An Unusual Media Start-Up: A Local Newspaper
Kevin Boyle is running his new publication, The Rockaway Times, from modest headquarters in an old taxi depot on Beach Channel Drive. Michael Nagle for The New York Times
Kevin Boyle has done two stints as editor of The Wave, a 120-year-old weekly newspaper in the Rockaways that has long been a source of local news in its seaside Queens neighborhood.
The first came in the late 1990s, and the second began after Hurricane Sandy. But then last month Mr. Boyle abruptly left after his attempt to buy part of the paper foundered and he decided to start his own paper, a free weekly called The Rockaway Times.
And so the Rockaways is about to become something unusual in this fast-moving digital information age — a two-newspaper town.
The new competitor’s name is a play on a local expression, “Rockaway time,” a reference to the casual way of life in a place where everyone seems to be “last minute or late” to everything, Mr. Boyle said.
The inside joke reveals Mr. Boyle’s feel and affinity for the local culture, which he spoke about as he stood in his new, barely furnished headquarters, a former taxi depot on a busy stretch of Beach Channel Drive.
He wore an orange T-shirt bearing the word “Paradise” over a map of the Rockaway Peninsula as he made the case for his brash plan to start a print newspaper amid that medium’s rapid decline.
He cited a need for more coverage of the Rockaways, which is still rebuilding after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 even while experiencing a growing popularity, particularly among surfers.
Starting next week, the paper will be delivered to houses and apartment buildings and left in busy storefronts and other hubs. And yes, there will bean online edition.
As for the other paper in the neighborhood, Susan Locke, The Wave’s publisher and majority owner, said simply, “We’ll all survive.”
Mr. Boyle, 55, hopes to enlist his mother to hand out business cards and to persuade his son to take up a delivery route. For his main seller of advertising, Mr. Boyle, who used to own a bar, tapped a 74-year-old man who used to be his liquor salesman.
His challenge to The Wave has locals buzzing, as does his choice for a newsroom; the greenhouse-like structure has a glass wall overlooking Beach Channel Drive, and still has an old green taxi sign adorned with shamrocks.
The location “lends itself to community input,” Mr. Boyle said. The building was flooded during Hurricane Sandy, and Mr. Boyle and some friends recently refinished the interior and laid a new concrete floor.
On Wednesday, the office consisted of Mr. Boyle’s laptop on a small card table and three folding chairs. Mr. Boyle said he would furnish the place slowly, as the staff — two salespeople and a young, full-time reporter — settled in, because “to open up fully grown would be really arrogant.”
He added, “There will probably be a refrigerator with one or two beers in it, for local color.”
As for filling the pages, he said he had signed up locals to write for no pay: a surf maven for a column on that topic, a bartender to write about bars, and other experts on beach news and wellness. The paper would also include Boyle-ing Points — “a humor column that’s at least funny to me” — which Mr. Boyle used to write for The Wave.
Mr. Boyle will own the paper with Patricia Adams, the publisher of The Forum newspaper in nearby Howard Beach, Queens, which will help with the layout, composition and some other tasks.
At The Wave, Mr. Boyle helped lead the paper to several awards this year from the New York Press Association, including one for its editorials.
He said his new paper would publish on Thursdays — a day ahead of The Wave — and that the first issue would be at least 28 pages thick. Ms. Locke said The Wave, which costs 50 cents, had a circulation of nearly 10,000; Mr. Boyle said he planned to start out printing 10,000 copies of his new publication.
Ms. Locke and Mr. Boyle parted ways after they could not reach terms under which Mr. Boyle could buy part of The Wave. Though Mr. Boyle professed “a warm spot in my heart” for his old paper and his belief that there is room for two papers in the Rockaways, he said that The Wave’s coverage of the community could improve. Repeating one of his running jokes, he added, “I didn’t even read it while I was there.”
Ms. Locke was unfazed by Mr. Boyle’s challenge, saying The Wave had hired a new editor, Mark Healey, a veteran journalist, and that with the new competition, “we’ll be stronger.”
“Everyone wants Rockaway to survive, succeed and grow, and that’s what’s important,” Ms. Locke said.
Mr. Boyle, who grew up in Marine Park, Brooklyn, has owned two bars in Brooklyn, taught college courses on media studies, written a book about the Rockaways and owned a Domino’s pizza restaurant.
He credited his past business experience and his wife’s “considerable understanding for my Peter Pan tendencies” in helping turn him into someone who believes he could tell the weekly story of the Rockaways as well as anyone. Mr. Boyle, who lives a half-mile from his office, pointed to his bicycle outside and said, “Plus, you can’t beat the commute.”
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