Diane Cardwell

The New York Post is hiring Staten Island Advance City Hall reporter Sally Goldenberg.

She’s filling the position vacated by Frankie Edozien, who broke the City Council slush fund story, then departed to take a teaching position at N.Y.U. and a Kaiser fellowship to write about health issues in Africa.  read more »

The New York Times is poised to announce they’re sending their Wal-Mart reporter, Michael Barbaro, to cover City Hall, according to two people familiar with the move.  read more »

New York Times City Hall bureau chief Diane Cardwell is leaving for a year to study at Stanford, Sally Goldenberg reports.  read more »

There's some movement on the local political beat!  read more »

City Hall is airing frustration about the prospect of negotiating with Eliot Spitzer as governor, reports Diane Cardwell.

Frustration within the administration has escalated to the point that some top advisers have started to view Mr. Spitzer's planned ascent to the Governor's Mansion in Albany as "the second coming of Rudy Giuliani," a reference to the former mayor's my-way-or-the-highway approach.

George Pataki is sitting on money that local Republicans want, reports Jacob Gershman.

Andrew Cuomo leads Mark Green in the polls and opts out of the next couple of debates.

Mike Bloomberg and Jeb Bush speak to business leaders in the city next week.

And Hillary Clinton meets with Ned Lamont in New York on Friday. -- Azi Paybarah

Diane Cardwell, who covered the Ferrer campaign last cycle for the Times, has been named City Hall Bureau Chief. She succeeds Jim Rutenberg, who departs soon for the White House.

Congrats and, in case you didn't get the memo:

To: The Staff

From: [Metro Editor] Joe Sexton

Diane Cardwell's first byline in the paper a dozen years ago carried this headline: Rapwear. Soulwear. Hipwear. The story introduced a new and fresh voice to our pages, and it is a voice that over the years has shown itself to be wise as well as witty, authoritative as well as nuanced, tough as well as tender. She wrote, for instance, the obituaries of Onofrio Ottomanelli -- the famed Village butcher -- and Freddy Ferrer -- the Bronx pol who didn't quite, ahem, make the cut.

She profiled the assassin at City Hall and Mr. Bloomberg's more or less constant companion. She traveled the country and filed from the battleground states in 2004, then returned to Brooklyn and took up a different kind of turf fight at the Atlantic Yards.

Along the way, her coverage of the City Council earned her a reputation as a shrewd and sophisticated observer of one of the city's more curious institutions. It made you laugh and cry, which pretty much means she got it just right.

Starting next month, Diane will bring her voice -- and all the intelligence and instinct and rigor that informs it -- to her role as City Hall Bureau Chief. It's an appointment we make with enormous excitement and great satisfaction. Diane, who has a real feel for the landscape and its inhabitants, also has a host of bold ideas for chronicling the second term of the Bloomberg administration and taking a true measure of its arguable accomplishments and potentially lasting improvements. We are, too, quite confident she will serve as an artful manager of a very busy and very talented couple of accomplices in Room 9.

In short, Diane -- child of Harlem and lifelong lover of the city -- rocks. We can't wait to get the party started.