The Publishing World Wags Its Finger At The Little Borough That Couldn’t

Everyone has heard how impressive Brooklyn would be were it its own city — the Brooklyn Museum, a population equivalent to the fourth-largest city in the country, blah blah. So how come the borough can’t sustain a glossy magazine? The Sun rubs it in:

Just last summer, Brooklyn had a whole stack of glossy magazines devoted to chronicling the borough’s supposed renaissance. Since then, all of those magazines have run out of money, and today, the only one still standing is the Brooklyn Rail, a nonprofit that gets most of its operational budget through arts grants.

The latest to fold is the Brooklynite, a free, glossy quarterly that has called it quits after just one year due to lack of funds. Until a few months ago, the editor, Daniel Treiman, had been planning to publish a third issue, but financial woes forced him to shelve the project and instead settle for posting online the material already written.

The Brooklynite joins a graveyard full of other failed Brooklyn magazines, including NRG, the self-proclaimed “Pulse of Brooklyn,” which ceased print publication last year; BKLYN Magazine, a lifestyle book that went on indefinite hiatus last month, and Brooklyn Bridge Magazine, a general-interest periodical that folded in 2000.

Mr. Treiman disclosed the end of the Brooklynite at last weekend’s Brooklyn Blogfest, an event dedicated to the borough’s blossoming local blogosphere. His announcement had been reported first on a blog. But according to Mr. Treiman, who lost thousands of dollars with every issue, it was not blogs that sank his ship, but Brooklyn itself.

“It’s not its own metropolitan area, but at the same time it’s too big to be a neighborhood. It’s an awkward in-between stage,” he said. “Brooklyn is both subsumed within the larger New York media market and a very disparate collection of neighborhoods.”

The borough is so diverse, so fragmented, and so big, he explained, that local merchants are reluctant to buy advertising in magazines aimed at the entire area.

For all the talk about its cultural renaissance and shared identity, Brooklyn remains quite provincial.