Another out-of-town reporter has parachuted into Camden and compiled a dispatch from America's most (insert adjective) city. And as is so often true of journalists generally and headline writers in particular, he's...searching for answers.
"Can you gentrify America's poorest, most dangerous city?" Peter Moskowitz wonders for Gawker, the website that takes gossip as seriously as news.
"Can you pose a better question?" I wonder, reading Moskowitz's well-written, but paint-by-numbers, piece. The Brooklyn writer, who's working on a book about gentrification, insists that not one but two of the "narratives" favored by journalists should be combined to tell the city's story: Camden is profoundly poor and dangerous, but there are (simultaneously) signs of hope. Stop the presses and hit send.
This is the sort of news one gathers by driving around downtown, witnessing the Waterfront, checking out a neighborhood or two, chatting up assorted activists, plugging in a few statistics, and perusing recent media tales of the city. Voila!
Moskowitz isn't celebrity scribe Matt Taibbi or NBC star Brian Williams, so his account of Camden at least has the virtue of not being all about him. But some of his observations are imprecise, even preposterous: It really would be news if the city's Fairview section had come to resemble, as he insists it does, "Detroit's tonier suburbs."
One doesn't have to live in Camden to write about it. I've done so for years, and I reside in what some might describe as a "tonier" suburb. And not everyone can immerse themselves in the city full time, as my colleague and friend, photojournalist April Saul, has done with her magnificent Camden, NJ : A Spirit Invincible project.
So let's give Moskowitz, and the parachuting journalists who will follow him, their due. They're paying attention to Camden, a city others would prefer we forget.
--KEVIN RIORDAN