Pulitzer-Eligible Longform Piece Confirms City’s Residents Are Stressed, Expensive-to-House, and Annoyed by the Coverage
Six Thousand Words on Why New York Is Hard: A Comprehensive Summary
The New York Times published a six-thousand-word investigation Sunday into why New Yorkers report lower life satisfaction than residents of comparable global cities, drawing on fourteen months of reporting, forty-three interviews, four data sets, a proprietary polling methodology, and the individual experiences of seven New Yorkers whose lives were described in the kind of detail that suggests the reporters spent more time with them than their families currently do. The piece runs with the headline ‘Why Is New York So Hard?’ and a subheadline that summarizes the conclusion as ‘It’s Complicated.’
Key findings of the investigation include: housing is expensive; the subway is unreliable; working hours are long; social isolation is increasing; and the gap between New York’s cultural promise and its lived reality is a source of specific psychological stress for people who moved here specifically because of that cultural promise. These findings align closely with the findings of a similar Times investigation in 2019, a similar Times investigation in 2016, a similar Times investigation in 2013, and the general awareness of every person who has lived in New York for more than six months.
New Yorkers Respond
The piece generated approximately four thousand comments on the Times website, of which analysis suggests: thirty-one percent disputed the methodology; twenty-two percent said New York is actually great and the reporter doesn’t understand it; nineteen percent said New York is terrible and the reporter understated how terrible; fifteen percent said they moved to Austin/Portland/Nashville and it is better; and thirteen percent said New York is terrible and they will never leave, a position that no commenter appeared to find contradictory. ‘This is a bad city,’ said one commenter with four thousand upvotes. ‘I have lived here for twenty-two years and will live here until I die. This piece explains nothing.’
Full investigation at The New York Times. Comedy: The Onion.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK