Joe Sexton

At 2 p.m. on March 10, The New York Times published a story on its Web site reporting that Governor Eliot Spitzer had been named in connection with a federal investigation into a prostitution ring.

And the story belonged, unequivocally, to the Cinderella section of the Times newsroom, the Metro desk. Joe Sexton, editor of the section since 2006, was finally getting to try on the glass slipper: The Spitzer story was arguably the biggest scoop in a year at The Times, and was certainly the biggest story of Joe Sexton’s reign at Metro.  read more »

The New York Times has a new metro columnist. Susan Dominus, who has contributed to The Times Magazine, New York and Glamour, will start work this Monday and will write a twice-a-week column for Metro, joining columnists Clyde Haberman, Jim Dwyer and Peter Applebome.

In a memo, Metro editor Joe Sexton wrote:  read more »

Carolyn Ryan, most recently a deputy managing editor at the Boston Globe, is staying within the Times Company family: She's just been named a deputy metro editor for government and politics at the New York Times. Unfortunately, Ms. Ryan's exit happens at a time when about two dozen Globe staffers have accepted buyouts.

Joe Sexton's full (and lengthy!) memo after the jump, which includes thanking Globe editor Marty Baron and mentioning Ms. Ryan's ping-pong prowess.

--Michael Calderone

UPDATE: Adam Reilly at the The Phoenix now has Marty's memo.  read more »

Metro editor Joe Sexton has been busy answering reader questions the past few days. Here's a good one:

Q. Last year, the Metro section published a one-week series of daily articles (on Sept. 29, Sept. 30, Oct. 1, Oct. 2, and Oct. 3, 2006) about a toilet-related controversy at a chess match in Elista, Russia, in the republic of Kalmykia.

Is Kalmykia considered part of the New York metropolitan area?

-- Max

A. Dear Max: I have always considered Kalmykia to be the city's sixth borough.

Sexton was joking, of course! And although Philadelphia received the most attention in the Times as New York's best fake sixth borough, there have been several others in recent years: Palm Beach, Washington Heights, Miami, Hudson County, Nassau County, Los Angeles, and the Middle East.

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.