Before there was the 24-hour news cycle, there was Ed Koch.
The former mayor was his own all-news network, generating stories at a furious clip through three or more press conferences just about every day of his tenure. By comparison, Mayor Bloomberg has two to three press briefings a week.
Koch replaced the spin doctors, media strategists and expensive pollsters who now dominate politics with his own gut.
“Here was his strategy,” recalled longtime Koch aide John LoCicero. “Whenever he could be on camera or in a story, he was there. He overwhelmed everybody with his point of view.”
There were the daily press conferences in City Hall’s Blue Room. There were the one-on-ones with individual reporters. There were the “radiator press conferences” in the rotunda of City Hall, where reporters could grab the mayor on his way out the door.
That presented something of a problem for Maureen Connelly, Koch’s first press secretary.
“He’d be in the men’s room, and a reporter would start asking questions,” she said. “There was no way I could stop it.”
“Virtually 98 percent of his mayoralty was unscripted,” added Tom Kelly, who served as a deputy press secretary in Koch’s last six years.
Wayne Barrett, a former investigative journalist for The Village Voice, said his style played to his strength and won over New Yorkers.
“It’s the opposite of the highly successful style of Andrew Cuomo, which is to parcel out any information about himself in the smallest doses,” said Barrett. “Both strategies seem to work.”