The Daily Catch Aims to Solve the “News Desert” in Red Hook
The Town of Red Hook, located in Northern Dutchess County, has been a “news desert” for over a decade. According to Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post, news deserts are “communities lacking a news source that provides meaningful and trustworthy local reporting on issues such as health, government and the environment.” That succinctly sums up the situation in Red Hook.
Enter: Emily Sachar and The Daily Catch.
The Daily Catch is a hyper-local newspaper started by Sachar in 2021 that focuses on the towns of Red Hook and Rhinebeck. At its inception, The Daily Catch only covered Red Hook, but following a year of exploration of the town, Sachar decided to expand to Rhinebeck.
“The goal is not to be bigger,” Sachar says. “It’s to be deep and broad in those two communities and give the citizens of those towns a resource.”
Sachar is no stranger to journalism. Originally starting her career under Bob Woodward at The Washington Post, Sachar then went on to work as an education reporter for New York Newsday, where she was awarded the nation’s highest honor for education journalism from the Education Writers of America twice.
She has two goals in creating The Daily Catch: first, to provide a resource for the towns of Red Hook and Rhinebeck, and second, to train young journalists and better prepare them for jobs at bigger publications.
“There are jobs available for people who want to be journalists, but there are fewer and fewer of them,” Sachar says.
Sachar wants to provide opportunities and offer journalists the on-the-ground experience that they’ll need to move on to bigger publications.
“I had to start at a tiny local newspaper like this one here, and I really believe that I can offer an incredible journalist a really good year here.”
In fact, one of the reporters at The Daily Catch is currently exploring job prospects at larger publications, which exemplifies the opportunity of being able to work for a small publication and build a portfolio, before moving on to other career opportunities.
“That’s what I’m offering. You’ll get really good, really fast, if you come here,” Sachar says.
A benefit of being in an area that lacks newspaper coverage is that competition from big publications like The New York Times or The Washington Post doesn’t really exist. While there is occasional competition from the Poughkeepsie Journal or the Daily Freeman, those papers don’t necessarily cover the area nearly as in-depth as Sachar does with The Daily Catch.
“I actually feel that we’re doing the quality that you would see in a big publication,” Sachar says. “When a story comes up, we try to go below the surface.”
A drawback of being such a small publication, however, is similar to the difficulties of many other fields in this day and age: funding and staffing. Sachar says that The Daily Catch is registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which means that the newspaper is supported entirely by grants and donations.
Sachar also says that staffing has been particularly difficult. “We don’t have a pipeline or a list of people who want to start writing for The Daily Catch,” she says. Sachar is working on creating a pipeline between the newspaper and local colleges like Bard, Vassar, Marist, as well as Dutchess and Columbia Community College, so that The Daily Catch can start offering internship opportunities to local students.
Sachar hopes that her status as a so-called “transplant” doesn’t affect the way that locals view her and The Daily Catch. “I think I will probably always be an outsider, and maybe that’s to my credit for the newspaper,” Sachar says. “At the same time, I’ve developed a great love for Red Hook, and I want to share it in a fair light.”
Sachar also notes that The Daily Catch has received many donations from the community, which she believes shows that they have proven that they’re “viable and people believe in the quality of the newspaper” with the work they’ve done in the first year and a half.
Sachar says that she’s constantly thinking about the future of The Daily Catch. “There are some people on our board who want us to expand out to neighboring towns, but I don’t necessarily see a need because I’m not trying to start an empire,” Sachar says. “I want to be really good at what we do.”
Looking forward, Sachar hopes that she will be able to build a replicable model to start a local newspaper that she can provide to neighboring towns that have ambitions to start their own.
“Here’s how you start a local paper, and here’s what you do.”
