For the reporters of Hell Gate, heaven is covering Mayor Eric Adams

“We nibble at the edges,” says Hell Gate staffer Max Rivlin-Nadler. “But we nibble a lot.”

Rivlin-Nadler was recently jostling for space near the steps of City Hall, as a media scrum gathered around clergy leaders holding a prayer vigil for Adams, who has pleaded not guilty to five counts including bribery and fraud. The resulting story was straightforward, but the headline was typically wry: “At Mayoral Prayer Circle, Eric Adams is Jesus Christ, Abraham, and Joseph.”

With the death of scrappy alt-weeklies such as the Village Voice and the New York Observer, Hell Gate is more or less alone in its lane: the relentless chronicling and witty skewering of whichever New York character happens to be New York mayor.

“Ten years ago, there would have been other outlets with this sensibility,” says Hell Gate’s Christopher Robbins. “But here we are, and New Yorkers appreciate it.”

“I love that Hell Gate is openly adversarial to power,” says comedian and writer Josh Gondelman, who recently shouted out Hell Gate’s coverage in his newsletter. “And the writing style is very entertaining.”

Gondelman singled out one of the website’s most intensive reporting projects — the Eric Adams “Table of Success” — by calling it a “rich and inventive work of journalism.”

The “Table of Success,” so named for one of Adams’s funniest quotations — “All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success” — is an interactive, regularly updated database of Adams’s associates, a number of whom have been raided by federal agents, subpoenaed or indicted in the past year. Hell Gate pitched the idea last year to Type Investigations, a nonprofit that provides technical and editorial support to freelancers and small newsrooms.

“They’re clear-eyed about the absurdity of New York politics,” says Aviva Shen, executive editor of Type Investigations. “I think investigative journalism tends to take a very serious tone, because usually it focuses on some kind of injustice where people’s lives have been really seriously harmed. The Adams political drama is obviously very serious too, but it’s also just a total circus. And I think Hell Gate’s irreverent tone and approach fit really well with the subject matter.”

And what a subject. Adams was inaugurated in Times Square on Jan. 1, 2022, as the self-proclaimed mayor of “swagger.” Following a campaign in which he was compelled to give a press tour of his Brooklyn townhouse in an attempt to quash rumors that he actually lived in New Jersey — and was observed by a reporter driving his car down a sidewalk to get around a traffic jam his illegal parking job had created — Adams became a fixture of the city’s nightlife and a reliable source of baffling quotes.

“I’m like broccoli,” he said in an early news conference. “You’re going to hate me now, but you’re going to love me later.”

Four months after his inauguration, Hell Gate was born: a tiny, employee-owned media company that aimed to be “trenchant, playful, outraged, irreverent, and useful to our readers; deeply skeptical of power but stubbornly idealistic.” From the early days, Adams and his administration gave the young operation plenty of chances to make good on its promise.

“Eric Adams Tells New Yorkers: Stop Listening to Eric Adams,” read a headline from June 2022, atop a story that poked fun at Adams for decrying what he called the media’s cynical fearmongering about crime, though he himself used the same rhetorical tactics to fuel his mayoral win.

Hell Gate also wrote about Adams taking his first three mayoral paychecks in cryptocurrency and tracked the roller-coaster value of Adams’s crypto holdings in a series of delightfully deranged reports.

Hell Gate, named after the city’s sturdy railroad bridge over the East River, was founded by five journalists who wanted to produce quality work on their own terms, free from the whims of corporate owners and the politesse of traditional media. Inspired by other worker-owned media companies — Defector and Racket — Hell Gate staffers envisioned a workplace, funded by subscribers, where they answered to each other and their readers, not investors. They wanted to write fun, devastating headlines that other media organizations might shy away from, call out hypocrisy, and be a thorn in the side of powerful people and institutions.

“Hell Gate’s role,” Robbins says, “is to not mince words.”

By the summer of 2023, Hell Gate, along with other New York media, was focused on what would turn out to be some of the earliest alleged campaign-finance violations related to Adams, in which six of his supporters were charged with illegally funneling money to Adams’s 2021 campaign.

“Just How Close Is This Straw Donor Scandal to Eric Adams?” Hell Gate wrote, in a reported piece fleshing out the connections between the mayor and the people implicated in the scheme.

“Did we know then that it would end in a federal indictment [of Adams]?” says staffer Esther Wang. “If I were betting, maybe I would have put a few dollars on it.”

Federal probes ensnared more and more of Adams’s associates and circled ever closer to the man himself, raising questions about lavish gifts and donations that Adams and his campaign had accepted from Turkish nationals — allegedly in exchange for using his clout to advance the country’s governmental and business interests in New York.

Not since the scandal-ridden final term of Mayor Ed Koch in the late 1980s had there been such chaos at the highest levels of city government. As the subpoenas and FBI raids piled up, the city’s media institutions vied to break news and make sense of the rapid developments — throwing the trophic pyramid of New York media into sharp relief.

Near the top, the well-connected New York Times broke the news of Adams’s impending federal indictment; meanwhile, the mayor’s legal team has accused federal prosecutors of illegally leaking prejudicial information from the investigations to the Times. Then there’s the New York Post, the conservative-leaning tabloid that has been criticized for pulling punches in its coverage of the mayor (though it delivered with its post-indictment headline: “Grand Theft Ottoman”). The liberal-leaning New York Daily News has broken its share of Adams-world stories, including a report from earlier this month about Adams quietly urging his embattled adviser, Tim Pearson, to resign.

A collection of nonprofit newsrooms has helped fill the gaps left by layoffs and cuts across the media industry: public radio station WNYC and its affiliated local news website, Gothamist; New York Focus, a newsroom dedicated to state and city politics; and Documented, which reports with and for immigrant communities in the city.

Then there’s the City, another nonprofit newsroom, known for its hard-hitting investigative reporting. It has led the way on coverage of Adams’s straw-donor campaign contributions and connections to Turkish nationals, and its service journalism has emerged as a go-to resource for New Yorkers trying to make sense of the avalanche of indictment news.

Hell Gate staffers speak highly of the City’s reporting, and they often link to its work in their daily newsletter, Morning Spew. The respect is mutual.

“They have a voice and do great work, and clearly have a mission that harks back to the Village Voice days,” City editor in chief Richard Kim says of Hell Gate, drawing a contrast with the City’s “less ideological” slant. “It’s important for us that we cover New York for all New Yorkers. … But, in the end, there are just not enough reporters covering New York, a city the size of a medium-sized nation, so my attitude is let a thousand flowers bloom, and people will take their different approaches.”

“Just because you’re funny doesn’t mean you’re not serious,” says Hell Gate staffer Katie Way. “And I think that’s where we’re really able to meet readers.”

When the Adams indictment came down, Hell Gate added a new widget to the top of its homepage:

“It happened: Eric Adams indicted. There has never been a better time to brush up on his circle of associates at the Table of Success.”

The news led to a bump in readership and subscribers, Hell Gate says. The week Adams was indicted, 868 people signed up for the website’s two free newsletters and 219 people became paid subscribers. Hell Gate now has 5,368 paying subscribers and has exceeded $500,000 in annual revenue from subscriptions, according to the company’s recently released annual report. Combined with limited advertising revenue and $300,000 in funding from foundations and individuals — such as Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and the Harnisch Foundation — Hell Gate brings in enough to cover operational costs and pay a modest salary of $60,000 (which some staffers supplement through freelance work). Though the company has not yet met its goal of sustaining itself with subscription revenue alone, its growth so far is “incredibly encouraging,” the report said.

Since the indictment, Hell Gate has continued looking for ways to push the story forward and add its own reporting. On Monday, a few days after a poll found that 69 percent of New Yorkers think Adams should resign, the site published a story featuring man-on-the-street-style interviews with the people coming and going from the private clubs frequented by the mayor and his associates.

The previous Thursday, in front of the downtown nightclub Zero Bond, Robbins spied one of the club’s founding members leaving a nearby restaurant: actor Liev Schreiber. “You’re out in here in the middle of the night, trying to get comments from these yuk-yuks?” Schreiber asked, perfectly articulating Hell Gate’s goal. (For his part, Schreiber said he would reserve judgment on the mayor’s indictment.)

Though Hell Gate is well-positioned to cover a spiraling mayoral corruption scandal and its absurdities, the reporters strive to bring the same skepticism to other powerful politicians and institutions in New York. They recently ribbed Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) and her last-minute decision to halt the city’s congestion pricing plan, a toll program that would have paid for billions of dollars in upgrades to the subway system.

One newsletter item from last month: “Climate ‘Superhero’ Kathy Hochul Keeps Showering Money on Climate-Killing Highways.”

“We don’t just pick on Eric Adams,” Robbins says. “We are extremely skeptical of power generally. It’s just who we are.”

During last week’s pitch meeting, in a co-working space in downtown Brooklyn, the staff went through freelance pitches, deciding which ones to nix (a profile of Adams’s lead attorney), which ones to approve (a piece about drama surrounding the outdoor dining scene in Chinatown and Dimes Square), and which ones were a maybe (a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in Washington Square Park).

After that, they moved onto political coverage plans. Who are the people contributing to Adams’s legal defense fund? Could Adams survive another potential round of indictments? Why are the courtroom sketches of the mayor so bad?

The staffers were split on whether Adams would resign, but they agreed that a deeper look into New York political systems — such as the byzantine Brooklyn Democratic machine — would make for a meaty reporting target, rich with characters and potentially humorous angles.

“Eric Adams is going to go away at some point,” Rivlin-Nadler says, “but the structures that allowed him to become mayor will still be here.”