Victoria Schneps-Yunis

Getting Eric Adams to attend a ribbon-cutting doesn’t take much work—like a flag-raising, it seems the mayor is almost always game. But what was strange about the ribbon-cutting for the Victoria Schneps-Yunis Building, which houses a nonprofit organization that serves people with special needs, wasn’t that Eric Adams attended. It was the location of the building, outside of the five boroughs in Garden City, Long Island.

But Victoria Schneps-Yunis, a resident of Roslyn Harbor, Long Island, isn’t just a regular local news magnate. Her business and Eric Adams’s career in public office have been inextricably linked. 

“When I write my book, there’s going to be a chapter on what she did to get me to become the mayor,” Adams said at the October ribbon-cutting, which may give you some insight into how the mayor views the media.

Schneps-Yunis refers to her media conglomerate as the “pothole newspaper,” covering hyper-local news around New York City and beyond. Starting with just a single weekly newspaper in northwest Queens in 1985, Schneps-Yunis has aggressively built a local newspaper empire fattened on medical advertising and required community advertising from City agencies, and is now comprised of over 70 community newspapers and magazines, from the flagship Queens Courier to Gay City News to Noticia New York to amNewYork Metro. According to its website, it reaches over 2 million readers each week. 

Schneps Media, which Schneps-Yunis runs with her son, has grown considerably over the past several years, gobbling up would-be competitors, laying off staff, and benefiting from the cost-savings of streamlined production. But that approach has led to criticism, with former editors and reporters claiming that the Schneps themselves have inserted their opinions into news coverage or encouraged favorable coverage of politicians they were chummy with.

“It very quickly became clear that they’re less of a news company than a promotions company,” Vince DiMiceli, the former editor-in-chief of Brooklyn Paper, told Gothamist after his paper’s owner was swallowed up by Schneps Media in 2018. “They wanted to make sure that anything we wrote about any politician was glowing. That’s not what newspapers do.”

Schneps Media did not respond to a request for comment. 

Beginning in 2014 and running while he was in office at Brooklyn Borough Hall, Schneps Media published a “pseudo-newspaper” called One Brooklyn that Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams mailed out to his constituents, with taxpayers footing the postal bill—totaling over $500,000 over the years, according to the Daily News. Content in the “newspaper” included things like lifestyle and personal finance tips from the BP, as well as flattering photos of him around the borough. 

Schneps Media made money through advertising in One Brooklyn, including ads placed by other businesses connected to Adams, such as Tony Argento’s Broadway Stages.  

Schneps-Yunis gave Adams $1,000 for his Brooklyn Borough President re-election race in 2017, and stood behind him on stage on election night in 2021. Her son, Joshua Schneps, was soon after appointed by Adams to the city’s Districting Commission. He aligned with Adams on the commission’s new council districts, by pushing for maps that pit two progressive Democrats against one another in a new district, instead of having a progressive take on a moderate. Those maps were rejected and that progressive, Justin Brannan, defeated moderate-turned-Republican Ari Kagan in a race where the Brooklyn Democratic machine [see entry on Rodneyse Hermelyn] was helping the Republican candidate by releasing a statement against Brannan). 

If you want to know more about Victoria Schneps-Yunis, she has a fun weekly column all about her life.

In November, she wrote about attending a meeting of New York politicians in Puerto Rico, where she gave awards to Adams and other local legislators. “I cherished the opportunity to meet old friends and make new ones. To my delight, many of the attendees were past honorees at one of our ‘honoring’ events!”

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Last updated: 12/18/2023