Former Local editor Andy Newman will be taking over The Times' City Room blog. Under Newman there will be some new features on the blog, like regular columns that "delve deeply into the workings of major New York City institutions" and provide "an ambitiously expanded daily look at what the city's blogosphere is talking about," The Times said in a press release.

Newman is replacing Times Metro-beast Sewell Chan, who made his name at the paper by being relentlessly prolific ("There's a lot of great, ambitious, smart reporters in the newsroom," a Times Metro editor told The Observer in 2006, "but he's the only reporter I know who actually pitched me a story while I've been standing at the urinal in the men's room").

Chan will move to a yet-unspecified "new assignment within The Times."

"There is news today in Local land," wrote Newman in a post announcing his departure. He reassured readers that they could continue to rely on the blog for the same caliber of coverage they had come to expect.

"Just to dispel any doubts," he said, "this is not the beginning of the end for The Local, as an entity or as a part of The Times; quite the opposite."

No word on the fate of "The Fridge."

Here's a peek inside some of the Times' most popular blogs, as offered by the editors:

Wendell Jamieson, deputy metropolitan editor for the Web who oversees City Room, the blog about New York for New Yorkers:

"Blog is a funny word to describe it, right?" Mr. Jamieson told the Observer. "It's really just a daily news report. We use the word 'blog' for lack of another term."

City Room debuted in June 2007 to provide breaking news, feature articles and reader conversations. Some of its reports include emergency landing of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River; M.T.A. fare hikes; popular baby names; bicycle racks; the history of Jewish delis; and the city's dog-scooping law.

Sewell Chan, City Room's bureau chief, wrote in his recent Talk to the Newsroom feature, that "[t]he tone of a blog post might often seem more conversational and less comprehensive than most traditional news articles, but we don't put anything on the blog that we would not be comfortable seeing in print. (Admittedly, we have experimented with first-person accounts, contests and even poetry.) We do avoid the opinion and mean-spirited snark associated with some blogs; snark isn't our thing."

But if City Room has one of the most unique voices among NYTimes.com blogs--it's one editors hope readers want to hear.

"City Room allows you to be very parochial in your coverage of New York City," Mr. Jamieson said. "We believe in covering New York for New Yorkers and going deep on things that only a New Yorker would really be fascinated by." Like, say, studies on architecture or neon signs with burned-out letters that "take on new (and unintended) meanings." "We do all sorts of stunt-type things," said Mr. Jamieson, like asking readers to get in on the rivalry between Montreal bagels and New York bagels.

Mr. Jamieson said City Room will be rolling out new columns and features in January, although he wouldn't go into detail. "We'll leverage metropolitan staff's deep knowledge of New York City institutions," is all he'd say.

As far as other fancy multi-media type stuff, Mr. Jamieson isn't concerned about keeping up with the latest blog gadgets. "Look, it's good stories--whether they're read the on the computer or a good newspaper. No matter how many slideshows you do, who cares? It has to be a good story, a strong one for City Room. That's what matters to us."

Vindu Goel, deputy technology editor of Bits, the tech news blog:

Bits launched in June 2007 among an increasingly crowded technology news market, but took a long-view reporting style in contrast to the quick-paced, casual tone at other tech sites.

"We don't cover all the breaking news in the blog the way that, say, TechCrunch does," Mr. Goel said. "We use [Bits] for some analysis that goes more in depth, with additional information about a story."

Bits has 12 contributors, including four editors. Mr. Goel said e-readers, the Google Books settlement and even the Netflix competition prize were popular subjects for the blog. Covering news like the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership deal, were also important milestones for Bits. Several posts about the subject worked better on the Web because by they fed news-hungry readers from the niche tech crowd.

Mr. Goel said Bits "is constantly working on" the voice of the blog. How can they make tech jargon accessible to the Times' broad readership without making tech nerds feel like they're reading a toaster's manual? Readers will usually tell them when they go wrong in the comments section, Mr. Goel said. "The interactivity is the best thing about the blog," he said. "We will get legions of comments, sometimes hundreds of comments, from all kinds of broad, general interest types of folks, asking how do I upgrade Windows Vista to people who will have a very heated about LED lighting."

Commentors have to register for NYTimes.com and Bits editors monitor posts to weed out the YouTube-like junk--no cursing or spam allowed. "We want to try to provide the readers with a better discussion," he explained. "People are expecting a little bit more from the comments."

Nick Bilton, a former user interface specialist for the Times, recently returned from working on a book to become Bits' new lead writer. He wrote in an introductory blog post that he hopes to open the discussion between readers and reporters even more. "The beauty of a blog is that it allows for conversation, not just oration, and I'll do my best to be part of the discussion," he wrote.

"I also hope to bring a new style of telling stories to the blog," he continued. "I don't believe storytelling is an art form of words alone. It's ocular, auditory, interactive and asynchronous. As I settle in and take off my training wheels, you can expect more graphics, audio slide shows, videos and data visualization on Bits."

Mr. Goel said, along with more multimedia features, he also hopes to include more "light and fun" posts between breaking news items.

"People take the Times so seriously sometimes," he told the Observer. "But I think it's okay for us have have a little fun too."

Tara Parker-Pope, lead writer for Well, a blog with the latest medical research and societal trends affecting personal health:

"It's difficult to compare blogs because we all have different goals," Ms. Parker-Pope told the Observer. The Lede might be gathering the most crucial daily news and helping Times readers understand it, while City Room is live-blogging breaking news. "For Well, we want to put readers' daily health conversation at the heart of the blog."

Ms. Parker-Pope "sifts through medical research and expert opinions for practical advice to help readers take control of their health and live well every day," according to the blog's description. But Well has also become a gathering place for readers to connect with Ms. Parker-Pope and the handful of running, nutrition, and other experts who occasionally contribute to the blog.

"On some days, my posts are based on my interests as an individual, as a single parent or a person who is trying to start exercising again," Ms. Parker-Pope said. "Those things are often reflected in the blog, but it's really to reflect what other people," she said.

"Well has a specific journalistic mission which is to really tell readers about their own lives," she continued. "Readers really like to learn about themselves and talk about themselves--we all do."

They also like to comment--a lot--and send Ms. Parker-Pope tips for stories. One of her favorite articles came from a readers' question, asking whether doctors and nurses should wear scrubs on the subway. Some commenters have become contributors. Kairol Rosenthal, a regular commentor on the blog, eventually wrote about cancer for Well.

Ms. Parker-Pope left The Wall Street Journal in 2007 to write about consumer health for The Times and she said she has never been closer to her readers.

She even trained for a marathon with them, and shared her experience, with a Web-based application called Run Well. 

Ms. Parker-Pope expects to expand on more running and recipe coverage. As far as multimedia features, she'd like to do more--if only there was more time.

"The limits to the blog are always about time as a resource," she said. "My goal is to continue serving this audience, engage them and interest them and surprise every now and then."

“benpolitico: times tough: @azipaybarah cutting own hair.”

The item is short, true, and was written a few seconds after the words left my mouth. I was sitting at my desk in City Hall making some idle conversation with a source when part of the talk went online.

Not that it was all that surprising. These days, if you don't share, chances are someone else will do the sharing for you.

I've been doing my best for a while now to get well into this spirit of full (or excess, depending on your taste) disclosure.

On Youtube, I’ve posted an interview with my mom, and more than once let some local politicos take over my camera and subject me to their questions. On Flickr, pictures from my vacation are interspersed with shots of Michael Bloomberg and David Paterson. On Facebook, “friends” I’ve met while covering their campaigns now know which high school I went to and how often I miss my favorite Wednesday night television show.

That was all before Twitter.

Now, rapid-fire Tweets have stripped away all bells and whistles from today’s multi-dimensional communication arts and put into everyone’s hands a haiku Uzi.

This Twittery new landscape on which New York politicos meet their online audiences is dramatically different from what existed just a couple of years ago, meaning that the online reporting world that followed Michael Bloomberg’s first re-election looks nothing like the one that will follow his second.

Dissemination of news is instantaneous. The gathering part is quicker too.

Take, as an example, me: Twitter helps me find what's floating out there, letting me aggregate RSS feeds into a cascade of, well, everything. Sometimes, it acts like a comments section detached from any particular web site or blog entry. Other times it acts like a quicker (and more public) form of email. I asked a New York Times employee, over Twitter, who else in his company uses the site. Minutes later, over Twitter, he sent me the list. (Thanks again.)

The PolitickerNY site automatically feeds stories to Twitter, using a formula most web sites do: the headline is the body of the lede are sucked into the body of the Tweet and then there’s a link to read more if you like. Additionally, I go on Twitter, using my own name, to write my own Tweets that let people know in the shortest possible terms what I have to offer.

A growing vanguard of local politicos and journalists seems to be warming to the possibilities of doing likewise. Earlier this month, Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum starting Twittering, making her the latest New York politico to enter the hasty new world of unfiltered, incremental communication with the public.

Here are a few more Twitterers:

Michael Bloomberg, mayor

http://twitter.com/mikebloomberg

Howard Wolfson, Bloomberg spokesman

http://twitter.com/howiewolf

Kevin Sheekey, Bloomberg aide

http://twitter.com/kevinsheekey

Bill Thompson, comptroller

http://twitter.com/Thompson2009

Jeff Simmons, Thompson spokesman

http://twitter.com/JackHites

Christine Quinn, Council speaker

http://twitter.com/quinn2009

Bill de Blasio, councilman

http://twitter.com/billdeblasio

Eric Gioia, councilman

http://twitter.com/ericgioia

Eli Richlin, Gioia spokesman

http://twitter.com/elirichlin

The Working Families Party

http://twitter.com/WorkingFamilies

Patrick LaForge, Times editor

http://twitter.com/palafo

Sewell Chan, Times reporter

http://twitter.com/sewell_chan

Errol Louis, Daily News columnist

http://twitter.com/errollouis

Alex Zablocki, public advocate candidate

http://twitter.com/alexforpa

KT McFarland, former Republican Senate candidate

http://twitter.com/ktmcfarland

Joseph Mercurio, consultant

http://twitter.com/Natpol

Brooklyn Young Republicans

http://twitter.com/BrooklynYR

Andrew Hawkins, City Hall News reporter

http://twitter.com/andyjayday

John DeSio, Riverdale Review reporter

http://twitter.com/johndesio

The New York City Council

http://twitter.com/NYCCouncil

Me

http://twitter.com/azipaybarah

[Image captured by Nicholas Carr at Britannica Blog]

According to Messrs. Chan and Baker, the letter containing the suspicious substance was address to Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal:

Messrs. Chan and Baker also report that, "The secretary and two other Times employees, including a mailroom worker, were being decontaminated as a precaution."

That email was time-stamped at 3:08 a.m. In the 13 hours since, the traffic has only increased, even though the story was last updated at 10:17 p.m. on Tuesday.

Spitzer announced that the state has found $220 million to help plug the MTA’s budget gap, a figure reported earlier as higher.

In other words, as an interested reader explained it to me, “Something has to go up because they’re not matching what they said has to go up. So, logically, unlimited rides go up, or tolling and Long Island Rail Road and Metro North go up.”

UPDATE: A helpful reader sent me an audio clip of the governor's remarks this morning, where he said he asked the MTA officials to "Come back with a proposal that has a significantly reduced increase in any of the other components from the 6.5 percent that had been discussed over the period of the hearings over the past number of weeks."

A memo sent to staff yesterday by city editor David Lombino said reporters should expect to file early when they’re working on certain kinds of stories. Mr. Lombino said in the memo that news editors will work with new online editor Mike McPhate to choose what will be posted early during their morning meeting.

Previously, wire copy was the only fresh content one could expect to see on the Sun Web site after the day’s stories were uploaded in the early morning hours. In an interview earlier today, managing editor Ira Stoll said he hopes that readers will get in the habit of visiting the site more often when they realize that new local stories, filed by the Sun’s own beat reporters, are being posted there on a regular basis.

Not all stories qualify for this treatment.

“We’re trying to do it more often on non-exclusive stories,” Mr. Stoll said, “like where there’s a press conference with the mayor or the governor at 10 or 11 in the morning and all the other reporters are there. Or if there was a crime that happened the night before and the police have put out a release about it.”

In an interview, Mr. Lombino said that if he’s dealing with “the kind of story that somebody [from another newspaper] can follow up on for the next day’s paper, we’ll probably want to sit on it until we’re confident they’re at home or in bed. It depends on what kind of scoop we’re talking about.”

Mr. Stoll said that “people may write shorter and quicker, and then for the print edition find a different angle or have more thorough reporting.”

Mr. Lombino said he had looked to The New York Times’ “City Room” blog as a reference point; the Times blog is updated frequently with up-to-the-minute metro news.

Mr. Stoll said he had never heard of City Room.

The full text of Mr. Lombino’s memo to staff:

Howdy,

In an effort to infuse our Web site with updated, relevant content, each day the city section is going to start posting a few stories online well before our normal deadline.

To help facilitate this, Mike McPhate is now serving as the online editor, and his office hours will closely resemble ours.

Each day at the morning meeting, the editors will choose from the city list which stories will be posted online. Obvious candidates for Web posting include reports from pressers, breaking news, crime stories that happened the night before, and filed feature stories that have already been edited and are running in the next day's paper.

When you find yourself reporting one of these kind of stories, please keep in mind that Mike or I will probably ask you to file something soon.

Depending on the content, a Web file doesn¹t need to be our normal 500-word type of story. It can just be a few grafs - ideally forward looking - about what came out of an event, etc. Most scoops will be held from the Web until an hour where we can be confident that no paper will rip us off.

Once we get this system down, I think you will agree that it will drive our readers to our site more frequently, and provide opportunities for more exposure through linkage on other sites.

Talk soon

Dave

Mr. Gelb, who chronicled his life at The Times in the book City Room, offered his reflection on the future of newsprint in the context of what might otherwise appear to be an unrelated topic: The Times’ move this year from its century-old headquarters at 229 West 43rd Street to the gleaming new 52-story tower on Seventh and Eighth avenues, between 40th and 41st streets.

But nobody at The Times seems to be able to talk about the new building without talking about the future of the newspaper—or rather, the future of the news organization. Amid harangues from rogue shareholders that the newspaper isn’t making enough money, and amid dire predictions for the future of the “dead-tree” media industry, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. is moving his company into a building that will demand the kinds of changes he has been trumpeting for more than a decade.

The old building at 229 West 43rd Street—the noisy, hulking bricks-and-mortar newspaper factory chronicled by Mr. Gelb—is still essentially an industrial building; the new one is an airy, transparent embodiment of Mr. Sulzberger’s post-newspaper newspapering plans for The Times.

Cascading style sheets replace plates; pixels stand in for ink, the virtual for the physical.

The move to the new building will force a change in the newspaper’s basic DNA. The product of The New York Times is no longer a newspaper but the news itself, in whatever form it takes.

On April 17, 10 employees of The New York Times’ Web division will be the first to move into the new Times Building, the futuristic, Renzo Piano–designed skyscraper looming over the Port Authority bus terminal.

“The new building, in terms of architecture today, and the kind of new skyscrapers being built, is magnificent,” said Mr. Gelb. “But I have no idea how The Times will function in that building.”

IT'S NOT REALLY A QUESTION OF WHETHER THE NEW BUILDING will be comfortable. By every account, the building is very All Mod Cons, right down to the forward-thinking and ergonomically sound Knoll desk chairs at every reporter’s desk. Rather, it’s a question of how the essential function of the company will change in an environment that was built to force that change.

By April 23, roughly 40 staffers will be situated in the Web newsroom on the tower’s ninth floor, according to Fiona Spruill, the department’s editor.

By mid-June, when construction is completed on the new high-tech newsroom—located in floors two through four of a pedestal-like lower wing of the building—several Web producers will head downstairs, integrating with their fellow print reporters.

Instead of reporters sitting next to the people whose bylines will be adjacent to theirs in print, they’ll be sitting next to people producing content for several different platforms at once.

“We’re doing the best we can so the distinction between the platforms is reduced,” said Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor. “The idea is simply to try and get the people who work together as close as you can.”

At West 43rd Street, it was difficult to shift some veteran (read: cranky) Times reporters around—but the new building and floor plan offer a clean slate.

For instance, Times staffers who work on the DealBook Web site, currently scattered throughout the business section, will now be clustered together.

“We’re trying to figure out how to reorganize the newsroom to serve this multi-platform world,” said Mr. Landman. “We have an organization that was set up by the rhythms of a printing-plant schedule. The rhythm of the newspaper had to do with how you get to the readers’ front door. That determines how copy editors worked, and so on.”

The directive is already different for reporters like Andrew Ross Sorkin, the 30-year-old business reporter and DealBook creator (whose first byline ran in The Times while he was still in high school), and for another young Timesman, Sewell Chan, who will be running his own Web-focused site.

On March 28, Mr. Chan, the prolific metro reporter, left City Hall to embark on his new assignment: bureau chief of City Room, an online desk at The Times.

City Room will be politically oriented, but it has also been compared to Gothamist.com by the tech people in-house, according to a Times staffer familiar with the prototype. Although currently in a rudimentary state, the Web site is expected to provide tabs for politics, public transportation, crime, courts, schools and neighborhoods.

That afternoon, Mr. Chan held a farewell party (with chocolate cupcakes!) in Room 9, according to a source, which was attended by fellow reporters and a few guests—including Mayor Bloomberg’s press secretary, Stu Loeser.

Mr. Chan’s City Room will not be a room, but a URL on the Internet. Call it Room 9.0. Two weeks before his mid-day cupcake soirée, the 29-year reporter was named as the first bureau chief of the Web site, “the most audacious online venture the Metro desk has so far conceived and committed to,” according to a staff memo sent by metro editor Joe Sexton.

So far, details have been scarce. The memo noted that there will be “breaking news and human interest, updates and follow-ups, local history and color, Q&A’s with newsmakers and our reporters, photos, audio and Web links to other New York sites.”

“Joe Sexton asked a group of editors and Web producers to propose new ways of presenting local news on nytimes.com,” said deputy metro editor Patrick LaForge, in an e-mail to The Observer. “After a basic idea had been sketched out, Sewell was asked to join the planning group. After the final proposal was approved, he was offered the job and accepted it.”

Mr. LaForge, who will serve as Mr. Chan’s editor, said that he expects the Empire Zone blog to be folded into the Web venture. Although Mr. LaForge said that he would like to have City Room up and running before the newsroom move, there is still “a lot of design, planning and technical work” that remains.

“It was not that long ago that we hired Sewell to be an old-fashioned ink-stained wretch on our metro desk,” said managing editor Jill Abramson at a recent Columbia Journalism Review panel. “He’s about to embark on reinventing himself as pretty much a 100 percent Web—focused on metro news—animal. It feels like some of the most vibrant ventures we have going are on the Web.”

“In the past two years, I have seen the mindset of our reporting staff change,” said Ms. Abramson later in a phone interview. “The biorhythms were set to the newspaper. What everyone thought about first, and sometimes thought about only, was the Platonic ideal for a newspaper story.”

“We want to build the new newsroom and put integration into the DNA of everyone here,” said business editor Larry Ingrassia, “so that we are thinking about what we are doing on the Web from the start.”

Mr. Ingrassia addressed interested Times staffers on March 29, in the page-one conference room, for a one-hour talk titled “The BizDay Pilot: What’s Going On Over There?”

And what is going on?

There are two major goals for BizDay’s newsroom reinvention, according to Mr. Ingrassia: breaking more news, and adding multimedia components to stories.

And the Times-reinvention guinea pig has already exhibited the strength of multi-platforms, according to Mr. Ingrassia, with coverage of February’s stock-market drop.

Ms. Abramson noticed, too.

“The newly integrated business desk, in the midst of our reinventing initiative, fed a steady stream of great stories to all our platforms, throughout the wee morning hours, the day and last night, into today,” she wrote in a Feb. 28 staff memo.

On Feb. 27, the coverage began with David Barboza’s report from Shanghai, and continued throughout the next two days with at least a dozen updates or additions. There were several updated versions of a story (with new tops), a column David Leonhardt, an audio interview with Floyd Norris, a slide show and a sidebar.

But won’t the multi-platform approach mean more work for reporters?

“It’s more a state of mind than changing what people do,” said Mr. Ingrassia. “If you’re going to go on an interview, tape it so there can be outtakes on the Web.

“We know that things aren’t going to hold as long, so why not get it right out?”

But while Times staffers are getting more out on the Web, they’re keeping a bit for themselves, too.

For instance, in covering the 2008 Presidential election, Times reporters will have a new tool at their disposal, kept hidden on the newspaper’s internal Web site: a politics wiki.

Like the most commonly known wiki—Wikipedia, the user-generated encyclopedia—the Times politics wiki is based on collaboration, with staffers adding and editing content.

On March 26, The Times’ Conrad Mulcahy—a 29-year old assistant to assistant managing editors Rick Berke and Craig Whitney, and the person who maintains the politics wiki—first alerted the newsroom about it.

“This is meant to be an agile resource that grows and changes at the speed of political news,” Mr. Mulcahy wrote in a staff memo. But since the wiki “lives behind the firewall,” in Mr. Mulcahy’s words, what’s actually there?

So far, the wiki includes a staff directory, calendar, internal memos about polling and statistics, links to news sites, archives of stories on candidates, and an explanation of the new political desk, according to political editor Dick Stevenson.

But it’s meant to be more expansive—like one giant collaborative reporter’s notebook for the political staff.

Mr. Stevenson said that the wiki is just one part of the broader changes to the politics desk, which he described as a “cross-platform, unified approach to covering politics.”

Again with the platforms!

But in the competitive political-reporting world, might even journalists on the same team be reluctant to offer up their resources?

“At least right now, with our team of political reporters, I don’t think that happens at all,” said reporter Adam Nagourney. “I think people are very cooperative.”

Mr. Nagourney said that he might be wary about adding very sensitive information to the wiki—such as a source’s cell-phone number.

While Mr. Mulcahy and Mr. Chan (both in their late 20’s) take on new Web-focused roles, Mr. Sorkin continues DealBook online—but with a print twist.

Displaying that Web and print integration that Times reporters are so fond of talking about, the first-ever special section of DealBook is slated to be published in the April 4 issue of The Times.

THIS MONTH, AS NYTIMES.COM EMPLOYEES START moving their monitors into the shiny new tower, and the West 43rd Street staffers continue packing dusty reporters’ pads into orange-plastic containers, they’ll be presented with a parting gift.

Reporter David Dunlap, a 32-year Times veteran, is creating a 64-page tabloid-sized magazine with a floor-by-floor tour of the West 43rd Street building, headquarters from 1913 through the present. He began the project about a month ago, and is being assisted by art director John Cayea and a few colleagues.

“I’m drawing principally from the photo archives that The Times maintains in its morgue,” said Mr. Dunlap. Also, he has obtained images from the “separate, discreet” archives maintained by the Times Company.

“Having seen our new newsroom in its unfinished state in January, I’m excited about the move,” said Mr. Dunlap, “though I can’t help but confess a bit of ambivalence.”

“Anyone who joined The Times in the past 10 years has never known this building when it trembled from the power of the presses as they began their nightly run,” he added. “Part of our decision to use this format was to evoke the paper’s industrial heritage.

“This ought to be on newsprint.”

The Great Caruso Saves the Day At Portfolio

Eighteen months after Condé Nast hired Joanne Lipman to launch a high-end business magazine, since named Portfolio, the 300-plus-page glossy has now been shipped off to the printers. Huzzah!

But it takes a lot of hands to edit those 6,000-word features, and in the final pre-launch push, another established editor was corralled into 4 Times Square: Michael Caruso.

Mr. Caruso, who abruptly left his last job as Men’s Journal’s editor in chief in October 2005—and won a six-figure settlement from publisher Jann Wenner—was hired last January as a freelance editor. For the first issue, he will have the title of “contributing editor-at-large.”

Formerly editor in chief of Details, Mr. Caruso is no stranger to expensive launches, either: He helmed News Corp.’s now-defunct Maximum Golf in 2001.

Initially, Mr. Caruso only showed up occasionally at Portfolio, but soon started keeping regular hours on the 17th floor; he grabbed the office used by Matt Cooper when in town from Washington, D.C., according to a staffer.

(Mr. Cooper has since been relegated to a cubicle near the staff writers).

And even though it’s only been a couple months, Mr. Caruso will soon enjoy a bit of R&R.

Recently, Ms. Lipman, as a reward to her dutiful staff, sent around an e-mail announcing the “Condé Nast Portfolio Long Weekend.”

Most staffers—except those putting the finishing touches on the Web site—have been given April 5 and 6 off.

Of course, even without a ritzy Condé Nast bash to prepare for, it’s still important to rest up before the April 16 launch.

That night, Portfolio staffers will be toasting one another (and S.I.?) at an intimate soirée in the Beaver Bar, located in André Balazs’ sleek downtown condo, according to a source.

Other Times reporters may have had splashier stories in that day’s paper—Mr. Chan’s longest piece, the stray-animal one, was only 758 words, and informed readers that the shelters had been found “adequate” but could be better. But no Times reporter had written more.

With those two bylines and two taglines, Mr. Chan raised his number of reporting credits in the past 12 months to 422. On average, if you pick up a copy of The New York Times, Mr. Chan’s name will appear in it 1.15 times.

Since he debuted in The Times in November 2004—with a contributor’s credit on a story about the lowering of terror-threat levels—Mr. Chan, now 28 years old, has recorded more than 600 credits. He has covered Hurricane Katrina, the transit strike, the Lake George boating disaster and the fine print of the municipal budget.

“He’s a terrific reporter,” said former metro editor Susan Edgerley, who hired Mr. Chan away from The Washington Post. “He’s hugely energetic. He’s curious, smart. He loves coming to work every day. He’s a joy to have in the newsroom.”

At a paper populated by reporters with sharp elbows and brazen ambition, Mr. Chan’s singular, nearly inhuman work ethic stands out. Through the decades, some New York Times reporters have made names for themselves on West 43rd Street with felicitous prose—to say nothing of deft politicking, sartorial flair or heedless use of expense accounts. But Mr. Chan has made himself a legendary Times reporter by reporting for The Times. And reporting, and reporting some more.

Mr. Chan collects reporting credits the way Pete Rose collected base hits: obsessively, with doggedness and hustle, scratching them out where others might bide their time and swing for the fences. They come one after another, and sometimes in flurries of three or four. As of June 20, Mr. Chan had been in the paper one or more times for 10 consecutive weekdays. That followed a streak of 19 weekdays in May.

The No. 2 metro reporter in output, Kareem Fahim, has 323 credits in the past 12 months, 99 fewer than Mr. Chan. The majority of his colleagues have fewer than 200.

Earlier this month, in a memo announcing the hiring of Serge Kovaleski from The Post, metro editor Joe Sexton quoted Mr. Chan praising his former colleague—and noted that Mr. Chan “took time out from filing 11 stories over the weekend” to contribute those thoughts.

“I guess I’m really old-fashioned, but I’d rather be the one writing about the news,” Mr. Chan said, declining to comment any further.

Mr. Chan’s drive has won him both admirers and detractors. The displeased ones see his ambitiousness as being a little too naked—there was grumbling about careerism (unheard of at The Times!) after he showed up at executive editor A. M. Rosenthal’s funeral. He has been known to shower famous journalists with detailed praise, including specific citations of their work.

But most of the complaints—and the praises—have an element of recognition. Mr. Chan at work is like any reporter on deadline, except he’s always on deadline.

At City Hall, Mr. Chan is one of the few reporters who carry a laptop into press briefings. “I see him working here constantly,” New York Post City Hall bureau chief David Seifman said. “From the moment he gets in to the moment he leaves, he doesn’t take many breaks.”

In group settings, according to witnesses, Mr. Chan doesn’t hesitate to hammer on minutiae. He will offer a question, prefaced by “Mr. Mayor, sir.” Then: “If I could please ask a follow-up …. ” Then: “One more follow-up, if I may …. ”

And he is constantly offering pieces to editors. Wendell Jamieson, who edited Mr. Chan’s M.T.A. coverage last year, said Mr. Chan used to intercept him as he walked through the newsroom and follow him, suggesting ideas.

“There’s a lot of great, ambitious, smart reporters in the newsroom,” Mr. Jamieson said, “but he’s the only reporter I know who actually pitched me a story while I’ve been standing at the urinal in the men’s room.”

Mr. Chan wrote more than 80 metro-front transit stories in 14 months on the beat.

“The story I like to tell about Sewell is you hand him the M.T.A. budget, and two days later he’s digging through it and he’s finding B1 story leads on page 250,” Mr. Jamieson said. “I think he’s home in bed reading it. He flips through it and finds things like they’re going to take conductors off train lines this year. It’s just classic good reporting.”

In bygone days, there were two distinct breeds of Timesmen: the establishment-cozy gentry à la Scotty Reston, and the pavement-pounding sons of immigrants, like Rosenthal. Mr. Chan’s background embraces both. He grew up in Flushing, the son of parents who emigrated from Hong Kong in the early 1970’s. His father drove a taxicab, which he does to this day.

Mr. Chan attended Hunter High School, where he was class co-president his junior and senior years, and where he was a classmate of his current Times colleague, Jennifer 8. Lee. Together, as juniors, Mr. Chan and Ms. Lee took over the school’s No. 2 paper, The Observer, transforming it from an 8 1¼2-by-11 newsletter to a full broadsheet in competition with the official paper, What’s What.

After Hunter, Mr. Chan went on to Harvard, where he majored in social studies and joined The Harvard Crimson. He raced through the paper’s tryout period.

“Usually, you call people at 2 in the afternoon and beg them to come in,” said Los Angeles Times reporter Joe Mathews, who supervised Mr. Chan’s college tryout as The Crimson’s managing editor. “With Sewell, you didn’t have to beg.”

Mr. Mathews said Mr. Chan stayed long after the other aspirants, till only the regular staffers were left, fetching sandwiches and coffee as needed. In a notable class—which also included Ms. Lee and Times reporter Michael Luo—Mr. Chan stood out, Mr. Mathews said. “I would say in both ability and diligence, Sewell was the hardest-working and most talented in that class,” he continued. “And probably the hardest-working and talented person I met at The Crimson during my time there.”

Mr. Chan rose to be executive editor of The Crimson and interned at The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post. Upon graduation in 1998, he studied politics at Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship.

In 1999, he joined The Post’s metro desk, where he covered cops, education and social services. “He would stay up late at night reading clips,” said former Post reporter Justin Blum, who now works for Bloomberg News. “He could recite who was on the City Council decades ago.”

“He was just incredibly energetic,” said Allan Lengel, a metro editor at The Post. “As an intern, the word was he would work all day and all night and go home and collapse on his bed in his clothes.”

“At one point, he asked then-A.M.E. for metro JoAnn Armao to bring a cot in so he could sleep,” Post metro reporter Lyndsey Layton said. “He was having such long days, he thought it would be more efficient to sleep there. I don’t think she took it as a serious request.”

Ms. Layton sat in the cubicle next to Mr. Chan in the newsroom. “He keeps trying to go deeper,” Ms. Layton said. “He has this very strange affection for middle initials. He was always double-checking with sources, ‘Is that William H.W. Smith III?’ He would get everyone’s middle initial.

“He was obsessed with it,” Ms. Layton said. “Even though it’s not Post style to include it.”

Mr. Chan was also fascinated by bylines, Mr. Blum said. At one point, he expressed admiration for former Times sportswriter Buster Olney’s byline and said he wished he had a snappy handle of his own. Shortly after, Post reporter David Nakamura dubbed Mr. Chan “Skippy.”

Not everyone who crossed paths with Mr. Chan was so enamored. In February 2004, he was assigned to cover Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on a tour of Central Asia. According to multiple Post staffers with knowledge of the trip, Mr. Chan’s enthusiasm chafed the veteran Pentagon reporters on the trip. After a stop in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Mr. Chan was late for a flight to Kabul, and the group left him behind, stranding him in Tashkent for an extra day. Afterward, an e-mail circulated in which reporters claimed to have pooled their money and bribed a clerk to delay Mr. Chan’s wake-up call. “I don’t think that’s true,” said former Los Angeles Times reporter John Hendren, who was on the trip, of the wake-up-call story. Mr. Hendren said that reporters had written “Sewell” on a sheet of paper and buckled it into his empty seat.

Mr. Chan then was assigned to Iraq, where he had other troubles. During his three months in Baghdad, he clashed with Post bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Post staffers said there was an incident in which Mr. Chan antagonized the bureau by asking the paper’s Iraqi driver to install a new toilet seat in his room at the Sheraton.

But by summer, he was back in D.C. and on the municipal beat—landing 23 credits in an August with 22 weekdays.

Soon after, he moved to The Times. There, he became as constant a presence in the newsroom as on the news pages. Mr. Jamieson said he had to order Mr. Chan to stop showing up on days off—or at least to stop showing up so much.

“I told him to take a day off on the weekend,” Mr. Jamieson said. “I think he did sometimes, and didn’t on others.”

The balance of Foers is shifting northward! This month, Joshua Foer, the youngest of the celebrated team of brothers, left his hometown of Washington, D.C., to take up residence in New York.

The move leaves New Republic editor Franklin Foer the last Foer brother in the District. Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer is currently ensconced in a $6.75 million Park Slope townhouse with his wife, novelist Nicole Krauss.

Joshua Foer is at work on a book about memory—he competes in memorization contests and has won a national championship—and has been freelancing for National Geographic, Slate, The Washington Post and The New York Times, among other publications. In an e-mail, he declined to discuss the specifics of his relocation.

“I literally just moved in,” Mr. Foer wrote. “I haven’t even figured out where to plug in my electric toothbrush or which day is trash collection. Given that most of my friends don’t know that I’m here yet, I’d hate to have them read about it in the newspaper. Plus, I sort of think I should do something a little more noteworthy than just move to town before I end up the subject of one of your columns. I’ll keep you posted.”

—G.S.