August 16, 2021
City & State New York
ANTHONY CORREIA/SHUTTERSTOCK; STATE SENATE
City & State has shed light on both the good and bad, placing a focus on ensuring that New Yorkers are aware of policy decisions and the information necessary to hold their representatives accountable. Also, City & State has managed to provide necessary levity at times, finding a way to use humor and insight on the personalities of individuals in government as a vehicle to deliver the message of its importance. Further, I applaud the intentional organizational changes made by City & State in relation to diversity in its newsroom and having a greater dedication to ensuring all perspectives are heard.
The history of City & State
N – state Sen. Jamaal Bailey
EW YORK POLITICS was a lot different 15 years ago. Michael Bloomberg still called the shots at New York City Hall. Westchester County Legislator Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Andrew Cuomo were making moves to win their first elected posts in Albany. This was an era when baby boomers and their older counterparts were at the height of their powers. It might sound quaint now, but digital-print hybrid magazines with drip like City & State mostly existed in the minds of editorially inclined futurists back then. It might sound incomprehensible to us now, but there were no smartphones back then. You couldn’t even tweet, so most people would watch television, read newspapers or surf the information superhighway for favorite news outlets like the New York Sun. Elected officials, lobbyists and political
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How two newspapers became a magazine. By Zach Williams
Mike Bloomberg was New York City mayor when we launched, and he became an avid reader.
junkies who now regularly consume dozens of news articles per day could only read so much via their primitive dial-up internet connections. Luckily for them, a scrappy publication called City Hall debuted in 2006 to provide these readers with their political fix. Success did not come purely from the sheer awesomeness of this monthly publication printed in tabloid form – though the artistic moxie of those early issues presaged many more lampooned politicians to come. One example is the November 2007 cover showing “Guru” Bloomberg teaching other mayors how to leverage their personal fortunes and moderate politics for political advantage. Then there was the clairvoyance of the reporting. “He can only change so much,” notes a July 2008 story about the mayoral aspirations of then-Rep. Anthony Weiner, whose political dreams would later im-
