The City

What you're reading

The City is a nonprofit local newsroom in New York launched in 2019 with a focus on accountability reporting for the five boroughs. It was founded with seed funding from foundations and individual donors after the contraction of legacy New York metro newsrooms left coverage gaps, and it publishes digital-only with a daily newsletter, The Scoop. Editorial leadership came out of the New York Daily News, the New York Times metro desk, and ProPublica.

Coverage centers New York City government, housing, immigration, transportation, schools, and the criminal-legal system. The newsroom is mid-sized for a local nonprofit — roughly forty staff — and partners with WNYC, El Diario, Documented, and others to extend reach into immigrant communities. Audience is concentrated in New York civic, policy, and political circles, with stories regularly picked up by the New York Times, the Daily News, and national outlets when NYC stories go national.

Ownership & funding

The City NYC (nonprofit). Funded primarily through nonprofit.

Nonprofit funding lets The City take on long investigations and beat-reporting that won’t produce a viral moment but matter for city government. Foundation and individual-donor revenue removes the pageview pressure that pushed legacy NYC dailies toward shorter, faster, more aggregated coverage. The trade-off is scope: no sports, no business desk, no national or international coverage. Donor influence is the standard nonprofit risk — major funders are disclosed on the site — and the model concentrates accountability work in areas that align with civic-foundation priorities.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places The City at Center with a factuality rating of High.

nwsly places The City at Center because the newsroom holds the line on traditional accountability framing: story selection is driven by where city power is being exercised, sourcing is heavy on public records and named officials, and the reporting holds Democratic incumbents who run virtually all of New York City government accountable as readily as it does anyone else. The newsroom does not frame NYC government as systemically corrupt or systemically working; it reports specifics.

The pattern is recognizable across coverage of Adams-administration scandals, NYCHA conditions, MTA management, and NYPD policy — the stories follow the documents rather than a thesis. The High factuality rating reflects rigorous sourcing, a published corrections policy, and the newsroom’s investigative track record on city-hall stories that have moved policy and forced resignations. Where The City does carry a recognizable liberal tilt is in topic selection — housing, immigration, criminal-justice reform get more inches than business or finance — but the reporting inside those topics stays close to the documentary record.

Editorial vs news side

The City is news-only. There is no editorial board, no opinion column, no endorsements. Analysis pieces are clearly tagged and rare. That makes the Center rating unusually clean — what you read on the site is the newsroom’s reported product, not a mix of straight news and editorial-board posture — which is why nonprofit local newsrooms tend to cluster at Center in the nwsly ratings even when their staff is recognizably liberal.

Why we include them in nwsly

Nonprofit NYC accountability newsroom; investigative local coverage.

The City fills the New York City accountability gap that has opened as the Daily News shrank and the Post and Times reduced metro depth. In the Center band, nwsly pulls it for borough-government stories, housing and homelessness coverage, and immigration enforcement — areas where the documentary depth of the reporting is differentiated from the wire-service NYC coverage everyone else carries.

Recent nwsly briefs citing The City

Coming soon — feed from /today and /catalog will populate this section.