BREAKING: Mayor Sends Press Releases
Ordinary comms becomes a secret army of influencers when The New York Times isn't invited
The New York Times has a rather breathless article discussing how social media buzz around Mayor Mamdani’s actions is not 100% organic, but rather happens because there is a Signal chat group where Mamdani’s director of new media communications sends out memos.
Press releases. The story is that the mayor’s office sends out press releases. And sometimes they ask that a story be framed a certain way, which the influencers sometimes refuse.
It takes 20 paragraphs of “floods”, “armies”, and “online adulation” for the Times to mention that none of these influencers are being paid. There’s also a Time standard deployment of out-of-context numbers. Two named influencers, comedian Akilah Hughes and political journalist Matt Stoller, have 200,000 and 175,000 followers on Twitter, a number which in qualitative terms is “known in your niche”. Bodybuilder Jeff Nippard has 212,000 followers. Chess streamer Anna Cramling has 142,000.
The person who runs the Signal group is Emilia Rowland, the mayor’s director of new media and cultural communications, who earns $175,000. The extravagance of it! Fetch my fainting couch!. This sounds like a high number, but if you engage your brain for more than five seconds, yeah, six figures starting with 1 is pretty common for a director role in a high-cost-of-living city. It’s actually right in the middle of posted numbers for the same job with Warby Parker and Moët Hennessy, which I pulled from LinkedIn just now.
Every politician does communications, and in Mamdani’s case he is absolutely correct to go to influencers first, because traditional journalists are falling down on the job. To give one example, the major papers didn’t cover the launch of New York’s Public Interest Technology team, despite a press conference and everything.
Moving government IT services in house to serve the public, rather than writing big checks to Deloitte and Palantir and accepting bad outcomes, is a critical good government initiative. The New York Times remains locked in Ronald Reagan’s framing that the government cannot act effectively and simply ignores stories which show that there is an alternative to public waste and personal drama.
The only actual wrongdoing here is that auto-deleting Signal chats don’t follow public records laws. Mamdani’s office should remedy this and already has. Meanwhile, The Vichy Times is likely sitting on vital stories about Trump’s corruption and ongoing mental collapse because Maggie Haberman has a book coming out.
The online adulation may have looked organic. But it was actually part of a campaign orchestrated by City Hall to use social media influencers to boost the image of the mayor and his young administration’s policies. Mr. Mamdani is a master of new media, and his rise to power has been driven largely by his ease in front of a camera and his ability to harness the seeming informality of social media to connect with broad constituencies. But as mayor, he has also been able to use taxpayer funds to create a sprawling network of hundreds of friendly influencers to boost his priorities, provide positive depictions of his administration and enhance his popularity
The offending article: The New York Times →