Jim Testa’s Constant Listener column is currently available on Substack.
When The Star-Ledger announced it would no longer publish a print newspaper and go to a strictly digital, online version, the decision rippled across New Jersey’s media landscape. Other papers owned by parent corporation NJ Advance Media — dailies The Times of Trenton and The South Jersey Times, as well as the weekly Hunterdon County Democrat — will also be moving to an online-only format. But The Jersey Journal, which also uses The Star-Ledger’s printing facility, announced it will stop publishing altogether as of Feb. 1.
That will leave Hudson County — one of the most populous counties in the state, a hotbed of politics (and political scandal) — without a newspaper for the first time since just after The Civil War. The Hudson Reporter chain of newspapers — which published weekly editions for Hoboken, Jersey City and other area townships — unexpectedly shut down almost exactly a year ago, while The Hudson Dispatch, The Jersey Journal’s longtime daily rival to its north, was acquired by and folded into the Journal in 1991.
Founded in 1867 by two Civil War veterans, The Jersey Journal published for decades from a landmark building in Journal Square that still bears the paper’s name in large red letters. But in recent years, as its readership aged and people looked increasingly to cable television and the internet for news, the paper struggled to survive with a skeleton staff and, since the onset of COVID, no actual office; staffers worked from home on networked computers. Still, the Journal continued to produce award-winning coverage of local politics, school sports and the area’s cultural landscape: music, theater and visual arts. When Marist’s quarterback won a game, or Weehawken’s tennis team trounced the opposition, it was in The Jersey Journal. The paper printed its readers’ obituaries, its cities’ public announcements, and the daily funnies.
That all ends Feb. 1.
And that’s where I come in. In 1991, when an enterprising young reporter who had been covering the area’s burgeoning music scene decamped for Minneapolis, I was offered a weekly music column. I called it Constant Listener, a homage to Dorothy Parker’s Constant Reader column in The New Yorker, and I covered everything from U2 concerts at The Meadowlands to unlikely hitmakers like Jersey City natives P.M. Dawn, to whatever was happening at Maxwell’s and Uncle Joe’s.
“Rolling Stone is cool and all,” Prince Be of P.M. Dawn once told me. “But my mom reads The Jersey Journal every morning, so we want to talk to you.”
DAN BRACAGLIA
JIM TESTA
From 1991 to the financial crisis of 2002, and then again from 2010 (and the advent of NJ.com) to now, I have written The Jersey Journal’s weekly column about music. That ends Feb. 1 as well.
Whether the online-only Star-Ledger will start to cover Hudson County more thoroughly, or something else will come along, I don’t know. Nature abhors a vacuum, but there are newspaperless communities all over this country now — places where the squalid squawk of cable news and the babble of the Twitterverse has replaced working reporters and editors. The future of news in the Garden State seems very much at risk.
But music is my beat, and I’d like very much for that to continue. And so, like Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus — and an army of displaced cultural critics and political commentators — I am starting a newsletter on Substack (though I will also continue to write occasional articles, on theater and music, for NJArts.net).
“Constant Listener: Jim Testa” is available now and free, with the option to purchase an $8 monthly subscription. The URL is jimtestanj.substack.com, and it is where I will be interviewing musicians, reviewing new releases, announcing upcoming shows, and writing about whatever else comes my way. Will it be local to Hudson County? Some of it, sure. But since I will no longer be restrained by an editor’s stingy word count, and will be able to post more than once a week, there will be plenty more: All kinds of music, events, local personalities, even my thoughts on film and TV. And for paid subscribers, there will be an audio podcast as well, and bonus content.
As a music journalist — as a newspaperman, something I wanted to be since high school — The Jersey Journal was my home for 25 years. So let’s just say I’m moving, and jimtestanj.substack.com is my new address.
And here’s the thing about home: It’s not a place so much as a feeling. And as Dorothy says to the Tin Man, if you can’t find what you’re looking for there, you probably never lost it in the first place.
CONTRIBUTE TO NJARTS.NET
Since launching in September 2014, NJArts.net, a 501(c)(3) organization, has become one of the most important media outlets for the Garden State arts scene. And it has always offered its content without a subscription fee, or a paywall. Its continued existence depends on support from members of that scene, and the state’s arts lovers. Please consider making a contribution of any amount to NJArts.net via PayPal, or by sending a check made out to NJArts.net to 11 Skytop Terrace, Montclair, NJ 07043.
