Editorial
University Heights Here We Come

We have been covering important issues in University Heights over the past few months, such as the community's fight against the city's proposal to build a water filtration plant at a site along the Harlem River and the City Council primary race in the 14th District between Maria Baez and Israel Ruiz (see p. 2)

With our next issue, we will formally add University Heights to the nameplate on our cover page. This means that the paper will now cover all the neighborhoods, their schools, businesses, community associations and institutions within Community District 7. 

We invite and encourage the residents, merchants and community leaders of University Heights to alert us to local issues we should be covering. In fact, we will only consider ourselves successful in this new endeavor if our new readers take an active role in their newspaper by letting us know what's going on, writing letters to the editor, and holding us accountable for our coverage. 

Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit support corporation of Montefiore Medical Center, launched the Norwood News in 1988 so that people and institutions in Norwood would have a way to communicate with each other. Since then, we've grown to cover Bedford Park, North Fordham and now University Heights. And we believe that over the last 15 years we've played a significant role by covering critical issues that have forced officialdom to pay attention to the wonderful, but too often overlooked, communities where we work and live. 

So, we are going to work very hard to bring the same kind of award-winning journalism our readers have long appreciated, to University Heights. 

Support We're Grateful For
We would like to take this opportunity to thank the New York Community Trust for their support of our work. For the last three years, the foundation has made grants to Mosholu Preservation Corporation, which has enabled the Norwood News to keep its reporter on staff and continue in-depth coverage of Norwood, Bedford Park and North Fordham. Prior to these grants, the New York Foundation supported our work, and we are also grateful to them. 

While they are everywhere you look in the suburbs, newspapers devoted to just a few neighborhoods don't exist in much of New York City. That's no accident. The economics of urban newspapering makes it difficult for low-income communities to sustain newspapers of their own. 

That said, the Norwood News has made tremendous strides in advertising over the last few years. More and more local businesses are discovering the benefits of advertising with us and we have steadily added to the advertising opportunities we provide, such as the back-to-school supplement in this issue. 

The Norwood News wouldn't have gotten to this point without the support of our readers, our advertisers, and also funders like the Trust, who recognize that community newspapers serve a critical role in neighborhood improvement. 

Interestingly, the fund within the Trust that provides the grant money -  The Charles Merz and Evelyn Scott Merz Memorial Funds -  has a strong journalistic legacy. Charles Merz was the editorial page editor of  The New York Times from 1938 to 1961 and he considered his best work a stinging attack on Senator James Eastland's McCarthy-era investigation of communism in the press.

"It is our own business to decide whom we shall employ and not employ," he wrote. "We do not propose to hand over that function to the Eastland Subcommittee." 

We are honored to be associated with this bold and independent tradition and we will certainly do our best to honor Merz' legacy.

Back to Opinion Index Page

News | Opinion | Schools | Features | Continuing Stories | Home
About Us | Past Issues