On May 24, the reporters move back into City Hall, after having been relegated to a trailer parked in front of the building for the duration of renovations.Room 9, located on the first floor directly opposite the City Council speaker's office, will once again be occupied by daily print and wire reporters. Room 4a, in the basement, will primarily be occupied by reporters for online-only publications, including Politico, DNAinfo.com, Examiner.com and Capital New York. Newer outlets, like City & State, will be there too.The New York Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post will be in Room 9, where they will each have three reporters. (The News has two right now, while their bureau chief is out on maternity leave.)The Wall Street Journal, ... Continue reading →

Following a New York Times editorial recommending the city adopt Philadelphia-style stop-and-frisk reform, Mayor Michael Bloomberg this morning wondered, "More murders, higher crime? Is that what the Times wants?"This morning, The New York Times wrote:New York should learn from Philadelphia, where the stop-and-frisk policy was the subject of a 2010 class-action suit for racial discrimination and violations of Fourth Amendment guarantees of freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. Like New York police officers, Philadelphia's were accused of using race as the basis for stops. Philadelphia settled the suit, accepting a consent decree that explicitly defined and prohibited illegal stops and put in place a court-appointed monitor to oversee stop-and-frisk practices.Today, during a Coney Island press conference hailing the start of beach season, the mayor was ... Continue reading →

The news that a New Jersey man has claimed to have murdered Etan Patz on May 25, 1979, a date that became known as National Missing Children’s Day in his memory, came too late, or too early, for today's newspapers.The question is whether the story will remain big enough for tomorrow's.This morning and into the afternoon, the Patz news was leading the homepages of all the city's major outlets, including The New York Times, The New York Post, the Daily News, Newsday, DNAinfo and the local affiliates for NBC, CBS, FOX and ABC, which broke into "The View" to carry Mayor Bloomberg's remarks during a press conference this morning about the latest developments.Nor is it a local story, exactly, appearing as it does this afternoon ... Continue reading →

As estimates of the total student loan debt exceed $800 billion and default rates approach 9 percent, some commentators are beginning to wonder whether an expensive education is really worth it, at least from a financial perspective. The combination of skyrocketing tuition and a dismal job market creates an environment where many are struggling to pay off hefty loans. But this is more true of some professions than others. Biomedical engineers can make $81,540 a year with a bachelor's degree, while a law clerk needs a law degree and still might make less than $40,000. The following interactive lets you search nearly 750 occupations in the Bureau of Labor Statistics database and see the required education for that profession, how much it will cost, what ... Continue reading →

The New Republic will open up a New York office sometime in the coming months, Capital has learned. Of course, the Beltway media-scene staple had its original offices here at its founding in 1914. And for about six years, from 2001 to 2007, the magazine had a New York-based business-side office, too.The latest TNR New York hub will have both editorial and business-side staffers, a spokeswoman told Capital. But the main headquarters will remain in Washington, D.C.TNR appears to be following a trend for D.C.-based media companies. Atlantic Media, publisher of The Atlantic, also has increased its New York presence, with the launch of a new business website and an expansion of The Atlantic Wire, its popular news aggregator. (The sites share new SoHo headquarters ... Continue reading →

There were lots of moments in Jason Horowitz's piece in The Washington Post yesterday morning about presidential candidate Mitt Romney's high-school days at the elite Cranbrook Schools in Michigan.But as a confessed media nerd, this was the moment that made my heart stop:The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be identified. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a ... Continue reading →

The call came in to ABC News around midday Tuesday: the White House was offering Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts a sit-down interview with the president, to take place the next day. One issue was dominating the news, and if the president was ready to discuss it, the interview would not just command a ratings-crushing audience – it would likely make history. Roberts scrubbed an appearance on The View, grabbed a producer and headed for New York's La Guardia airport Wednesday morning. There was a canceled flight, a manic dash between terminals, and the brief prospect that history would succumb, if only temporarily, to the caprice of the US air industry – and the weather.In the end, Roberts arrived on time for her interview ... Continue reading →

Fred Mahe, a 36-year-old software salesman, twists his tie into a neat knot while riding his skateboard up Madison Avenue from his home in the Financial District to his office at 42nd Street and 3rd Avenue. “It’s like a magic carpet,” he said of his trusty transport. “You just kind of stand on it and it goes.” Mr. Mahe doesn’t ride to work every day (“Some days it’s all you can do to find your way to the train,” he said), but he has joined a contingent of late–20-something and 30-year-old skateboarders who are riding the concrete waves of New York and Brooklyn on planks of wood atop polyurethane wheels. These aren’t the young skate punks of Union Square, grinding on railings and clattering down ... Continue reading →

One by one, the skaters rounded a turn, dropping a gloved hand to the asphalt as they scraped their wheels in a slide, taking care that nobody crossed into oncoming traffic and found themselves splattered across the grill of a Buick. At the bottom of the hill, the leader of the Bergen County Bombers, as this gang of skateboarders is known, wrestled the black motorcycle helmet from his head, revealing a mortgage broker with gray flecks in his beard and the crow’s feet that come from decades in the white-collar trenches. “It’s a total midlife crisis,” said the group’s leader, Tom Barnhart, 47, of Cresskill, N.J., who started skateboarding two years ago for the first time since the Carter administration. His life, he said, had ... Continue reading →

Marvin Orellana for The New York Times Joe Weisenthal wakes up around 4 a.m. most weekdays, afraid that in the five or six hours he has been sleeping, something happened that could move financial markets. His alarm is his cellphone, and after he silences it so that his wife can sleep, he rolls from bed and starts to type, still in his pajamas, in the darkness of his apartment at the edge of the Financial District. And the first thing he types, the first of about 150 daily messages he posts on Twitter, is almost always this: “What’d I miss?” He works for the next two hours at the table in his living-dining room, amid boxes and bikes and cleaning supplies. A chandelier hangs over ... Continue reading →