After more than three decades covering courts, crime, and corruption in Rochester, longtime investigative reporter Gary Craig is retiring from the Democrat and Chronicle.
His advice to young journalists: “Be persistent and polite. Let them know you’re not going to go away. Call them at home, if you have to."
Craig is closing out his newspaper career this month.
He arrived in Rochester in 1990 to join the staff of the now-defunct Times-Union, and stayed on when the newspaper merged with the Democrat and Chronicle in the mid-1990s. At the time, Rochester had two daily newspapers with a combined newsroom of about 200 journalists. Today, the Democrat and Chronicle lists just 14 staff writers on its website.
Craig reflected on the changes in a recent interview on WXXI’s Connections with Evan Dawson. “If I were starting fresh,” he said, “it would be maddening.”
He recalled covering Mayor Tom Ryan in the early 1990s and having access that would be unthinkable today. At the time, he said, you could “walk up to City Hall and knock on the (door of the) mayor's top aide and say, ‘Hey, is the mayor in?’
“There’s security issues now that you can’t downplay,” he said. “But it’s hard.”
The same holds true for public records, Craig said. Where once reporters could walk into a city department and pick up a document, today they’re routinely told to file formal Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests, even for records that are supposed to be publicly available.
“You don't have to withhold it if it's public,” he said. “You don't have to make people file FOILs.”
Craig noted that access issues are compounded by reduced staffing.
“It was easier when we had enough staff,” he said.
Local outlets struggle to maintain the kind of watchdog presence that builds institutional memory and trust with sources with fewer fewer reporters available to cover school boards or town meetings and be where their sources are.
“You get to know them,” Craig said, “and you're just chatting, and then you're talking news, and you're talking family or whatever."
Craig is known for his deep coverage of major criminal cases in the region. He wrote extensively about the 1993 Brink’s depot robbery, in which $7 million was stolen in one of the country’s largest armored car heists. He later turned that reporting into a blog and book. He also co-authored a book about the Attica prison uprising, and in 2016, collaborated with WXXI on Finding Tammy Jo, a podcast about the decades-long mystery surrounding the murder of a teenage girl in Caledonia.
In recent years, Craig has grown concerned about the rise of anonymous sourcing in journalism and the role of social media in shaping public trust. He said officials and activists alike have weaponized platforms to erode faith in traditional news reporting.
Still, he encourages young journalists not to lose heart, and “don’t give up.”
