New York Sun - April 28, 2005
Staff Clash Over Political Destiny of City Limits By Jacob Gershman, Staff Reporter of the Sun
City Limits, a left-leaning magazine on urban policy, was thrown into turmoil after tentative plans by the publisher to fire the editorial staff and change the publication's political direction were leaked to employees and the board of directors.
Members of the board received last week, through an anonymous source, a copy of an e-mail that the magazine's publisher, John Broderick, purportedly sent to a job candidate for the position of editor. According to the e-mail, obtained by The New York Sun, Mr. Broderick told the candidate the magazine's "lefty baggage" was "dragging us down."
He also told the candidate that the publication's apparent mandate for increasing racial diversity could be loosened, saying that if the candidate took the job, the next person hired need not necessarily be African-American, according to the e-mail.
Mr. Broderick's future at the publication, as well as his role as executive director of the magazine's sister program, the Center for an Urban Future, was left in doubt after the message was leaked to board members of City Futures, the groups' parent organization.
The board of City Futures told the Sun in a statement that it rejected the opinions expressed in the e-mail and would be meeting with staff members and Mr. Broderick today at the magazine's Wall Street offices to convey its concerns. Members of the staff said they are aware of some of the e-mail's contents but are not resigning over it.
"Although the executive director is entitled to his private views, the City Futures board emphatically and unanimously disassociates itself from these views now that they have become semipublic," the board said in its statement."They do not reflect our opinions or policies."
Mr. Broderick declined to comment on the e-mail and directed inquiries to the board.
According to the e-mail message obtained by the Sun, Mr. Broderick encouraged the job candidate to take over as editor of City Limits.
"There is no greater signal that I could send to our collective constituency by hiring the head of a real estate industry trade magazine," the e-mail reads. "It's a way of me saying that journalistic integrity comes first, and that we are willing to give up the old lefty baggage that has been dragging us down."
The e-mail apparently was written in response to a message the candidate had sent declining the offer of the position. That candidate has not taken the job, and the magazine is still looking to hire an editor, a board member said.
Mr. Broderick, who previously worked for the Flatbush Development Corporation, promised the candidate significant editorial and management latitude, according to the e-mail.
He said he would allow the candidate to endorse Mayor Bloomberg, a Republican, and would withdraw "the comment that the first person hired has to be African-American." But he said the candidate would have to be committed to diversity.
Identifying the four top editorial employees by name, Mr. Broderick said they could be "cut loose" if the candidate so desired.
The board said in its statement that it is "dedicated to diversity as a matter of principle and practicality." It also said the organization insists that all City Futures employees be treated "honestly, fairly, and respectfully."
Sources said Mr. Broderick was hired last year to revamp a money-losing publication with a tiny and slipping circulation - said to be around 4,000 - and a progressive mission that had lost some of its urgency in recent years, particularly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
According to its Form 990 for 2003, submitted to the Internal Revenue Service, the magazine received more than $900,000 in contributions but lost more than $100,000, with expenses totaling around $1.3 million. The magazine recently reduced its publication schedule to bimonthly, from 10 times a year.
In an effort to reinvigorate the magazine, a consultant was hired in 2002 and made recommendations about how to enlarge readership and cut costs, according to a member of the board. He suggested that the board conveyed to Mr. Broderick when he was hired that he would probably have to trim the staff. Another board member said Mr. Broderick's mandate "was never ideological, it was a business and management thing."
The journalist who stepped down as City Limits' editor last year, Alyssa Katz, said the magazine has made gains in online readership through its Web site,www.citylimits.org, which she estimated draws 90,000 readers a month. She said the magazine, despite its small size and limited resources, has broken news of scandals in public-housing programs that were picked up by city daily newspapers. In 1999, for instance, the magazine broke the story of how bogus nonprofit groups scammed the Department of Housing and Urban Development out of tens of millions of dollars in housing subsidies through loans intended to rehabilitate abandoned residential buildings.
City Limits was founded in 1976 as a newsletter for left-wing neighborhood groups that sought to protect residents from arsonist landlords who wanted to collect insurance money.
Past employees of the magazine include a longtime writer at the Village Voice, Thomas Robbins, and an adjunct scholar at the Columbia School of Journalism, Annette Fuentes.