Fernando Mateo

Mayor Mike's new television spot was unveiled this afternoon at campaign headquarters on West 40th street and featured, in a dig on Freddy, "Bronx native" and salsa star Willie Colon. In the ad, (no link available) Colon spins around and blows his trombone as Mike stands, with conspicuously less rhythm, on the other side of a split screen in a frozen grimace or talking with school kids. Fernando Mateo, director of Latino outreach for the Bloombrg campaign, performed some salsa steps as the commercial played, and said the ad helps "bring out the flavor of who we really are." The 30-second spot, which will start airing immediately on Hispanic television channels and cable shows in the city's Latino neighborhoods, is an effort to cut into Ferrer's base. But the commercial's fast, wheeling pace and lack of a traditional voiceover suggests a move to anticipate Freddy's expectedly unorthodox Ellis Verdi ads. "Salsa moves all Hispanic people," said Mr. Colon, who was on hand. "We hope it moves them to the voting booths." - Jason Horowitz  read more »

After her early boom, Jeanine Pirro is having remarkable trouble breaking through to the New York media market.

So this afternoon on 11th Avenue, she's holding a press conference to press for a drop in the gas tax. Unremarkable -- except she held that same press conference four times over Labor Day Weekend, without apparently leaving much of an impression.  read more »

This time, she'll be backed by taxi driver organizer, and fellow Mercury Public Affairs client, Fernando Mateo, who does occasionally make these things interesting.

NOTE: This is the fifth, not the fourth. Corrected from an earlier version. NOTE: Pirro's gas-tax push has gotten, in fact, a smattering of local press hits, which pop up on Google News here.

El Diario today takes the first look at Freddy's attempt to capture the Villaraigosa momentum, and has Ferrer saying he's "ready to be the first Latino Mayor in four centuries."

The paper also gives a Bloomberg aide, Fernando Mateo, a chance to take a shot at Freddy for, unlike the Los Angeles Mayor-elect, "disappear[ing] for three and a half years." (Would you see the Bloombergs saying something that harsh in English at this point in the race?)  read more »

But what interested us most, in our typically self-centered journalistic way, was to see what Freddy thinks of the press.

He "blamed, in part, the 'excessive scrutiny' of the press for the decline of its campaign. 'If a Puerto Rican congressman did not support me, the press would say I'm finished,' Ferrer said [after citing his support from most of the black members of the city's congressional delegation.] 'If an idea is bad, it's Ferrer's,' he added in another point of the interview."

There is Fernando Mateo, standing with a crowd of demonstrators in Union City, N.J., protesting the  read more »

Under nearly cloudless skies, thousands of Mexican-Americans gathered on East 116th Street to celebr  read more »