Quite a number of grizzled city fishermen have taken Wang into their confidence, and in exchange she accepts the social code they expect her to follow. When I pressed Wang for details on where she’d been fishing for striped bass in Brooklyn, she refused to tell me. Good fishing spots are carefully guarded by those who fish them, whether you’re in the Catskills or below the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. “The nice thing about Hell Gate is that we don’t need to care about all of the things that all of us have been taught to care about as journalists, especially at digital news sites: page views, ‘uniques,’ ‘critical’ metrics like that.” The site, which is owned by its employees, has a few thousand subscribers who pay at least $6.99 a month, and support from a few wealthy backers, such as Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist. “They’re not, you know, the most-read stories,” Wang said, of her fishing pieces. They gape at tales of pizza rats and other pests, of course, and are capable of real awe when it comes to owls in Central Park, or dolphins in the Bronx River-the subject of another OnlyFins column. New Yorkers are perennially drawn to news articles about animals in their midst. “I’ve also lately devoted my life to fishing for striped bass, or striper, spending every free hour on various piers along Brooklyn’s waterfront, my hands covered in the blood and guts of the bunker I cut up to use as bait.”) (“I’ve smoked more weed in the past couple of months than I usually do in an entire year,” she wrote, to open an article about the bass. In pursuit of subjects for OnlyFins columns, Wang has entered New York’s only freshwater-fishing tournament, talked to fishermen hauled into court by the state, fantasized about casting in the federally condemned waters of the Gowanus Canal, and researched the surprising local political significance of striped bass. Hell Gate, the Web site, keeps a close eye on local politics, but its correspondents roam widely. Wang and her co-founders see the bridge as emblematic of New York City: old, sort of beautiful, in need of infrastructure investment. The site’s name is adopted from a 1916 arched railroad bridge that spans the East River. Her black hair poked out the back of her baseball cap, which was emblazoned with Hell Gate’s logo. Wang took a hit of her vape pen and cast again. “One time, I snagged a turtle,” she said. Turtles bobbed in the water, gazing at us. “You hear about these mythical five-pound bass in the lake,” Wang said, pulling her rod up and frowning at her empty hook. Black crappie, yellow perch, bluegill, and common carp all live in Prospect Park Lake, the last lake in Brooklyn. (“No fish is more emblematic of New York’s waterfront setting,” the Times once reported.) The city’s freshwater scene isn’t half bad, either. The Hudson River is a big draw it is one of the most significant striped-bass spawning areas in the country, and city fishermen, who cast from boats, piers, and sidewalks, have been known to catch fifty-pounders during the fish’s biannual migrations. Fishing, with proper permits, is allowed and practiced in all five of New York’s boroughs. She slowly reeled the line back in, waiting for a bite. “So we’ve both won.” With a flick of her wrist, Wang cast a line into the murky water, and her lure, a dark plastic worm, landed with a plop. “Somehow, they’ve convinced me to podcast,” Wang said recently, standing on a bank beside Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Lake. OnlyFins, Wang’s fishing column, débuted that same month. Their Web site, Hell Gate, launched in May, 2022. Second, she wanted to write a column about the hobby with which she had recently become obsessed: fishing in the polluted rivers, man-made ponds, and noxious canals of New York. First, she didn’t want to do any podcasting. Last year, when the journalist Esther Wang was approached by some friends who were starting a local news organization, she agreed to join them, on two conditions.
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