Commentary, Politics

They Don’t Need a Newspaper When They Have Two Hundred Phones

Posted on by Bill McCarthy

City Hall built a press list that does not call itself a press list. It lives on an encrypted app. It has more than two hundred names. It grew out of the campaign fan club. And until a reporter asked, at least one of the official threads was set to vanish.

That is not “reaching young people.” That is a messaging shop with a disappearing ink feature.

The Club

The chat is called NYC Creators Announcements. It is run by Emilia Rowland, the mayor’s director of new media, on a $175,000 city salary. Her boss in communications makes $260,000. Members get daily talking points, video clips, event invites, and shots at the mayor. They fill out a form with their neighborhood and their issue hobbies so the office can aim the love.

The roster came from Creators4Zohran, the influencer army that helped elect him. After Inauguration Day the campaign group put on a city lanyard. Researchers tied about 189 accounts to the operation. The chat itself is described as more than 200, from five-thousand-follower micro-accounts to pages with millions. Some of them do not even live here. A teacher with a side hustle. A self-styled dandy. A California account that still posts as if the East River were a lifestyle brand.

One Brooklyn operator with more than a million followers went on her own page and bragged that she does not know how such a small team talks to so many of them. Constant stream. Events. Policies. Happy to do it. She says she has never been paid. That may be true. Access is a currency. So is being first to the clip.

How the Money Moves

The mayor’s office says it has never paid a creator for a collaboration. Read that sentence twice. It is crafted.

City agencies do pay. Staffers told researchers the going rate is $5,000 to $20,000 per campaign. The checks do not always say “City of New York” on the payee line. They go through marketing and advertising firms that already hold city contracts. The procurement file names the firm. The influencer’s name often does not appear. Hashtags are inconsistent. Sometimes #paidpartnership. Sometimes a program tag. Sometimes nothing a normal scroller would treat as a disclaimer.

One social-services contract on the books this year is more than $100,000 for a social media campaign. That deal started under the last mayor. The pipeline did not. Composting, voting, tenants, clinics — wrap a policy in a face the algorithm already likes and you do not have to buy a television spot. Staffers said that out loud. Cheaper than TV. Hits the people who do not watch TV.

So you have two layers. Layer one: unpaid access junkies who will post the line because they believe it or because they want the next invite. Layer two: contractors paid with tax money through a middleman so the receipt is harder to read. The Signal chat feeds both.

Is It Legal

Using influencers is not a felony. Every modern press shop courts people with audiences. A creator list is a press list with worse lighting.

The records law is the problem. Official city business is supposed to leave a paper trail the public can request. Signal is built to leave as little as possible. Disappearing messages are the product. The city’s top lawyer said there is no ban on the app if staff follow retention rules and disable the vanish setting. Then he said they took “corrective actions” — after a newspaper told them a thread had been set to erase the director’s messages. That is not a clean bill of health. That is a confession that they fixed it when they got caught.

If official talking points, invitations, and coordination lived in a chat that ate itself, those are missing public records. That is the lawsuit waiting to happen. The Council already booked a hearing for September 22. A member is drafting rules for how the city hires faces. Watchdogs who would give this mayor a pass on housing still said the private channel is the issue.

The paid layer is a different smell. Taxpayer money for civic ads is legal if the contract is real and the disclosure is honest. Routing the talent through an agency so the name never hits the award notice is how you keep the propaganda off the transparency portal. It may survive a procurement audit. It should not survive a voter with a memory.

The Real Product

They will say local news is dead and someone has to tell people where to vote and how to compost. Fine. Send a press release. Post it on the city site. Buy an ad and put “paid for by” in 12-point type.

What they built is a campaign that never ended. The same accounts that sold the candidate now sell the administration, with city staff on the clock feeding the line and, in some cases, city vendors paying the talent. The audience thinks it is watching a neighbor. It is watching a briefing.

A socialist mayor who lectures the country about billionaires just industrialized the oldest hustle in politics: pay the chorus, or flatter it, and call it the people. Two hundred phones. One message. A chat that used to delete itself. If that is governance, the next mayor will copy it. If that is a scandal, the hearing in two weeks will decide whether anyone in this town still thinks a public record is supposed to last longer than a story.

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