Business News

The New York Times Announces New Features and New Bureau Chief for City Room

Monday 11. January 2010 - The New York Times announced today a series of new features and staff changes for its City Room blog (http://nytimes.com/cityroom), which was launched in 2007 and quickly grew to become one of the leading online news resources devoted to New York City.

In the coming weeks, City Room will roll out a series of new features, including daily columns that will delve deeply into the workings of major New York City institutions like the police department, the schools and the courts, and an ambitiously expanded daily look at what the city’s blogosphere is talking about.
Sewell Chan, the founding bureau chief, will be moving to a new assignment within The Times. His replacement will be Andy Newman, a veteran Times reporter, who has excelled in both the print newspaper and its online enhancements.
“City Room, launched as something of a wild dream in 2007, has been a miracle of energy, intelligence, curiosity, competition and daily engagement,” said Joe Sexton, Metropolitan Editor, The New York Times. “It has been the vehicle with which The Times broke some of the biggest news stories. It has been a source of vital information at moments of crisis. It has hosted scores of experts and entertained and provoked millions of readers around the globe hungry for a taste of New York.
“Sewell Chan, City Room’s force of nature, now hands off to Andy Newman, who has spent the last year roaming our online frontiers, and whose versatility and imagination will now carry City Room into the future.”
City Room mixes original reporting with reader conversations. Among NYTimes.com’s most active blogs, it posted 3,314 items and received 82,535 comments (82,256 of which were approved) in 2009. Since inception, it has consistently ranked among the top five most popular blogs on NYTimes.com.
Mr. Newman joined The Times in 1997 and has covered transportation, religion, the night desk, Brooklyn, Staten Island and investigated such questions as why New Yorkers stare out their apartment windows; what it is like to walk every inch of the Staten Island shoreline (and swim in the Kill Van Kull); and why drivers lash ragged stuffed animals to the grilles of their trucks. Since early 2009 he has run The Local, The Times’s foray into hyperlocal collaborative journalism in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
Mr. Newman will continue to leverage the unique talent and resources of The Times’s one hundred-plus-person Metro staff.