legendary progenitor of alt-weeklies everywhere, where I contributed a long-form urban planning feature that hit the streets just as the Voice’s then-owners “laid off” much of the staff, including the editor who assigned me the piece. Thus ended my relationship with the Voice.
For the next 11 years I worked as an editor and reporter for Streetsblog, the aforementioned non-profit site that soon became (and still is, I guess) the most widely-read urban planning news source in the country.
Below is a still from a Zohran Mamdani mayoral campaign ad, from earlier this year. It’s a Streetsblog headline of mine from 2008, pertaining to a Midtown Manhattan city bus project the Bloomberg administration ultimately failed to deliver.
Along with transit, planning and development, I covered traffic crashes. Specifically, collisions that resulted in serious injury or death to city pedestrians and cyclists.
On average, a New York City motor vehicle operator — cab driver, bus driver, NYPD patrol officer, truck driver, delivery worker or commuter — kills someone walking or biking in the boros about every 33 hours.
This includes people fatally struck in ostensibly car-free areas, like sidewalks, parks, greenways, and inside restaurant dining rooms. It does not include crashes that cause non-fatal, permanent life-altering injuries, like TBI and amputations, which in NYC are much more frequent than fatal collisions.
I maintained a database of fatal crashes, with details on attendant criminal court cases, which I reported on in the extremely rare instance a motorist was charged, or even ticketed, for killing someone.
I was the only reporter in the city compiling such data, and it earned me another call from above. When Jill Abramson, the first and as-yet only woman to lead The New York Times as executive editor, wrote about the 2007 collision with a Manhattan box truck driver that changed her life forever, she consulted me on background.
Infants, children, parents, grandparents, grandchildren, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, boyfriends, girlfriends, fiancés, wives, husbands, friends, food delivery workers, college professors, executives, artists, actors, tourists, pets, journalists — no one was immune. This remains the case today.
I used Streetsblog crash data to file regular reports on city traffic fatalities, often including graphs to indicate patterns in what the numbers were telling us. Those DOH/ACC companion animal body counts on The Scoop New York were preceded by Streetsblog data reports on men, women, and children lost to city traffic violence.
I had a Friday column, The Weekly Carnage — the bylines for which were apparently changed by Streetsblog, without my knowledge, when they had an intern or someone delete old images from the posts, as I learned just before typing this sentence. The Weekly Carnage aggregated and summarized the week’s worst traffic crashes, in memoriam to the victims, who were again honored with an annual year-end post.
After I eventually left Streetsblog and went back to freelancing — like my father and his father before him, self-employment is my natural state — I successfully pitched a NYC-centric animal welfare story that (eventually) served as the springboard for The Scoop New York. And here we are.
If not for those regular Streetsblog crash data reports, there would be no TSNY DOH/ACC extermination data analyses. If The Weekly Carnage never exists, neither does NYC ACC KILLS. Just as without Flagpole’s City Dope, there would be no The Weekly Poop.
A word about JAMESTOWNY: I need it. To help preserve my sanity. To allow me to write about subjects that don’t make me want to take a header off the GWB and people who don’t make me wish Pluribus was non-fiction.
Same as what Dr. Morse’s slow horses do all day isn’t normal, neither is reporting on it five days a week. It’s infuriating. It’s horrifying. It’s draining. It’s goddamn exhausting, is what it is.
I am often asked how I do this. There’s nothing special about me. No different from any other normal human person with normal human person morals. It tears (and tears) me up to write this shit as much as it tears (and tears) you up to read it. But what I do is cake compared to the folks on the front lines, including The Scoop New York’s A-team of sources. TSNY is a mere reflection of the horror the advocates in the trenches live every hour of every day.
Yes, a segment of my spine is literal titanium — the business end too, all the way uptown to 207 Street. But I wasn’t born that way.
The Scoop New York is on a day-to-day basis more harrowing than my years at Streetsblog by an order of magnitude. I constantly berate myself over animals I tried to cover but couldn’t. Couldn’t help get them safely away. Because there are too many queued for the gallows for me to address or because they were slaughtered before I knew anything about it or because I took a day off. Breakdowns are not infrequent.
Don’t misunderstand. No one should feel sorry for me. I lead a charmed life, all things considered. I make my own decisions. I’m a middle-aged white man in the United States of America in 2025. I do what I want.
I choose to do this because it needs doing, and because I happen to be a natural-born prolific red-ass. Just the high-toned sonofabitch for the job. (There’s a reference for you, Nolan. Hint: It’s an oldie. First print Viking hardback. No ChatGPT, now.)
And I love my work.
