Publisher’s Note: City & State loses a cherished colleague

Dear C&S Readers:

We have some sad news to report: Our longtime City & State colleague and friend, Jim Katocin, died over the weekend.

Jim was vice president of advertising and the first employee at City & State. He was hired in 2005, and our growth and success is very much attributable to his hard work and dedication the past two decades.

Jim was a gentle giant, whose laugh and dignified manner ingratiated him to his colleagues, his clients and his array of longtime friends. I had a long talk with Jim on June 5; he lost his closest friend to cancer recently, and I was checking on him to see if he was OK.

We discussed everything but business for 45 minutes. We laughed about the sad fate of our mutual love, the New York Knicks, and we covered a lot of ground. He told me about his first job in New York, selling fruit from a stand on the Upper West Side. He fondly reminisced about all the great characters he encountered each day who would shop with him. He said that job was the perfect way to break into sales, and the lessons he learned during his few years doing that helped make him a successful media salesperson.

Jim was excited about working on a startup like City Hall, which was the original incarnation in 2006 of City & State. It was just him and the original editor, Edward-Isaac Dovere, for the first year, and they went out together to pitch clients on this new publication that was quickly being embraced by the political community.

Their collaboration led to Jim’s first sale in August 2006, the third issue. He told Jim he was doing a cover story about whether Mayor Mike Bloomberg might run for president in 2008. That sparked an idea for Jim: He knew that Bloomberg was having problems negotiating a contract with the Police Benevolent Association and called its director of communications to suggest he run an ad across from the opening page of that Bloomberg profile.

The PBA representative liked this creative way of getting the mayor’s attention and paid $5,000 to buy that prime space. The ad read, “Run for president? He can’t even negotiate a contract with his own police force.”

The day that issue was distributed in government office buildings, one of the deputy mayors, Kevin Sheekey, put the newspaper on Bloomberg’s desk at City Hall. Bloomberg marched over a bit later with the City Hall newspaper in his hands: “Thanks for showing me this cover story. But why DIDN’T YOU SHOW ME this anti-Bloomberg ad from the PBA?”

When Jim relayed this story to the union communications director, he said: “Wow, that’s the best $5,000 I ever spent! Sign me up for three more ads.”

I knew that day, because of Jim’s ingenuity, that City Hall had a viable business model. And the rest is history. Oh, and by the way, the police negotiated a very strong contract a few months later.

Jim Katocin was a quiet, polite, methodical sales executive. He cared about his clients. He took the time to serve them properly, and he cared if they were satisfied with their ad campaigns.

The City & State team, his family, friends and the many clients who worked with Jim over the past 20 years will miss him.

He was one of the best of us, and his hard work and dedication – and that creative PBA ad in 2006 – are largely responsible for the newsletter First Read, and all of City & State’s many offerings.

Best,

Tom Allon, Publisher

City & State