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Who Really Runs New York? - An Interview with Akash Mehta, Editor-in-Chief of New York Focus
Democracy requires watchdogs, but who's watching Albany? In this conversation with Akash Mehta, Editor-in-Chief of New York Focus, I uncover the hidden machinery of power in New York State.
Research shows that geographic isolation breeds corruption - when state capitals sit far from population centers, accountability suffers. While New York City teems with journalists, few eyes focus on the capital, where the real power resides.
Launched in 2020, New York Focus answers the crucial question: "Who runs New York?" Their investigations have revealed family dynasties controlling the prison system, secretive legislative committees determining which bills live or die, and law firms involved in judicial appointments. Most importantly, they've proven that when journalists expose these hidden mechanisms, change happens quickly.
As Akash explains, power in New York takes many forms - from predictable corporate influence to dysfunctional bureaucracies where "no one runs New York" and problems persist due to institutional neglect rather than malice. But their work also reveals the power of informed citizens to drive accountability when armed with knowledge.
Ready to understand who's really pulling the strings in your state? Subscribe now to hear what happens when fearless journalism meets democratic dysfunction. Then visit nyfocus.com to support their essential work uncovering the stories that shape our lives but seldom make headlines.
And so the family dynasty that over decades has risen up in the ranks of the internal politics of the prison agency and now runs the prison agency. They run New York, the law firms and their closely affiliated political machines that control the local judiciary systems. They run New York and the elite senators on the Working Rules Group, which has been operating for decades but has never received any sustained coverage until we covered it last year, and which essentially decides the fate of hundreds of bills in the last month of the legislative session. They run New York.
Speaker 2:They run New York. In 2012, researchers Felipe Campante and Kwak Ando published a paper finding that there are greater levels of political corruption in states where the capital is geographically isolated from major population centers. That was a mouthful. In other words, the further away lawmakers are from most people in their state, the more corruption tends to occur. The paper also found that politicians tend to get more money from campaign contributions in states with isolated capitals. Massachusetts, for example, the paper found, with its population concentrated around Boston, is less corrupt than New York and its isolated capital in Albany, which is about two and a half hours away from the city. The researchers' explanation for this dynamic is that there's less accountability in areas with fewer newspapers. They also found that newspapers provide greater coverage of state politics when their audiences are more concentrated around the capital.
Speaker 2:Now, for a state like New York, almost all the action is in New York City, so it's no surprise that newspapers apply their focus there and not so much on Albany. On a basic level, this makes sense. Out of sight means out of mind, and out of mind means there's less accountability. Compounding this problem is the fact that over the past couple of decades, local newspapers have struggled and several have even died. These local papers cover often mundane but extremely important activities happening in our neighborhoods and our governments. Given this fact, we should genuinely worry about more corruption. But amid these struggles in journalism, one new startup is filling this critical void. Started just five years ago, in 2020, new York Focus is covering Albany better and more extensively than any other publication, at least in my opinion. Last week, for example, they published this amazing guide on New York State's budget proposals. If you don't know, new York's budget is massive even larger than some countries and after it's finalized, it'll be no less than $250 billion for this fiscal year and it determines fundings for schools, childcare, medical care, housing, everything. The guide is also wonderfully organized into major categories like education, social services, family policy and several others. If you click on family policy, for example, you'll see where the governor and the legislatures agree and disagree. Under family policy, you'll see that they all agree on increasing tax credits for parents with children, but that the government disagrees with raising funds for child care vouchers. Under housing, you'll notice that everyone agrees on rezoning reform to increase housing supply and that they all agreed to restrict private equity firms from buying up single-family homes, which started to become a problem, a serious one a few years ago. So if you're a New Yorker, you really can't afford not to review this guide. I'm actually consulting it to prepare for the next year as much as that's possible today.
Speaker 2:Aside from this, new York Focus also has these fascinating deep investigative stories on the prison system, on the judicial system and several other areas, and all of them teach a great deal about New York. So after stumbling across this site, I decided to reach out to the editor-in-chief, akash Mehta, to speak to him about New York Focus, and he agreed, which is pretty cool. Here's my conversation with him. Before we get started, please subscribe to the Empire Review on all your platforms and also make sure to check out New York Focus and subscribe to them as well. I hope you'll enjoy.
Speaker 2:I came across New York Focus a couple of months ago while I was doing research for one of my pieces. I can't remember what, but I quickly saw how different New York Focus is from other platforms, for example, from the New York Times, which is the legacy platform that we all know. But I also noticed how different it is from more local, concentrated not concentrated, but local publications like the Gothamist and City and State, which I read consistently and, I think, are great publications. The difference that I quickly saw is that New York Focus covers topics that others are not. So, for example, I spent the last couple of weeks reading one of your pieces about how judges are selected, essentially by a select few people political parties and law firms. It's a great piece two to three parts. Highly recommend it. It's engaging. You also covered a story about New York State's prison system and the family that essentially operates it Another great piece.
Speaker 2:I also read a piece about, I guess you can say, the not so public Senate committee that essentially determines what bills actually become law and what bills die. So in many ways, I have learned more about New York over the past two to three weeks than I've learned about New York in the past two to three years, only because, as I said earlier, you're going into topics that not many others are doing so. So the reason why I have you here is because we're essentially doing the same thing, I would say. So I'm very excited to have you here, and I'll start with my first question how did you get this idea and what led you to launching New York Focus? All I know is that you launched it back in 2020. And you hear, right now, the publication is growing on a consistent basis. You're working on an exciting piece about the budget, but how did you get this idea and how did you get here right now idea and how did you?
Speaker 1:get here right now.
Speaker 2:Jonathan, that was the most heartening, lovely introduction because I should pitch you a job offer to be our comms consultant or our fundraising consultant.
Speaker 1:I'm open to it. What you described really just gets to the heart of our mission and what we're trying to do and really what we set about trying to do about four years ago. I grew up in New York City. As a kid I was really interested in local politics. I served on my community board, I interned for various local electeds and campaigns and organizations and when I moved back to New York in 2020, not thinking that I was going to go into journalism professionally, to New York in 2020, not thinking that I was going to go into journalism professionally I just sort of was talking to some of those people I knew in those circles and hearing the wildest things that, even as a New York native and someone who had been, you know, somewhat involved in local politics, was new to me about how the state really works, and I freelance reported a few of those stories again not intending for it to, you know, become a career, but you know, for example, I reported on how the governor was every day you know this was Cuomo at the height of the pandemic.
Speaker 1:Every day was in all of our living rooms asking the federal government for more money and at the same time, he was essentially threatening to reject about $6 billion in federal Medicaid aid because it would come with a string attached, which is that it would have prevented him from passing his own Medicaid cut. That type of just story and dynamic of the real decisions that were being made in New York State were new to me, felt enormously important and felt incredibly undertold, and I didn't know this at the time. But New York State, you know, we think about. I think people are aware that there is a crisis in local news across the country, but people also think that New York is exempt because we have the New York Times, we have the Wall Street Journal, we have more journalists per square foot probably than just about anywhere else on the planet, but it turns out that almost all of those journalists are focused on national and international or non-political subjects, and the ones who are focused locally are mostly focused on New York City, whereas so much of the real power is in Albany.
Speaker 1:Kathy Hochul, for all that we know about Eric Adams and his scandals. Kathy Hochul is 100 times as powerful as Eric Adams and the state legislature is 100 times as powerful as the city council, including in New York City, where they control the subways and the bail law that sets the population at Rikers and essentially the tax system. And yet coverage of Albany has slowed to a trickle and overall newspaper coverage in New York is down by about half in just about 20 years. And so that's why we set about creating New York Focus about four years ago to fill that void, to really return a sense of scrutiny and accountability to state politics in a state that is just dramatically large and important and wealthy. You know we have a $230 billion budget, which is more than 90% of countries, and yet we rank in the bottom three states in terms of how many reporters we have per dollar in that state budget.
Speaker 2:Going off of what you said. Why do you think there's less interest in state politics?
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a great study that says that the further away a state's capital city is from its most populous city, the higher the rates of corruption and also the higher the adultery rates among state legislators.
Speaker 2:I see, I think the idea is like what goes on in Albany stays in Albany, right.
Speaker 1:So that's one reason that New York City just sucks on a local level, sucks the air out of the room, is a black hole of attention and, to be clear, new York City also used to have a much more vibrant news ecosystem as well, as anyone who's, you know, skimmed the pages of the New York Times' Metro section could tell you, although actually they no longer publish it in print, so you can't even do that anymore. I think the other thing to say is that Albany is built to avoid scrutiny. What do you mean by that? So much of the processes and the structure of how state government operates is designed to make it hard for journalists to do their job.
Speaker 1:I believe the last time I looked at the numbers, I believe it was 49 out of 50. Maybe it was 50 out of 50 in terms of the length of time that you have to go to get one of these requests returned to you. So I was talking to Anna Wolfe, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at Mississippi Today, is starting a bureau in Jackson and was saying she gets frustrated when Mississippi officials don't return her records requests within a week. In New York the average is 180 days 180 days, wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:According to an analysis we did of figures by Muckrock. And that's just the tip of it. Another giant one which I'm thinking about a lot, given where we are in New York's legislative session right now, is our budget process, which has been ranked 50 out of 50 for.
Speaker 2:Something interesting. You said that there was more scrutiny or more coverage about state politics a while back. When did that start to decline.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been a long process, but essentially since around the turn of the century. By some estimates, the heyday of newspapers nationally was in 2005, 2006. And in New York, our board member, rex Smith, who's sort of the dean of Albany Journalists, has been doing this for just about longer than anyone else. He used to be the editor-in-chief of the Albany Times Union, which is the local paper in the capital region that still does great work and for a long time did by far the most day-in, day-out coverage of state government. He talks about how he took over that paper in 2002 and served through 2020. And in 17 of those 18 years he had to cut staff. And he talks about how he used to be the Albany Bureau Chief for Newsday at a time when they had, I believe, about 600 reporters. And now anyone who I don't know the exact number, but anyone who skims their website knows that it's nothing close to that, nowhere near that right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's likely a result of the proliferation of social media Facebook, meta in general, Twitter where people are engaging with news in a different way. I mean when I say we, I think most people have known this for at least the past five to 10 years, where I know folks who get their news entirely from X or from Substack now, or any other platform.
Speaker 2:So I think, at least the way I see it, the decline of newspapers, is multifaceted, but one explanation could be the rise of social media and just a differing nature of how we consume media now.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And the other, just crucial thing to add, there is advertising. Advertising the advertising model that had sustained much of local journalism has just completely dried up and it's, you know, often attributed at first to craigslist, but it's far more than that.
Speaker 2:I can see that. So you have a rather provocative line, tagline for the new york focus, which I love, which is who runs new york? When I first thought of that line I thought, well, it's obviously the wealthiest New Yorkers, the people who run companies, the people who are in government themselves, but who in fact runs New York?
Speaker 1:Right, I just want to say the three stories that you highlighted in the introduction. It makes me so happy that you chose those three stories because they all get to what is the central mission of New York Focus, which is to shine a light and to politicize really, the hidden institutions and actors that run New York, that control how state politics work and yet are not known. And so the family dynasty that over decades, has risen up in the ranks of the internal politics of the prison agency and now runs the prison agency. They run New York. The law firms and the closely affiliated political machines that control the local judiciary systems, even though you've never heard their names. They run New York. And the elite senators on the Working Rules Group, which has been operating for decades but has never received any sustained coverage until we covered it last year and who, as you referenced, even some other senators didn't know of its existence until our story, and which essentially decides the fate of hundreds of bills in the last month of the legislative session.
Speaker 1:They run New York, and so a lot of what we do is try sort of developed, a sort of rough schematic of the different buckets, of sort of answers to the question who runs New York and maybe I'll just quickly run through it. The first answer is exactly what you started out with, and certainly what I started out with as the hypothesis which is true, which is that the rich and the powerful run New York. New York is the most unequal state in the nation. We have enormous concentrated wealth and that wealth plays a dominant role in state politics the influence of through lobbying, through campaign finance, but also just through networks and who you went to private school with as a kid, or the rich and the powerful run New York, and so a lot of our coverage is, in various ways, about the influence of wealth on New York state politics.
Speaker 1:Maybe, if I had to pick one example, we did a story a few years back about how a campaign finance law that was aimed to really end or dramatically reduce the role of corporate dark money in New York politics had just gone completely unenforced. People were routing their corporate anonymous donations through LLCs, through these sort of like Astrourf, fellow Cs, but then violating campaign finance law by not listing the actual owners, the actual sources of the money. We reported on this. As a result, the Board of Elections finally started enforcing the law. 3,000 corporate donors were de-anonymized. As a result, and among other things, we found as a result of your story, as a result of our story and here I should shout out the reporter, sam Mellons.
Speaker 2:I read much of his stories.
Speaker 1:And so, as one of the many things that was unearthed by that, we found that the nursing home industry, for instance, had donated a lot more than was previously known to Governor Hochul. The second answer and it's a bit of a demoralizing one, or a similarly demoralizing one is not you, you do not run New York. And what I mean by that is really what we were talking about a couple moments ago, which is that New York politics is built in many ways to exclude popular participation, to sideline the public's ability to know about what's going on and participate in what's going on. There was a landmark Brennan Center study that looked at every single state legislature and found that New York had the most centralized decision-making power that most systematically excluded the role of rank and file legislators whose goal is really to represent their constituents. And there are so many stories that again that we do that sort of fall under this bucket. The Working Rules Group story that I just mentioned is one of them. The third one to me was maybe the most new to me, the most unexpected, and that is that no one runs New York no-transcript, and later we looked at this and found that it's true across the state as well, and they can't get jobs, can't rent apartments, can't reactivate government benefits, for the simple reason that they aren't issued ID. The system has all the information they need in most cases to give them ID and in fact in many cases they had their ID when they got arrested. Police confiscated it and then it got lost, either by the cops or the court system or the jails, and they never get it back. This is a solvable issue. Other states have solved it. Other states have DMV machines, id machines in jails and prisons. New York City tried to solve it and they couldn't because of the logistical issues involved in setting up a secure Wi-Fi connection at Rikers. It's not because there was a billionaire who spent a lot of money stopping this from happening, it's because no one was running that program well.
Speaker 1:And one thing that we look at so much is just the decline in capacity, the decline in state capacity in many areas, in many areas. And then the last answer is that we run New York. New Yorkers do have enormous leverage and power ordinary New Yorkers, when they are informed and when they are organized and when they make their voices heard. And we play a small role, and by we I mean New York Focus, but I also mean journalists writ large, but there are so many examples of bringing issues to light, it leading to public outcry or participation and then seeing extremely concrete change. One example we reported on how the state prison agency had passed a policy, a pretty draconian censorship policy that essentially prevented incarcerated people from publishing any creative work, including journalism, by the way, we commission incarcerated journalists, so it would have prevented us essentially from doing this without going through an onerous, probably months-long, review process that basically would have stopped them from, in our reading at least portraying the prison system in a negative light, and it was, to my mind, a clear First Amendment issue.
Speaker 1:And we published the story and there was immediate outcry. There were social media campaigns. There were call your legislator campaigns. Pen America created an online petition legislator campaigns. Pen America created an online petition. Within 24 hours, the prison agency rescinded the policy in response to that popular outcry. I see this just over and over and over, that the issues on which there is sustained large-scale popular mobilization are the issues in which we see change. New York has also been a state where a lot is stuck in the past, but also it's a state where, in the last five or six years, we've seen a lot of change, a lot of sort of big new, ambitious policies. Implementation is a different question, and that is because when New Yorkers make their voices heard, they are listened to. When New Yorkers make their voices heard, they are listened to. Why do you think?
Speaker 2:public officials are responding in that manner. I mean, you just mentioned the story about the artist in prison who couldn't receive commissions for their work, and it's my understanding that several other officials have responded to many of your stories. Another one, for example, is I read the piece on Kathy Hochul's proposed plan to change our home health care program, in which lobbying efforts were being basically lodged against her, and then you discovered that there was another lobbying firm, or at least another organization, that was funneling money to this organization, potentially in violation of campaign finance laws, to this organization, potentially in violation of campaign finance laws. After this, I believe the state health commissioner urged Attorney General Letitia James to look into this a bit more. So there have been many instances in which your stories have led to public officials taking action. Why do you think they're receptive? What's making them listen to what you're doing?
Speaker 1:So in that particular story that you mentioned yeah, exactly as you said we basically revealed that this $10 million lobbying campaign the second biggest lobbying campaign of last year that was blanketing the airwaves with advertisements attacking Hochul's home care plan was in fact funded by undisclosed funds. This is, by the way, separate from the other dark money story that I referenced earlier. In that case, it's because it was in their interest to do so, in their very direct political interest, because, you know, in a way, we were exposing something pretty underhanded about their political opponents. And you know, let's be honest, that is one way that journalism can have impact. You know, we reported earlier, this week in fact, that former Governor, andrew Cuomo, who's, of course, running for mayor, his private defense lawyers at the same time as some of them are representing him against sexual harassment claims on public, on taxpayer dime, as in you know, the taxpayers pay for their legal costs. At the same time, we found that they're hosting a glitzy fundraiser for him, so they are steering private money to him while he, in effect, is steering public money to them. We reported on this and we found out yesterday that there was a rally outside of the fundraiser and other candidates criticized him for it.
Speaker 1:So of course, that's one way that journalism can have an impact is by, you know, giving ammunition and fuel to the, you know, to various sides of political beefs decision makers might be responsive to public attention and awareness.
Speaker 1:One of them is that they genuinely many, you know, the actual sort of day in, day out, civil servants of New York State and are, you know, in my estimation, are like almost entirely in it for the right reasons, trying to make government work, doing peculiar, you know, work on, oftentimes in, you know, understaffed agencies and the information that we report is sometimes new to them and then, you know, spurs them to take action. And you know I have to be careful of not violating off the record things that we've heard. But just today we heard from, you know, one of one of the houses of the legislature, that a pretty significant part of one of their proposals, their proposed change to the governor's plan, was a direct result of the fact that we raised an issue with, we raised a sort of limitation of the governor's plan on this particular issue. So that's an example of just well-meaning political servants responding and taking the information that we're making public and trying to do their jobs with it.
Speaker 2:Illuminating. The information is extremely important because, in order for us to operate the city and the state, we have to be civically engaged, and I noticed that you were in city government or at least intern, if I'm mistaken when you were in high school.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was. I interned for various places and I was on my local community board.
Speaker 2:So very much, not, you know just as a kid.
Speaker 2:But how did you get into that? Because I think that to me that's a direct line to what you're doing right now. I mean, you've been civically engaged since you were a teenager, which I think puts you in the minority of like civic engagement for much of the population. I can't say that I was that civically engaged when I was in high school, but I do think it's fascinating how that experience, at least for my opinion, seems to have led you to where you are right now. So what got you into interning for the city when you were younger, and did it actually have an appeal to you when you were thinking of starting New York Focus?
Speaker 1:I remember that the first task I was assigned to as an intern for a city council member was going to pet stores in my neighborhood and asking them if they would the program was called, I think, adopt a Basket if they would essentially take responsibility for changing the trash, can the trash bags by their business. There's a lot of dog shit there, you know, like dog walkers sort of throw their waste in the garbage cans.
Speaker 1:But the garbage trucks on these less populated streets only go, you know, once or twice a week and so they were asking, you know, private businesses to sort of step up and it was so exciting to get them, you know, to say yes and to see like real, immediate, concrete, like improvement and change in a, you know, in a community First victory. First victory, incredibly small scale stuff and incredibly galvanizing because you can see change and you know you can see change on the level of the corner. You know garbage can in local politics and you can see change on the level of, you know, thousands of corporate, anonymous donors or the composition of this of the state's top court. Local politics, local and state politics, are far more malleable and responsive to public input than federal politics. Everyone I know who's reported on both the federal level and the state level talks about how you can get so much more of a response and see so much more just immediate sort of results from your reporting on the state level. I can see that I totally agree.
Speaker 2:I mean I see my council member almost every other week just walking around the neighborhood right city council member and I've often run into our assembly member as well, and I haven't seen our state senator that much. But I can see how, from just pure proximity, it is a lot easier to shift or even like mold what's happening in your community. The issue is that most people are not that engaged, for whatever reason, and not that many people are civically engaged. But I do think that if people did get more engaged, a lot more things would happen. But let me return to something else. You mentioned that you have become less cynical since you've been working on this, but how bad was your cynicism when you first started doing this?
Speaker 2:Huh, that's an interesting question, I mean.
Speaker 1:I think I maybe had a model where, among those four different answers that I gave to who runs New York, the rich and powerful would have been like just about my only answer. You know, when I started I don't know, maybe that's an exaggeration I suppose I did know that. You know, at least on the level of the corner garbage can someone else could run New York. And yeah, and I think I've just become much more aware of the fact that that is so much of the story. I do not want to downplay it, but it's not the whole story.
Speaker 2:I want to go back to this point that New York State makes it extremely difficult for the public to be engaged with the process, and you've mentioned this before, but I want to return to this because I think this is important. You may have answered this, but I want to truly emphasize it. But what structural barriers are in the way for people being engaged? I know that there's the proximity for example, Albany is far away from us and you've also mentioned the Freedom of Information Act, which makes it a lot difficult for you to receive information. So there's proximity and lack of information. But are there any other structural barriers that you've encountered that you've noticed that makes it hard for people to be engaged?
Speaker 1:The one and I know I've already referenced this, but the one that to me, is sort of dominates everything else is just the degree of centralization of decision-making power. In New York, the governor. We have one of the strongest executives in the nation. The governor has most of the power. So much of the debates that we're seeing right now on the federal level of Trump and Project 2025 and trying to sort of weaken the role of Congress and boost the role of the executive. That's already happened in New York, that's. You know that, in fact, this is a story that we should do.
Speaker 2:It sounds like a good one.
Speaker 1:So that is so the you know the governor has a dominant role, and then in the legislature, the legislative leaders, the Senate majority leader and the assembly speaker within the legislature, to the extent that they do have power, you know they do have some, but power there is enormously centralized with the leaders, and so with such centralized decision-making power, that inherently limits the ability of the public to participate. And it means that you know, if you have a well-paid lobbyist, you know who knows about the existence of the Senate Working Rules Group or who speaks to the governor's staff every week, then you have a ticket to entry, and if you don't, you're left rallying outside the doors.
Speaker 2:I wanted to ask you about the budgeting process. You cover this quite extensively in your work, but what has shocked you the most about this? You may have answered it already, but what has shocked you the most about your coverage about the budgeting process of New York?
Speaker 1:What shocks me the most is that there is no actual debate that happens in public that you can just tune into as a normal person to hear what people, what legislators, actually think about the bills that they're talking about.
Speaker 1:You know, I watched a Friedrich Wiseman, I think, three and a half hour documentary the other week about the Idaho State Legislature and the thing that was just mind blowing to me, coming from New York, is that you actually had a documentarian sitting in the committee room, you know, just taping, like you know, and any member of the public could have been there and hearing legislators talk about bills, debate them, try to figure out how to make them better, like that happens in public in other states, whereas in New York it's literally unthinkable that genuine debate and consideration like that could happen in the public. You know there is like floor time but where there are like recorded you know committees and sessions in the legislature but no one's doing any actual debate or consideration. It's just sort of political speeches, it's having made up your mind on something you try to get a good soundbite in. There's no actual deliberation, and so the extent to which the real decision-making and deliberation happens behind closed doors is mind-blowing.
Speaker 2:Again, I've learned more about New York over the past two to three weeks like truly learned about it than I have reading other publications. Where do you see New York over the past two to three weeks like truly learned about it than I have reading other publications? Where do you see New York focus in, let's say, the next two years? What stories do you really want to cover? What's really pulling you at this moment?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, maybe I should just give you a little sketch of our institutional trajectory. So we launched in October 2020, so we launched in October 2020 as really a sort of I mean, scrappy doesn't cover it like as just more of an idea than like a real institution we were. It was just a team of, you know, a few of us that were basically just my college friends. We threw up a WordPress site. We had almost no money and luckily, like just before we launched, we got a $60,000 grant and so that gave us enough money to pay ourselves half time for six months and hire some freelancers. But we threw it up on the site and then, since then, we've about doubled our budget every year.
Speaker 1:We are now a team of about 15 of us covering and we have beat reporters dedicated to the criminal justice system, to climate and environmental politics, to, most recently, to social services, this sort of safety net, to education, and there are some generalist reporters. We do not have a full time reporter on health. We do not have a full-time reporter on health. We do not have a full-time reporter on housing. We do not have a full-time reporter on immigration, even at this crazy, monumental moment when it's needed. So there are vast areas and we cover all these issues, but through our generalist reporters or through freelancers, not in the sort of dedicated way that we're able to when we have staff reporters dedicated to a beat.
Speaker 1:And so one major thing that I would like to see over the next two years is us finding the funds. We're a nonprofit outlet. We're funded by donations, both from our readers sort of just everyday readers and from foundations and rich people, basically, who can afford to make large donations. And so if you're listening to this and you think that you know you want to see the type of reporting that I've described on an issue like housing or health or immigration. We would so appreciate your support.
Speaker 1:And then we also want to build out our Albany Bureau. We will, you know, I would I don't know that we're going to get there in two years, but I would like to have, you know, four or five full-time reporters in Albany year-round, not just for the legislative session keep reporting on the governor and the assembly and the senate, but also on all of the state agencies, which are fiefdoms of their own. Some of them are larger than entire other states from the perspective of figuring out how Albany works. And then I also want to expand across the state. So much of what Albany does affects regions and cities across the state, not just New York City, and so I want to build regional bureaus Again, this isn't all going to happen in two years but across the state that translate what's going on in the state level to how it's felt locally.
Speaker 2:You certainly have the vision and I would say what pulled me to the publication, aside from covering stories that aren't being covered, is the storytelling. The storytelling is what really pulled me into it Not to be hyperbolic, but a novel in certain instances. You know the way that you started the story not you, but the way your organization started the story about the family that runs the prison system was pretty captivating. It's a pretty graphic description and I'll read it maybe in the postscript, but that's what pulled me into it and I think if you continue along the storytelling aspect, you'll continue to grow. Who do you see as your biggest competitor?
Speaker 1:Okay, this will sound hokey, but it is just true. Local journalism has been winnowed enough and decimated such that journalists genuinely see each other as collaborators just as much as competitors. Yes, we're racing for scoops with the Albany Times Union, with the New York Times, with Gothamist and the City and a number of other publication. But we're also co-publishing with all of those, with all of those papers you know we're. We have a year long project right now with the New York Times to cover local police misconduct. We, you know, partner with the Albany Times Union and the city and Gothamist. And and then also when we you know, sometimes one outlet will crack a door open and the others will sort of wedge it fully open. And we're constantly talking to each other in meetings, sort of behind the scenes, about trying to figure out how we can together, collaboratively, make the biggest impact. And, to be honest, I wish there were more cutthroat competition.
Speaker 1:There's a great Maggie Haberman interview somewhere where I think Ben Smith, in a Ben Smith column, where she talks about how she used to as a city hall reporter. She used to. She was either at the New York, at the Daily News or the Post, or maybe she jumped between the both of them. Every morning she would read the other one, scan through the sort of mentions of anonymous sources, immediately figure out who the anonymous source was, call them up and scream at them for giving it to the other paper, not to her. And in a way you know that in a way is a much healthier environment where there are enough journalists that you know, competition pushes each of us to, but we're no longer there.
Speaker 2:Is there anything you'd like to say? To close off? And I'll say for all our listeners here and viewers on YouTube and every other podcasting platform that you should seriously take a look at New York Focus Not saying this because I'm here sitting with the editor-in-chief, but because I have pulled much of my information for much of my segments and, as I've said before and I'll continue to say, I have learned much more about the city through this platform than anywhere else. So is there anything else you'd like to close off before we finish recording?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, so we cover the courts extensively. We cover political influence on the courts, but we also cover the sort of internal politics of the court. We covered, for instance, the state court of appeals a lot. We cover many of the issues that you mentioned, like congestion pricing, like local law 97 and the city's decarbonization, and so I imagine there are a lot of people listening to this podcast who know about these issues and who know things that we should know, or rather that the public should know, and that we can be a vehicle for enabling the public to know. And so you know.
Speaker 1:One thing that I just wish that we had more generally in our civic spirit is a culture of reaching out to journalists and telling them what they should know. So please, if you you know. My sort of two asks are one if you can support the work, please do you know nysfocuscom. You can read our work there and you can donate. But also if you know something that we should be covering, or if you just have feedback on a story or an idea for a story, please reach out. My email is akash A-K-A-S-H at nysfocuscom.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay, Akash thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Appreciate it.