The editor of a New York City newspaper bullied reporters for years. Then, he was promoted. 

February 2022 | Long Island, New York

When Karina Kovac learned of her newsroom’s new editor, she hoped he would be like his predecessor: committed to growing young reporters. 

Kovac herself was 24 and eager to whet her journalism skills at Herald Community Newspapers, a group of roughly two dozen hyperlocal newspapers across Long Island. A recent graduate from journalism school, she’d felt buoyed by her hiring editor’s nurturing posture — the many “little nods” he gave to her and her colleagues. 

But after he announced his departure just months into her new role, Kovac knew only that his replacement came from The Riverdale Press, a sister paper owned by the Herald’s publisher, Richner Communications, Inc. Michael Hinman was, for her at least, a mystery. 

“But Stuart trusted him,” she told The Objective in 2023, referring to Stuart Richner, the publisher’s CEO. 

She would discover later, through the anonymous review site Glassdoor and conversations with a Riverdale Press reporter, that Hinman had been accused of bullying reporters, many of whom were also young women. Across a dozen interviews from 2021 to 2023, The Objective spoke with nine reporters who worked with Hinman during his five-year tenure as editor of The Press. They spoke of panic attacks, insomnia, and isolation from partners and friends. In the aftermath of her own employment, one left the industry altogether.

Six reporters said they shared their concerns in at least eight meetings with The Press’ human resources employee — Richner attended at least three — to little avail. Instead, the newsroom experienced a revolving door of young reporters who had eagerly joined one of the few weeklies to win a Pulitzer Prize, only to resign, sometimes without work lined up, months later. 

“Because of my work at The Press, and because of me having to work with someone like Michael for so long [10 months], and the stress of the job itself, but mostly just him, I am a different person,” Raphael Lassauze, a former reporter at The Press, said. “That alteration has stretched into how I interact with the world. It broke a few things.”

Kovac herself resigned from the Herald in June 2023. She’d experienced what felt like “a thousand cuts,” including an ever-expanding workload, Hinman’s passive-aggression and a perpetual feeling that she was doing something wrong. 

“I could not take it anymore,” she told The Objective in 2023. “And it was just so hard for me, because I was doing what I always wanted to do.

“This job that I love, you know, isn’t supposed to be like this.”

Heather J. Smith, who worked at The Press from 2019 to 2020, said Hinman insisted reporters’ experience in the newsroom echoed industry norms, and in some ways, it did. The requirement that young reporters “pay their dues” and a demanding workload with little pay, from which Hinman himself was not exempt, is a story with which many journalists are familiar. 

The following accounts serve as a testament to how traditional newsroom culture can harm not only reporters but also an already-struggling industry and its readers. 

Neither Hinman nor Richner responded to multiple emails and phone calls about this story from The Objective. Instead, in March 2022, four months after The Objective’s initial requests for interviews, Richner announced Hinman’s promotion to a role that includes overseeing The Press.

July 2019 | Riverdale, New York

The Riverdale Press had a new employee — again. 

Kirstyn Brendlen was 23 and a recent graduate from journalism school. The opening, at a community newspaper in the Bronx, drew her attention because it asked for little to no journalism experience, she remembers, rather than the two years other “entry-level” reporting jobs required. 

The interview she’d had with Hinman, the paper’s editor, left her with mixed feelings. “It was weird, because it felt like it went well,” she said. “But also, I didn’t really talk.”

Lengthy job interviews, sometimes spanning three or four hours, in which Hinman monologued, were a trademark of his, according to five reporters. He would later tell Smith he did this to assess a reporter’s ability to navigate sources. He wanted to see how well they could “manage him,” Smith remembers.

The interview was one of multiple tests he crafted for reporters in his newsroom, some of whom were practicing journalism for the first time. He posted data on each reporter’s productivity on the conference room white board and at the bottom of staff-wide emails. Once, he quizzed reporters over the contents of an email he’d sent the night before.

In the early weeks of her employment, Brendlen left out a space in the header of one of her stories. Though they were both working in the office, she remembers, Hinman emailed her repeatedly to double-check her draft.

Brendlen conferred with another reporter. After the reporter also failed to identify the issue, Hinman came “storming out” of his office and stopped inches from Brendlen’s face, she said. Jabbing his finger at her computer screen, he said, “Does that look like what it’s supposed to look like? There’s supposed to be a space there.”

Brendlen remembers Hinman’s corrections as public and punitive. Just before Labor Day 2019, she made an error while posting a story. As a lesson, Hinman required her to post her colleagues’ stories for the long weekend. He announced the news to the staff in an email, so “everyone (knew) that you messed up,” Brendlen said. 

Smith, whose own role at The Press began six months before, interpreted Hinman’s punishment as an initiation. Once, when they were alone, she remembers Hinman told her that, when reporters first joined the newsroom, he tried to “break them.” 

“Michael was in the process of breaking Kirstyn,” she said.

As instructed, Brendlen scheduled the stories to post Tuesday, rather than the customary Sunday, to accommodate Labor Day. When Smith logged in that weekend, however, she didn’t know the change was on purpose. She would realize, later, that the instructions were written in a long email. 

Hoping to protect Brendlen, Smith rescheduled the stories for Sunday. 

After the stories ran, Hinman sent out a staffwide email, a copy of which The Objective obtained, with the subject line, “Why are all the stories live?” 

“I thought I made my instructions VERY CLEAR that stories were NOT supposed to post until Tuesday. In fact, on Thursday, I re-emphasized that,” he wrote. “I would like to know why, then, that was ignored? Our start time on Tuesday is now 10 a.m. I expect everyone there, because we will all be meeting the moment I arrive.”

When Tuesday came, the reporters waited in the newsroom in an “anxious stew,” Brendlen said. After he arrived, Hinman talked so fast “he had spit in the corner of his mouth,” she remembers.

“It doesn’t matter if it was intentional or not,” Hinman said in the meeting, a recording of which The Objective obtained. “Sometimes you are going to get communication from your boss where your boss is unhappy. That’s just the way it is.”

“I’m sorry if that upset you over the weekend,” he added later. “But you should imagine how I felt.”

After the meeting, Brendlen, Smith and a reporter who declined to speak on the record called Erika Hecker, the company’s new human resources representative, and Richner. Hecker declined to be interviewed for this story.

The reporters shared Hinman’s pattern of aggressive behavior and outsized reactions. “It sounds like Michael is a bully,” Smith remembers Richner saying during the HR meeting. 

Richner agreed to speak to Hinman about his behavior. When the day came, Hinman called Smith into his office after the call ended. He had a blank notebook and pen in front of him. 

“He uncapped his pen, and he said, ‘Now you’re going to tell me all the reasons why I’m a bad boss,’” she remembers. “And I said, ‘This is the most abusive work environment I’ve ever encountered.’”

For the next two hours, she said, he told her she was wrong. He’d been “very good” to her and her colleagues. Much worse editors exist out there, he said.

“After the second hour I realized that, ‘This has backfired,’” Smith said. “‘This accomplished nothing, and we likely made it worse for ourselves.’”

All told, six reporters referenced nine separate conversations with one or both Hecker and Richner. The meetings took place after a fresh incident with Hinman or during reporters’ exit interviews. Two of the conversations involved multiple reporters; in separate interviews with The Objective, multiple reporters corroborated that those conversations took place.

“They can’t say that they didn’t know,” said Rose Brennan, who worked at The Press from 2020 to 2021. She remembers speaking with Hecker three times. 

After these meetings, Lassauze said that Hecker and, possibly, Richner, would relay their messages to Hinman. His behavior would calm. He would be complimentary, even kind. Inevitably, though, after weeks or months, Hinman would backslide into “old behavior,” Brendlen said. 

In considering that circle of escalating tensions and a blow-up, followed by a honeymoon period, Brennan borrowed a hyperbole from one of her former colleagues:

“He holds your head under the water, and asks you why you’re drowning, and then, just when you think that you’re about to drown, pulls you out. And he hands you a towel,” she told The Objective. “And you’re so grateful for that towel.”

February 1989 | Riverdale, New York

Smith acknowledged that journalism can be, on its own, an exacting job. The Riverdale Press’ legacy is a testament to the industry’s challenges. In early 1989, days after the paper published an editorial praising a local bookstore for stocking Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses,” the newsroom was firebombed. 

People theorized the two incidents were linked, according to The New York Times coverage of the fire, but no arrest ever came. Instead, The Press kept producing the paper. “The newsroom had to be strong — journalists know that no matter how they’re threatened, they must continue,” Hinman wrote in an anniversary story 30 years later. 

The paper went on to thrive as hardships plagued most print newsrooms in subsequent decades. When the paper’s founders and longtime owners, the Stein family, decided to sell the paper to Richner Communications, Inc. in 2008 after more than 50 years, The Press was “quite profitable,” according to The New York Times’ coverage of the sale. By that point, The Press had a 10,000-person circulation and a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. 

Hinman took the helm as editor in 2017. Like the paper, he celebrated scrappiness — especially his own. He grumbled proudly about his long hours, yet reporters said his own inefficiencies only worsened workloads for himself and his staff. 

“Everybody needs a few minutes to decompress at work,” Smith said. “But it was the hypocrisy of not valuing our time and maintaining that he was spending all of his waking moments working on the newspaper, but then wasting time right in front of us.”

His emails, some of them hundreds of words long, came at odd hours, including the middle of the night. Reporters said he would call a meeting and then not show up on time; sometimes, he would stretch meetings on and on with stories about himself. He complained to staff members about each other. And, on a reporter’s last day, he read the cards she had left for her colleagues on their desks.

Reporters said his inattention to personal boundaries made already difficult seasons harder. When hurricane Isaias knocked out her power in the early months of the pandemic, for example, Brennan was on deadline. 

Her phone was dying, she didn’t have a car, and she was hesitant to venture to another location to find power. She lived with her father, who was high-risk for COVID-19. Hinman used some of her final battery to call and yell at her, she remembers. She was just making excuses, he told her.

“I was originally very hesitant to use the word ‘abuse’ in conjunction with Michael, especially since it’s a professional environment,” she said. “But when I really think about it, I would not accept the way that Michael spoke to me from any other man in my life.”  

The Press was Brennan’s first professional journalism job. By the time she quit in July 2021, she was the newsroom’s senior reporter — the reporter who’d been there the longest — at 23. 

Hinman harnessed the youth and inexperience of his employees to paint a picture of his newsroom as typical in the industry, an image against which they had little to compare. 

Smith, a veteran reporter in her 40s, remembers he would rib a female intern at staff meetings, making comments like, “I see that intern did a good job on the story, who’d have thunk?” 

“It’s especially bad when he does that to his new employees,” she said. “But to do that to an intern sets a tone that will follow her for the rest of her career. If she begins thinking that that kind of behavior is proper and allowed, she will let it happen from then on.”

Teresa, a reporter who asked The Objective to change her name, interned at the Press in summer 2021. She was 19, a Riverdale native, and approached the opportunity with gusto — only to leave her internship weeks early.

“I’m absolutely terrified of making mistakes,” she told The Objective in 2021. “I’m afraid to speak up for myself. I’m afraid to ask questions.”

During her brief time at The Press, she said she felt she had to unlearn the journalistic skills she studied in school to suit his preferences. “If anything didn’t go his way, he would take it out on me,” she said.

His disdain felt palpable: Glares, rude comments, a “negative” tone of voice. He would say, in a way that felt disparaging, “you’re interns,” she remembers.

“I feel like it’s a very important part of a mentor position to help interns grow in a way that’s both constructive and comforting,” she said. “You want to lift them up, but not so high that they get full of themselves.”

Teresa’s path at The Press didn’t intersect with Smith, who had resigned more than a year before Teresa’s internship. 

During her own tenure at The Press, Smith worked to combat Hinman’s narrative for young reporters. She knew that reporting requires a “certain kind of toughness” to deal with curt editors, long hours and extra work. Newsrooms can be strange, tough places, she said, “but they’re not supposed to be like this.”

“There would be plenty of times where he would tell the rest of the staff: ‘This is just how it’s done,’” she said. “And I would pop up and say, ‘No it’s not. No.’”

April 2022 | Long Island, New York

Weeks after Hinman took the helm as executive editor of Herald Community Newspapers, Kovac’s editor resigned. A single mother of two, Cristina Arroyo Rodriguez had, for the last year, balanced a full-time schedule at the Herald with a second job to help pay bills. 

On Long Island, she needed it: After she took the editing position in May 2021, the newsroom paid her a roughly $32,000 salary, she said. An annual living wage for a single adult with two children in Long Island back then was between $98,000 and $112,000 before taxes, depending on the county.

The Herald’s work-from-home option, a product of the pandemic, enabled her to get both jobs done. But Hinman wanted reporters back in the newsroom. 

The job required “some presence,” he told her in an in-person meeting about the policy change, a recording of which The Objective obtained. He referenced his 30-year career as a journalist, his experience in both in-person and remote workplaces. New reporters, he said, need the collaboration that takes place inside a newsroom.

Arroyo Rodriguez pointed out that she’d fulfilled her responsibilities remotely. The bigger issue, she said, was pay. If she earned a living wage at the Herald, she wouldn’t need to work a second job. 

Hinman understood, he said. Her argument isn’t new. But, he said, “realities are the realities.” Most of his career, he said, he’d held a second job. 

“Reporters here, you’re only really expected to be here a couple of years,” he told her. “This is a stepping stone for the next thing.” 

When he was a new journalist in the 1990s, he said he worked in a small town. His paycheck was so low, she’d “be shocked.” “But,” he told her, “those are the dues that we pay to work our way up.” He gave her the option to resign or be fired. She chose to resign.

Arroyo Rodriguez’s exit served, for Kovac, as a blow and a promotion. “She was my mentor when I first got (to the Herald),” Kovac told The Objective. “So when she left, it was a big hit for me.” 

Kovac took over Arroyo Rodriguez’s editing responsibilities. As months passed, the thousand cuts she would reference in an “exit” email to Richner built up. 

When one of Kovac’s colleagues contracted COVID-19 in late 2022, Hinman required him to work in the newsroom, she said. A former Herald reporter who requested to speak anonymously confirmed the incident. At the time, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised people to isolate for at least five days — 10 if people nearby were high-risk.

The decision “endangered everyone else in the office,” Kovac wrote in her email to Richner after she resigned.

Then, when Canadian wildfires turned the New York City skyline orange, Hinman propped open the window in his office. “I was like, ‘Can we close this? It’s stinking up the whole office,’” Kovac remembers asking him. ‘“I don’t think we should be inhaling this.’ And he told me, ‘Oh, it’s clearing out my sinuses. I’m going to keep it open.’”

That day, New York City air quality ranked worse than any major city in the world, and state health officials urged people to limit their exposure. “A bad quality to have in this industry is tone-deafness,” Kovac wrote in her email to Richner.

She had wanted to hold people accountable since she was a little girl. When new owners tried to evict her family and neighbors from her childhood mobile home park, her mom fought publicly, in town halls and in court. When Kovac went to college, she understood: Reporters did something similar. 

She quit the Herald in June 2023. “I feel for my own mental health and wellbeing the decision was a necessary one,” she wrote in her email to Richner the week after. She hoped he hired a new executive editor, she told him. 

Richner responded, she said. He told her he’d like to discuss her concerns, that they mattered greatly to him. Kovac invited Richner to email her his questions.

According to Kovac, he never replied.

Ongoing | New York City, New York

When The Press hired Hinman in 2017, he quickly donned many hats, according to a former employee who requested to speak anonymously.

As the sole editor, the former employee said, he was responsible for putting content in pages each week, proofing those pages, making editorial decisions, overseeing the opinion section, writing a weekly editorial, serving as a liaison between the staff and the company, navigating advertising decisions, managing staff and parlaying with readers. 

“It’s just one of those positions that really sets you up for failure,” the former employee said. 

Small, legacy newspapers like The Press have unique financial pressures that they navigate through the lens of longstanding tradition, according to Jaci Clement, the chief executive officer and executive director of the Fair Media Council, a media watchdog organization. 

The prevailing philosophy in decisionmaking is maintenance — how the newsroom maintains its culture and product — rather than change, she told The Objective in 2021. 

Dwindling returns from traditional funding sources complicate the paper’s hiring options. Not only do they have “huge overhead” for printing and distributing the paper each week, she said, their funding comes from advertisers and subscribers who, more and more, look to digital rather than paper sources for their business and news needs. 

To scrape by, as Hinman acknowledged in his meeting with Arroyo Rodriguez, the newsrooms become stepping stone jobs that offer new reporters experience without opportunity for advancement or financial cushion. They’re demanding jobs with long hours, little pay and little expectation of sustainability.  

“If you’ve ever worked at a local paper, it’s not nine to five. You’ve got to go to the school board meetings, and you have to talk to the people in the community, and a story breaks out on the weekends or on your own birthday, and you have to go cover something,” Clement said. “So people start factoring in the lifestyle versus what they’re being paid.”

As a result, she said, there’s little incentive to invest in reporters or ensure they have a positive initial experience in journalism. Those who do stick around may be beholden to an editor the newsroom hired because he “didn’t upset the applecart,” Clement said. 

Alternately, reporters themselves become editors who’ve never learned to manage people, and the newsrooms don’t have bandwidth to pay for that type of training. “Just because someone’s a great reporter, doesn’t mean they’re going to be a great editor … and no one has the time to deal with any of the deficiencies,” she said.

The consequences of mismanagement reverberate through the industry and community. Young reporters, scarred by their first jobs, seek employment in other fields. High turnover rates at community papers like The Press disable the growth of institutional knowledge. As papers diminish, research from the University of Texas suggests that so does local voter turnout.

The field’s vulnerability is common knowledge. In February, Richner’s son, Zachary Richner, helped launch the Empire State Local News Coalition, a statewide group advocating for legislation to help sustain local journalism. The Coalition comprises more than 200 New York news outlets, including those under the umbrella of Richner Communications.

In April, the group celebrated an early win: the inclusion of a payroll tax credit for news outlets in the New York state budget, meant to incentivize hiring and retaining reporters. 

The new policy is “industry-saving,” Zachary Richner said in a press release. 

As for Hinman, his loyalty to The Press rendered him indispensable, the former employee said. That’s why he lingered after so many complaints, they suspect: Because no one else would do as much for the newsroom as Hinman.

October 2021 | Riverdale, New York

When Sarah Belle Lin arrived at The Press in October 2021 to replace Brennan, she planned to stay for years. A 28-year-old journalist from the Bay Area, Lin longed to deepen her coverage of the Bronx. Four months later, she resigned. 

She recognized red flags over time, she said. When Lin first tweeted about her new job, her inbox flooded with messages from former Press reporters, “just women,” she said. The sentiment was the same: “If you need anything, let me know.”

“I translated that (as), if you want to talk Riverdale transportation, Riverdale schools, let me know,” she said. “Now, those messages mean something completely different.”

In January 2022, she and her colleagues were in a remote meeting with Hinman. Lin and Hinman were disagreeing over a school construction story. She thought it needed student voices; he didn’t. As she was sharing her perspective, Hinman muted her.

“I was in shock,” she said. “Force muting … is the equivalent of someone slamming the door in my face.” Lin sent Hinman her letter of resignation that day. 

Hers wasn’t the first disagreement to lead to newsroom turnover. 

In June 2019, a Riverdale Press employee named Mark Sacks was arrested for and, later, convicted of possessing obscene sexual performance by a child. He was ultimately placed on the national sex offender registry. 

Sacks had worked in advertising at The Press since at least 2015, and reporters who interacted with him remember him as someone who shared personal details in the office. “He would talk about the women he’d slept with,” Smith said. “He’d talk about how young they were, how hot they were.” 

The Objective contacted Sacks about this story through certified mail; he did not respond. 

Within weeks of his arrest, Sacks was back at work. When Joseph Konig, a 22-year-old reporter in his first months on the job, noticed Sacks’ return, he was furious: The Press had a high school intern at the time. 

Konig confronted Hinman about Sacks’ presence in the newsroom. They spoke briefly and heatedly, according to a recording The Objective obtained of the encounter. Hinman wasn’t Sacks’ supervisor, but Konig wanted him to raise the alarm.

Hinman requested an apology “if we want to see how this is going to continue from here.” The apology, Konig interpreted, was “for insubordination.”

Konig told Hinman he didn’t care if he lost his job — he cared that a “pedophile” was working in the office, he said in the recording. “I don’t want to hear about it,” Hinman said. 

He told Konig to “resign or get fired.”

As Konig cleaned out his desk, Hinman told him he’d call the police if Konig didn’t leave, according to the recording. Konig took his things and went.

That same day, Konig’s colleagues shared their own concerns about Sacks’ employment with Hinman and Richard Stein, who formerly owned The Press and who served as a company representative during the meeting. Stein did not respond to The Objective’s requests for comment. 

The meeting yielded action, Smith remembers: Richner called the reporters afterward and told them Sacks wouldn’t be coming back. That week, The Press, under Hinman’s byline, published a blurb about Sacks’ arrest, calling him “a former Riverdale Press employee.” 

Later, Smith said she overheard Hinman on the phone. He was speaking to another local news editor, she remembers, recommending he not hire Konig.

Ongoing | New York City, New York

Davida Perry, an employment attorney in New York City, receives a steady spate of phone calls about bad bosses. She couldn’t comment on Hinman, she said, but shared generally about workspace protections. Her firm, Schwartz Perry & Heller LLP, represents people who’ve experienced sexual harassment or discrimination at work. 

The former, she said, is easier to identify. Workplaces where employers curry sexual favors, hang sexual posters, send sexual photographs or messages, where conversations devolve into sex talk. 

Discrimination can be “more subtle,” she said. Her team relies on circumstantial evidence, like veiled comments toward people in a protected category. An age discrimination case, for example, might include an employer’s references to wanting “new blood,” “freshening up the place” or other “euphemisms for age,” Perry said. 

Reporters, speaking without legal expertise, differed in how they characterized Hinman’s treatment. Some referenced behavior that, they interpreted, specifically harmed women. 

Smith, for example, remembers Hinman regularly interrupted women in the office and taunted a female intern during staff meetings, but not a male intern. Teresa, the intern who asked The Objective to change her name, said Hinman regularly used the term “bitch” in the newsroom, including after Brennan asked him to stop. The former employee who requested to speak anonymously recalled that Hinman seemed more receptive to ideas from male reporters than female reporters.

“I often felt that the young women in the newsroom were constantly failed, because he would never listen,” they said. The employee observed that female reporters had “to depend on a male colleague to get a point across to (Hinman).”

Other reporters remember Hinman at odds with the men in the newsroom. Brendlen, for example, spoke of “brutal” emails she remembers Hinman sent to a male intern. Lassauze said Hinman was “highly egalitarian in his abuse.” Konig agreed: “I think we will find that Michael, what he does to people, he does to everyone.” 

Many of the callers Perry’s office receives can’t offer the evidence needed for a claim, she said. They speak of unreasonable, disrespectful bosses. Bosses who treat everyone poorly. She can’t help them.

“The law doesn’t guarantee anyone a nice place to work,” Perry said. “If your workplace is hostile, and the people are mean and nasty, and screamers, the law says – if the law could speak – ‘get a different job.’”

But the search for employment in journalism is harder than it once was, according to Jennifer Pozner, a media critic, journalist and author who’s written for decades about gender, race and power in media. She began her journalism career in the early ‘90s and remembers a few male colleagues’ proclivity to belittle women, including herself. 

Pozner survived, she said, because she knew she’d move on to other newsrooms. She had “an escape hatch,” she told The Objective in a 2021 interview. But viable, living-wage journalism jobs are increasingly harder to find, she said. 

Between 2008 and 2020, newsroom employment shrunk 26% — the loss of about 30,000 reporting, editing and visual storytelling positions, according to Pew Research Center. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the decline will continue in the next decade, thanks in part to diminishing advertising revenue and media consolidation.

The latter factor is especially concerning, Pozner said, because consolidation reframes journalism as a commodity, rather than a service. “(The news is) just another soda can,” she said. “It’s just another product for the assembly line that you can sell.” 

“Media corporations have just lost all notions of journalism as a system of checks and balances, a system of standing up for the little guy,” she said. “It’s now, ‘If you can do that, fine, but really, we have to make money.’”

Identity-based structural biases, like racial bias or gender bias, certainly exist in media, she said. But they’re not the industry’s “guiding force.” 

“The biggest bias is profit,” she said. “Versus anything that would get in the way of profit.” 

Afterward

I came across this story as a young woman myself. I was new to New York City, freshly graduated with a master’s in journalism, and searching for a reporting job as the pandemic stretched into its second year. 

The Riverdale Press, with its storied history and communal focus, seemed promising; I applied for an opening through Report for America. Hinman emailed me to set up an interview, and in my preparation for it I stumbled across social media posts from former Press employees that referenced problems at work. 

After our interview, I contacted the women whose posts served as warning, and they agreed to speak with me. Their experiences with Hinman, some of which I outline here, unsettled me, so I shared my findings with Report for America and pulled my application before Hinman could hire or reject me. 

Report for America paired The Press with another reporter, who declined to speak on the record for this story. 

The organization vets hundreds of candidate newsrooms before selecting a final cohort, Alison Bethel, then-vice president of corps excellence at Report for America, told The Objective in a 2021 interview. She said that Report for America can’t monitor the coming and going of reporters outside the organization, but noted that her team looked for but didn’t find social media posts that referenced Hinman’s behavior at The Press.

For its newest cohort, Report for America is not partnering with The Press. The newsroom didn’t reapply, according to Sam Kille, Report for America’s vice president of communications.

As for me, I never found a job in New York. Instead, that summer I returned to Texas to be closer to family and, ultimately, report this story. Since then, I’ve checked in again and again with the reporters who formerly worked at The Press and, more recently, the Herald. 

In the months it took for Brendlen to find another journalism job, she wrestled with self-doubt. “In those days (at The Press), I was really internalizing so much stuff,” she said. “I’m thinking, ‘I messed this up. I’m not, I’m not good at this.’”

She said she reminded herself that Hinman’s behavior and the world he created at The Press were not normal. Her former colleagues who found work elsewhere helped: They gave her renewed imagination for what a job could look like. 

Brendlen is now a digital editor at Brooklyn Paper. In 2021, she won multiple New York Press Association awards for her work at The Press.

Smith resigned in late February 2020. By then, she’d become her mother’s caregiver and missed work regularly for doctor’s appointments. At one point, she took family leave. When her mother’s health deteriorated rapidly, Smith left The Press for good. 

“I couldn’t deal with Michael and my mom’s death at the same time,” she said. Smith graduated in May 2023 with a master’s in journalism. 

As for Kovac, she’s now the assignment desk editor at News 12 Long Island. She remembers the Herald with gratitude and sorrow — mostly for the people who remain. She hopes more nurturing leadership will return. “What kind of journalists can we be when empathy is scant?” she told The Objective.

Lassauze stayed at The Press for as long as she did, 10 months, because she couldn’t afford to quit without another job lined up, especially during a pandemic. 

Applying for the open position at The Press had required vulnerability, a step forward as a new person in a new field. She was 20 and a writer, but she didn’t have a college degree, and her only journalism experience stemmed from one class in high school. 

Most importantly, the role would be her first out as a trans woman.

When she began to feel exhausted by the newsroom, nerves frayed and jumpy from Hinman’s moods, she came to think she deserved it. 

“Knowing my position as a trans woman in a newsroom, so young as I was, so inexperienced, that I had less right to complain. So being yelled at made sense,” she said. “So it became a pathology of, ‘I deserve this scrutiny.’”

Lassauze left journalism, she thinks for good. She saw no meaningful change come from sharing her concerns about Hinman, and the inaction disillusioned her.

“If you’re in a career, and you just blatantly, openly talk about the awful things you experienced that seem systemic, and then everyone’s just going to look at you, in the manner of, ‘We already know this, suck it up. Either get back to work or disappear,’” she said. 

“And then you disappear.” 

Alexis Allison is a journalist, teacher and baker near Fort Worth. This fall, she’s attending law school at The University of Texas. She also created the above illustration.