I didn’t set out to become a journalist. I came to college wanting to be a writer—novels, maybe, something creative. But I enrolled in a few media courses, and somewhere along the way, I fell in love with the practice of uncovering truth. The skills overlap more than people think. Both require observation, precision, knowing which details matter. I came this far. Why stop now?
So when the Yonkers Ledger asked me to survey the local media landscape—who covers Yonkers, how do they do it, where do 211,000 residents get their news—I took the assignment seriously. Yonkers is New York’s third-largest city. I expected to find something organized, a clear picture, sources that residents knew and trusted. (See accompanying article for more details about local news outlets.)
Instead, I found fragments.
The Search
A search for “Yonkers news” pulls up the Journal News, which is technically the paper of record. But click through to LoHud.com, and you’ll find high school sports dominating the feed. Stories about Yonkers appear between coverage of Scarsdale wrestling and Ossining basketball. The dedicated Yonkers reporter position that existed until 2021 is gone.
The Journal News represents the last remnant of a once much more vigorous local journalism world. In the early 20th century, the city had two dailies: The Yonkers Statesman and The Yonkers Herald, which combined in 1932 to form the Herald Statesman. There was a separate Sunday paper and other papers aimed at more niche markets. Those faded, and in 1964 Gannett, a national newspaper chain, acquired the Herald Statesman. In 1998, Gannett folded the paper into The Journal News.
The last remnant of printed news is The Yonkers Times, edited by Dan Murphy, which publishes regularly and covers local politics. It has a print edition with limited circulation.
Today, social media has become the dominant source for local news, so I moved my search to Facebook. This is where it got confusing. There’s Yonkers Voice, run by Ru Ros, who streams interviews with local politicians. There’s Yonkers Voice Central, which appears connected to the other Voice. There’s Inside Yonkers, Yonkers Spotlight, and Yonkers Newswire. Some of these are run by the same people. Some might be automated feeds that just repost headlines from other sources. I couldn’t always tell which was which.
Then there’s Yonkers Insider, which was run by the late Delfim Heusler, a beloved local media presence who recently passed away.
Yonkers Daily Voice and Patch exist in the online newspaper format, but they’re part of larger corporate networks covering dozens of towns. The coverage feels thin—press releases rewritten, occasional crime reports, not much local journalism.
News 12 Westchester still covers Yonkers, but mostly for fires, shootings, and ribbon cuttings. The days when reporters like Rose Diaz covered the city consistently ended with layoffs in 2016.
Beyond that, there are neighborhood Facebook groups, Nextdoor threads, and politicians posting their own announcements. There’s another social media entity, BP News and Information, that runs a few pages. Individual residents share videos of traffic stops or local events.
What’s Missing
Nobody sits at every city council meeting and reports what happened. Nobody is tracking every contract vote, every zoning variance, every personnel decision. The school board meets regularly—who’s covering it? The planning board makes decisions that affect neighborhoods for decades—where’s the reporting?
When the Herald Statesman existed, reporters covered these beats full-time. They knew the players, understood the history, and could connect today’s vote to last year’s controversy. That dependable knowledge is gone.
What remains is reactive. Something dramatic happens, and it gets covered. The daily grind of municipal government, where most of the real decisions happen, goes largely unwatched.
What This Means
I’m not from Yonkers. I grew up in the Bronx, where I was conditioned to seeing dilapidated buildings and aging infrastructure. When Phil Zisman, the city’s former Inspector General, now a Ledger columnist, took me on a tour of Yonkers, I saw something different. He showed me neighborhoods where Irish immigrants were systematically placed near factories a century ago—close quarters designed for corporate efficiency, but transformed by the people who lived there into something resembling a community. The old buildings are still standing. The bars and pubs those families opened are still there, kept alive by their descendants.
Yonkers was built around unity. The reasoning behind it was wrong—big corporations exploiting immigrant labor—but the people made something of it anyway. They saw each other as family. That’s something the Bronx doesn’t have as much of, though we’re trying.
The Herald Statesman was part of that connective tissue. When I researched the 1988 Yonkers housing desegregation case, I found coverage that filled pages for months—courtroom proceedings, community meetings, political maneuvering, the human impact. Reporters filed multiple stories daily. Readers understood not just what was happening but why. It felt like finding a huge chunk of history that people have forgotten existed.
Today, if a similar crisis hits Yonkers, where would residents go for that kind of comprehensive coverage? A Facebook livestream? A corporate aggregator rewriting press releases? Neighborhood group comments?
I get my news the way most people my age do—TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. The last time I held a printed newspaper was when I was changing my dog’s kennel. I noticed the latest issue of the Co-Op City Times lining the floor. There was a story about a new initiative providing free childcare for two-year-olds in New York City. Something that newsworthy – used to line a dog cage. That image hasn’t left me.
I don’t have an answer for what Yonkers needs. I just know the news infrastructure that once existed doesn’t exist anymore. And I know that when council meetings go unwatched and zoning decisions go unreported, the people who benefit are rarely the residents.
The Herald Statesman building still stands at 44 Wells Avenue. It’s luxury apartments now. A mural acknowledges what the building used to be. That’s about all that remains.
