The change comes early in the election cycle, but apparently, there is a lot going on. 

"Yes, we are beginning earlier than usual, but with a mayoral race, the Clintons, an ambitious governor, congressional races and the walk up to 2016, it seems urgent to have a full-time political chief and Carolyn is raring to go," reads an email to newsroom staff. "She will work closely and seamlessly with the Washington bureau, the fount of some of our strongest national political reporting and editing, with the ace political reporters here in New York and with the National and Investigative desks. She will assist Washington in the coverage of the mid-term elections."

Full memo below:

Dear Colleagues,

In March 2008 the political editor of the Metro Desk spent a tense weekend working one of the most sensitive stories The Times has published. Our senior FBI reporter and, soon, a whole team of diggers had complete trust in her and then-Metro Editor, Joe Sexton as they carried out their work in secret, trying hard to confirm their story. On Friday, the political editor, who had hoped to publish that night but knew to hold off and push her team for still more reporting, went home at 2 a.m. She spent all weekend in the office, dispatching reporters to Washington, taking files from others in Albany, staking out the governor’s swanky Manhattan building, and answering nudgy questions from the managing editor. Nervous about getting beaten, the Metro reporters all found steadiness as well as competitive zeal in their editor.

She seemed to have perfect instincts, knowing when to cut the tension with a joke. And when, on Monday, Carolyn Ryan said, “Hit it,” The Times published its blockbuster on Eliot Spitzer.

No one needs a tuning fork to know that Carolyn has perfect political pitch and that no one’s passion for the political story surpasses hers. Whether the story is New York’s gay marriage law or Anthony Weiner’s clients (no puns), Carolyn has completely dominated political coverage in our region. It was a no brainer to borrow her talents for the national political conventions and the 2012 campaign, where she had immediate impact.

While we may be cutting short her fabulous run as Metropolitan Editor, it seems only natural to turn to Carolyn to be our next political editor and lead our coverage. Yes, we are beginning earlier than usual, but with a mayoral race, the Clintons, an ambitious governor, congressional races and the walk up to 2016, it seems urgent to have a full-time political chief and Carolyn is raring to go. She will work closely and seamlessly with the Washington bureau, the fount of some of our strongest national political reporting and editing, with the ace political reporters here in New York and with the National and Investigative desks. She will assist Washington in the coverage of the mid-term elections.

Wendell Jamieson, whose very heart beats Noir New York, will be our next Metropolitan editor. He had been Carolyn’s partner on all Metro has accomplished, helping to lead coverage on everything from police controversies to hurricanes. Like her, he is beloved by reporters and editors on the desk, in part because the chase is always more fun and interesting when Wendell is leading it. Although much is made of his tabloid pulse (because he once worked at The Post, New York Newsday and The Daily News), we are drawn to Wendell’s flawless news head and his fascination with and knowledge of every aspect of New York.

He is the author of "Father Knows Less, or 'Can I Cook My Sister?' " in which he reported out the answers to his young son's wacky questions. He is a native of Park Slope and often notes that his Times career has improved along with his neighborhood. By the time he's done being Metro editor, no one will be able to afford a birdcage there.

Wendell takes the helm of a desk that is happy and performing at the very top of its game. Unlike Park Slope, it’s hard to imagine the place getting any better, but we know it will.

Jill and Dean

Once inside, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, sipping beers, while New York Times reporter Amy O’Leary asked a panel of editors and writers to talk about moxie.

Why was it, Ms. O’Leary wondered, that as a young freelancer she had spent months refining every pitch while her male peers tossed off story proposals from every statistic or idea they encountered?

“You have to understand that rejection is part of the process,” Times metro editor Carolyn Ryan said. “It really is part of the engagement with ideas.”

Ms. O’Leary’s younger self would have worried that one bad pitch could get her blacklisted from editors’ inboxes.

“You’re not going to remember in a pejorative way someone who’s just eager,” Ms. Ryan said. “We have a reporter at our paper, Sarah Maslin Nir—she was a lunatic when it came to pitching. She was relentless.” (After freelancing across 11 sections, Ms. Maslin Nir was hired full time.)

Attendees jotted it all down in notebooks made by Muji and Moleskine.

The event was put on by “female nonfiction storytellers” group Her Girl Friday, but a handful of men dotted the crowd, either in solidarity or simply sensing a networking or hook-up opportunity. The mood alternated between J-school seminar and group therapy session (even The Observer found herself involuntarily pumping her fist as panelist Katherine Lanpher cried, “No is a bump on the road to yes!”), but the evening’s mission seemed grander.

“This estrogen halo in this room—it’s really wonderful, it’s really powerful,” said Ms. Lanpher, a public radio host. “But we’re here because those byline counts matter.”

She was referring to the annual tallies put out by The Op-Ed Project, a nonprofit that shepherds women and minority writers onto newspaper op-ed pages, and VIDA, a two-year-old organization for women in the literary arts best known for throwing the wildest party the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference has ever seen. (There were burlesque dancers and roller-derby girls.)

In the last three years, the groups have become a fixture in Manhattan media circles for their end-of-year counts, which distill the nebulous boys-clubbiness of publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker into easily rebloggable bar graphs and pie charts.

As a result, a conversation previously relegated to once-a-decade university research papers has become an annual media event, a regular and cathartic articulation of a long-running internal monologue.

“We call the count ‘The Count’ from our experience of quietly counting to ourselves every time we read The New York Times Book Review,” VIDA co-founder Erin Belieu, a poet and professor at Florida State University told The Observer. “We were always looking to see how many and what kinds of books by women are being reviewed.”

In addition to counting female-authored articles, stories and poems, VIDA keeps tabs on the number of books by women reviewed by tastemakers like the London and New York Reviews of Books. Less than 20 percent of the titles reviewed by the NYRB were written by women, a problem novelist Meg Wolitzer wrote about in The New York Times earlier this year.

Ms. Wolitzer told The Observer the statistics had validated a suspicion she and female novelist friends had long shared. “You just had that feeling there was excitement around male work,” she said. “That was something I couldn’t quantify but I felt.”

It’s hardly a new discussion. Katha Pollitt reportedly devoted a Nation column to the problem more than a decade ago. TIME online editor Ruth Davis Konisberg had her own byline count site in the mid-aughts, called Women TK. But for the same reason, VIDA’s numbers are shocking. How is it that in 2012, The Nation (helmed by a woman, Katrina vanden Heuvel, since 1995), is still 73 percent written by men?

There are a couple of theories. The most popular is that women pitch less, or less aggressively, than men. Harper’s editor Ellen Rosenbush said as much when confronted with her dismal statistics, calling the “dearth of female bylines” an “industry-wide issue.”

“When I saw the VIDA counts I thought, I don’t know why that is. I’m not in the right position to theorize,” Ms. O’Leary said. But having mentored young journalists, she knew pitching was a perennial concern, and one piece of the puzzle that could be solved. “I just thought, well, hey, why don’t we do something really practical?”

According to a blog post by former GOOD magazine executive editor Ann Friedman, the gender makeup of a magazine reflects the genders of its editors and their professional networks of writers. Shortly after the first VIDA count, Ms. Friedman started Lady Journos!, a curated feed of quality, nonservice articles and essays written by women, in the hopes of keeping female bylines fresh in the minds of assigning editors.

The token male on Tuesday’s panel, The Atavist founder Evan Ratliff, agreed that editors should take responsibility.

“We have had a really bad gender byline balance,” he said sheepishly. The Atavist, which publishes very long form nonfiction, has only published two pieces by women, out of sixteen total, since it was founded in 2011.

Boos, though polite ones, rose from the crowd.

“I knew I shouldn’t have come here,” he joked.

He explained that after the first two stories The Atavist assigned to women fell through (a total coincidence, he assured the crowd), they never managed to correct the ratio.

“There are a lot of male writers who just have a natural sense of entitlement to them,” Mr. Ratliff said. They just pitch and pitch until something sticks.

“It’s not a question of gender as much as it is a question of who feels entitled to take up the space,” Ms. Lanpher said, pointing out that Wikipedia has no editor and is 75 percent written by men. “They feel they can do that. It’s really not an ovary thing.”

With Jill Abramson at the top of The Times and Tina Brown at the top of Newsweek, it’s easy to forget that the publications were embroiled in landmark gender discrimination cases as recently as 1978 and 1970, respectively.

“The system at Newsweek was women researched and men wrote,” Gloria Steinem recalled at Monday night’s Women’s Media Center benefit. “It was absolutely airtight. So considering where we started I’m not surprised it’s still a problem.”

Whatever the causes, the gender awareness stoked by the VIDA count has added a new, political layer to the ritual grousing over National Magazine Award nominees. Ms. Friedman divvied up the count by gender this year and found no women had been nominated in prestige categories like feature writing, columns and commentary, essays and criticism, and reporting. (They fared better in the personal service category, home to “Would You Get a ‘Mommy Tuck’?”)

Meanwhile, election news analysis site The 4th Estate found that women contributed just 15 percent of the quotations in political articles in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and even named the worst offenders (will anyone volunteer to introduce Jeff Zeleny and Dan Balz to some chicks?), something VIDA has heretofore avoided.

“Shaming people has never really changed anyone’s mind,” Ms. Belieu explained.

VIDA was born from a viral email manifesto written in August 2009 by Cate Marvin, a poet and professor at the College of Staten Island. The AWP had just rejected a panel she had proposed for its annual conference, on the transgressive in female poetry, and she faced an absurdly large pile of infant laundry to fold. Writing to a handful of writerly friends, she likened herself to the narrator of Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing.”

Ms. Belieu stayed up all night forwarding the email to like-minded women, who flooded Ms. Marvin’s inbox. They were frustrated that the conversation about women in the literary arts had devolved, in Ms. Belieu’s words, into “a retrograde, touchy-feely, moon-goddess-y, groovy” sort of thing.

Ms. Marvin and Ms. Belieu co-founded VIDA in part because, as established poets with professor gigs, they could speak freely about inequality in a way that made full-time poets and fiction writers more anxious.

“You undermine your ‘special woman’ status,” Ms. Belieu said, referring to those, like Louise Glück and Kay Ryan, who have been admitted to the literary boy’s club. “What happens when you go on the record as someone who doesn’t like this club?”

Few know better than Jennifer Weiner, the bestselling Good in Bed author. She has publicly fought the literary establishment on Twitter, even as her massive commercial appeal underwrites her publisher’s more artistic ventures.

Ms. Weiner first called attention to the disproportionate amount of attention paid to male authors in 2010, with the hashtag “Franzenfreude,” which she used to describe The Times and other publications’ slobbering over Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

The keynote speaker at BookExpo America’s Blogger Conference on Monday, Ms. Weiner said her publicist had urged her not to speak out against The Times again, fearing they would take it out on her next novel.

“What else can they do to me?” Ms. Weiner asked. “Can they quote Jonathan Galassi—who is Jonathan Franzen’s editor—making fun of my made-up German? That happened.”

Now Ms. Weiner thinks that The Times may be misrepresenting her book sales. She said that her current paperback, Then Came You, was the eighth-best-selling book on Bookscan, but only ranked 22 on The New York Times Bestsellers List. When her publisher has called to contest her rankings in the past, she said, The Times said it doesn’t disclose its methodology.

In VIDA, there’s a third party that can hold The Times accountable, by one measure, without risking seeming whiny or paranoid.

“What ‘The Count’ is really doing is, whether they like it or not, editors are in a position of having to think about this,” Ms. Belieu said. “The volume just keeps getting louder.”

On June 18, VIDA will make its formal debut in New York literary society—well, Brooklyn literary society, anyway—with a fundraiser thrown by Riverhead Books at Brooklyn Brewery.

“My goal is: Everyone in publishing should be ashamed of themselves if they didn’t go to the VIDA fundraiser,” said Riverhead head of publicity Jynne Martin. (According to a 2011 count produced by The New Republic, Riverhead’s catalog breaks down 45 percent female and 55 percent male, compared with a 30–70 split elsewhere).

The fundraiser will help VIDA fund its first two program goals: creating a network of mentoring workshops and putting together an endowment that will allow it to offer no-questions-asked grants to writers.

“As a writer you’ll often want to apply for these projects and you’ll have to come up with some grand proposal,” Ms. Belieu said. “‘I’m going to go to Italy and study the saints blah blah blah.’ There are very few organizations where you can say ‘I would use the funds for this award to take care of daycare.’”

“It goes back to Virginia Woolf,” Ms. Belieu said, of writing. “You need enough money and you need a room to do it in.”

kstoeffel@observer.com

On Monday, he was succeeded by Wendy Ruderman, who was hired away from the Philadelphia Daily News for the post early last month. The self-described “pint-size” investigative reporter won a 2010 Pulitzer for her reporting on a corrupt narcotics unit in the Philadelphia Police Department.

Mr. Baker has moved to the public education beat, Joseph Goldstein will continue representing the Times in the shack, along with Ms. Ruderman.

Times Metro editor Carolyn Ryan told Off the Record that she had been hoping to hire Ms. Ruderman for some time, adding that Metro day assignment editor Dean Chang had previously tried to poach the sixth-borough star to his old paper, the New York Daily News.

“She is a firecracker,” Ms. Ryan said.

Indeed, on her way out of the Philadelphia Daily News, Ms. Ruderman publicly urged her colleagues to join her in leaving the paper, which recently taken over by a group of investors wrangled by former Penn. Gov. Ed Rendell.

“I hate to say it, but if people at the Daily News aren’t looking, they should be,” Ms. Ruderman told the Philadelphia Post. “If they’re not, it’s kind of stupid...This place is rudderless.” (A stern warning, coming from a Ruderman.)

Nonetheless, Ms. Ruderman’s award-winning expose, “Tainted Justice,” co-written with Barbara Laker, resulted in an FBI probe and has been turned into a book, Midnight in the City of Brotherly Love, due next year from HarperCollins.

Asked if the Associated Press’s slew of NYPD scoops (for which they took home a Pulitzer this year) had influenced the shake-up, Ms. Ryan said she was more concerned with the upcoming mayoral election, in which Police Commissioner Ray Kelly is sure to be an influential figure, if not a contender.

Praising Mr. Baker’s “deep institutional understanding” of the NYPD (his father was citywide supervisor in the NYPD Emergency Service Unit), Ms. Ryan said the public schools beat needed his “news-breaking energy.”

(Getty images)

Yesterday, The New York Times dropped a juicy political micro-scandal: Marc Cenedella, the deep-pocketed Republican activist expected to challenge Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in 2012, appears to have endorsed—if not written—a blog about, among other things, sex and drugs.

Under Mr. Cenedella’s photo and name were headlines like, “Sexy vs. Skanky,” “He Stole My Weed,” and “A New Holiday for Men.” (You know, the one where you give your boyfriend steak and a blow job “to show your man how much you care for him?”) The Tucker Max b-material was hosted on the site of Mr. Cenedella’s company, theladders.com, a popular job search website.

In the era of Christopher Lee and Anthony Weiner, it takes more than a little Internet muckracking to make us blush. Far more interesting was the disclosure halfway through.

“The Times was made aware of the entries by an opponent of Mr. Cenedella,” reporter Raymond Hernandez wrote.

Since when does The New York Times disclose the origin of its stories?

“We expected high interest in this story, and tried to anticipate the questions that readers—and people like you—might have,” metro/politics editor Carolyn Ryan explained to Off the Record in an e-mail yesterday. “We thought it would be helpful to provide as much context as possible about how this story emerged.”

It probably wasn’t much of a revelation to media and politics insiders, anyway. Even the most diligent beat reporter is far less likely to trawl the hidden URLs hosted on their subject’s company website than, say, an opposition researcher. Given the questionable nature of the materials, disclosing their source seemed to answer to public editor Arthur Brisbane’s recent admonishment of Times reporters for failing to elucidate the motives and distortions behind their subject’s sound bytes.

The transparency also served to draw a clear reportorial line between the smeary tips and rigorous investigative reporting.

“Just for the record (and as you may sense, this is a bit of a pebble in my shoe ) not every investigative story has its origins in an opponent’s campaign,” Ms. Ryan added. “In fact, many that we do—including the John Liu story—are simply the result of great shoe leather reporting.”

(You got that, conspiracy theorists? The recent John Liu campaign finance story was not a Bloomberg plant.)

Good they drew the distinction when they did. By the end of the day, the sexy blog was debunked (an eight-year-old group blog that commented on the memes of its day) and used to suggest that the possible “opponent” in question, Kirsten Gillibrand—a co-sponsor of PIPA—maybe still doesn’t know much about the Internet.

As small a detail as it may seem, the whole sitting-standing thing was the subject of some back and forth before the event, when a student organizer explicitly rebuffed the campaign's suggestion that the candidates be permitted to deliver answers standing up. Gioia’s campaign manager, Eli Richlin, emailed the student organizer to urge him to see “the difference between the Obama-McCain town hall debates, and the old Cheney-Lieberman format, sitting around a table which gets so awkward.”

The student organizer, who forwarded me the email exchange with Richlin, said they couldn’t make the arrangement the night before the event.

The Gioia people didn't arrive at the decision to break the rules by accident, I'm guessing. The calculation is that the image of Gioia standing up to speak helps accentuate a contrast he’s repeatedly tried to construct between his older “politician” rivals and what he hopes will be seen as his own snappy, out-of-the-box campaign.

In an email, Richlin explained the tactic to me as follows: "The old way of politics, where politicians sit behind desks and talk at voters, rather than with them, has failed. By engaging New Yorkers in the political process, and encouraging everyday people to add their voices when decisions get made, we can achieve real change. That’s the kind of campaign we’re running.”

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.

To: The Staff
From: Joe Sexton

I am thrilled to announce that Carolyn Ryan, the deputy managing editor for local news at The Boston Globe, will be the new deputy metro editor for government and politics.

Marty Baron, in making a gracious announcement to his newsroom in Boston, said of Carolyn, "Since joining the Globe in 1999, Carolyn has led coverage of many of our biggest news stories, bringing to them her trademark enthusiasm and innovative spirit. She has hired many of the exceptionally talented people on our Metro staff, and she has helped us move aggressively online with breaking news and multimedia packages."

Here's but a sampling of the kinds of things Carolyn tackled:
The Democratic National Convention in 2004, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the closing of Catholic churches in the Archdiocese of Boston, the search for a new president at Harvard, Mitt Romney's run and the race to replace him, floods, storms, fires, explosions, the citywide terror scare that turned out to be a guerilla marketing campaign for Cartoon Network, the only American governor to give birth (twins) while in office, campaigns for United States Senate, United States House of Representatives, governor, mayor, City Council, State Legislature, countless crime stories, including the tale of a woman who killed her husband, stuffed him in a freezer, shipped it to a storage facility, and confessed to it all on her deathbed.

Marty's word, of course, is gold with me. But Carolyn has many admirers here in New York who are eager to second Marty's emotion. Pat Healy, who worked alongside Carolyn in Boston, is one. He describes Carolyn as an original thinker and real leader, someone funny and witty and also capable of simultaneously mapping out days worth of coverage on a breaking story.

"Carolyn is at once incredibly cool and incredibly competitive on a hot story (tabloids, beware)," Pat said. "No arena suits her more than politics -- her skepticism and scrutiny have made the politicos of Boston sweat, and her passion for investigation and follow-up have exposed the more callous among them, all the while betraying not a hint of cynicism about the political world. She has loads of integrity, and is loads of fun -- on a desk or on a bar stool."

Carolyn, a former statehouse bureau chief for the Boston Herald, joined The Globe as deputy city editor, moved on to become political editor and was promoted in 2003 to be assistant managing editor for local news.

Asked her thoughts on the work of an editor, Carolyn answered this way:

"My view of editing is drawn in part from Maxwell Perkins. He said that it was an editor's role to "release energy.'' In a newsroom, it's that and more. The best editors unleash the energy, creativity, and drive of those who work with them. For me, editing is most invigorating when I am igniting excitement in others. Reporters respond, in my view, to a good editor's interest, discernment, high ambition and high expectations. Indeed, what really inspires reporters, in my experience, is an editor whose standards are high, whose interest in their work is deep and authentic, and whose understanding of them as human beings is genuine."

I then pressed her for some biographical tidbits. Here's what she produced.

She's a maniacal ping pong player, an eager absorber of New York news and politics from afar, and the owner of well-preserved copies of the back pages of New York tabloids from Oct. 21, 2004."

Seems like she'll fit right in.

Carolyn steps into one of the most important and entertaining jobs in the joint. Rudy, Mike, George, Eliot, Hillary, Joe, Shelly, Christine, the Rev. Al. Oh, and K.T. and Jeanine. Wild and crazy. Daunting and vital.

She will have her hands full, but she will have the many able hands on this desk and beyond assisting her at every turn. And I have no doubt she has much to teach me.

I'd like also to conclude this announcement by publicly thanking Marty. I consider him a friend and an editor of honor and talent and impeccable collegiality. He's engaged in a bruising fight up north, but has along with his staff continued to put out a world class paper. Its two Pulitzer finalists this year are only the latest evidence of that.
And he has been pure class with me.

Carolyn will join us as soon as it is comfortable for all involved.

Again, I am beyond excited.

Joe