Former editors Edward-Isaac Dovere and Adam Lisberg on the origins of City Hall and First Read

As part of City & State's 10th anniversary coverage, former editors Edward-Isaac Dovere and Adam Lisberg sat down with us to discuss two of the most important moments in the company's history: The launches of City Hall and First Read. 

City & State: What was the media landscape when you launched City Hall in 2006?

Edward-Isaac Dovere: There was obviously a need for something there. We were benefitting from the fact that right around that time you started to see the hollowing out of local journalism, especially in New York. It was this moment when that was happening but there was still a desire for it, and we moved into that slot pretty well. We were also helped by the fact that there was a lot of news going on. By the time that we were up to speed and what we wanted to be and staffed up in 2008, we had a combination of Spitzer’s resignation, all the stuff that happened with Paterson afterwards, and everything that happened with the term limits extension and the run-up to the 2009 races. So the golden years, I would say, were 2008 and 2009. That’s when we were doing our best stuff.

C&S: You moved to Washington, D.C., and joined Politico, which has since expanded to New York. As an outsider now, how has the competitive landscape changed for City & State?

EID: There seems to have been a snap back in certain ways, right? There’s Politico New York, there’s DNAinfo. Some of the local coverage has waned, and some of it has come back. The Daily News’ Daily Politics blog was started by Ben Smith, and then manned by Liz Benjamin and then by Celeste Katz, all of whom brought a lot to it. That being gone now, a lot of other things have stepped in. It does feel like there’s more interest in covering things locally than there was for a moment there, on the one hand. On the other hand, it’s like, what kind of coverage do you do? How deep is it? How intense is it? How much are you making the people in power uncomfortable? I think those are big measures that need to be there for any kind of coverage.   

C&S: Our Winners & Losers list remains one of our most popular stories online each week. How did that start?

EID: I wonder if he’d be OK with me giving him credit. Well, whatever. Jay Kriegel and I were talking about things one time, and he has obviously been around city politics forever and I think has a good sensibility of what connects with people and what doesn’t. And he said something to me like, “You guys should do some kind of list of who’s up and who’s down in politics. People really want to read that.” And I started thinking about it, and that became the Winners & Losers feature. From the beginning, as with other things, the idea was to do it in a spunky way, to really make people read it. I’ve seen some of the ones that you guys have done since, and it seems like that’s carried through. It’s very much the way my brain works, but something I’ve carried through professionally is you make people need to read and want to read and want to be involved with it. Very quickly people were jockeying for that, like, “Oh, make me a winner!” or “Make that guy a loser!” I think the first one or the second one we figured out how to do a very rudimentary online poll for it, and all of a sudden 600 people were voting for it. And then it became a thing, a hook that pulled people in. It’s all from that same spirit.

C&S: How did First Read begin?

Adam Lisberg: There was this gaping hole in the New York media market that nobody was delivering everything you needed first thing – and the key is delivering it. Liz Benjamin always had this roundup of links in the morning, but you had to go to the website and they were all these real quick descriptions. It was a tremendous resource to go through, but it wasn’t delivered to you. And there were other places that had the pieces, but nobody had brought it all together. Darren (Bloch) and Tom (Allon) had been thinking along these lines, and I started thinking about it, too. I thought, you know what I want? I thought, for one of those mornings I have to be someplace at 8 a.m., at an ABNY breakfast or a Crain’s breakfast or meeting someone, I want to be able to read something quick on my commute that will make me feel like I know what’s going on – that even if I don’t click on the links to today’s Times politics story or Ken Lovett’s latest scoop or whatever, even if I don’t read the link, I’ll seem like I know what I’m talking about and everyone in the room won’t know something I don’t. So that was the genesis. That’s why we made it with links to everything, that’s why I organized it in a real bullet-point kind of way with things grouped together.

C&S: What was the thinking behind the various elements included in First Read?

AL: We tried to make it something top to bottom that would give you what you need – you have the day’s sked, have a kicker at the bottom. We started out just doing highlights of the day’s sked, figuring nobody is going to want to know about every little time where a City Council member dedicates a street corner somewhere, but every time we realized we’ve got to throw everything in there. People wanted it, people wanted to be in it, and having that in there became a resource. Once in awhile people would forward things on to me, and in one case a very high-ranking elected official had read way down into the weeds of some scheduling thing that day and forwarded it to somebody else and said, hey, why is so-and-so doing such-and-such? That email made its way back to me and that’s when I realized, yeah, we better put everything in there, because if really high-ranking people are getting this deep into it, we owe everybody to have it out there.

C&S: How did it go in the first few weeks?

AL: A ton of work went into that morning email, but I think it paid off. I figured out what the template would be, and then we started doing live, internal tests. If the goal was to put it out by 7 a.m., what time in the morning would you have to get up to start pulling it together? And it became clear you needed to do a certain amount of legwork at night, and how to push things through, and we started sending out those first links to some trusted outsider folks to see what they’d want, what they thought of it, and we got some good suggestions. Somebody said, you really ought to have some news in there, too. So we started to push for HATs – Heard Around Town items – and half the challenge there was finding two or three little nuggets of news that you could break the next day, and half of it was writing them short and sweet enough that you could put it into an email and it wouldn’t feel like a slog. It was just a ton of work, and the response was immediate. It’s a ton of work, but the basic concepts were so easy and so compelling. The New York political, government, nonprofit world needs this, and why hasn’t somebody else started this first? We better hurry and get this out there before somebody does, because being first to market with this thing was so key. So that became the franchise: get a quick-hit, comprehensive roundup, put it in people’s hands first thing in the morning, and it was working.