A New Gig For The Gersh Man
Gersh Kuntzman became editor of the Brooklyn Paper in 2005, bringing to the job the tabloid sensibility he had picked up from his previous ten years at the Post. He teased out the conflict inherent in every news story, transforming a respectable broadsheet into an attention grabber. The paper’s voice became so identified with him, in fact, that media geeks were shocked when he resigned his editorship in January to take a job teaching Hyper-Local Reporting at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, as well as to oversee its news website The Local-Fort Greene, a partnership with the New York Times. (The day he started there, The Local began to bear conspicuous marks of Gersh’s trademark style, which, full disclosure, our sister publication, The L Magazine, has enjoyed ragging on.) “I left the Brooklyn Paper after working there for six years solely because I had spent the last six years solely working at the Brooklyn Paper,” he tells us. “As much as I loved the job—and I did—it is difficult to do the same thing, for upwards of 12 to 14 hours per day, every day for six years.” Not that his new job will be so much different from his old one: the Paper’s revolving staff of cub reporters were a lot like students. “The difference between Brooklyn Paper reporters, of course, and students is that professional reporters have had the emotions and earnestness removed already,” Gersh tells us. “With students, that dehumanification, that journalistic detachment from the subject of your story, takes a little longer.”
Photo Kirstin Roby