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NYC NEWS ENGINE

The city's public policy journalism, surfaced by insight and importance

Fetching and scoring stories from NYC newsrooms...

Every link goes to the original source. Support these newsrooms directly.
Stories are scored for depth, reporting effort, and policy relevance. Auto-refreshes every 5 minutes.

How scoring works: Stories are ranked by a weighted combination of investigative signals (FOIA, documents obtained, data analysis), explanatory depth (deep dives, explainers, accountability follow-ups), policy topic relevance (housing, criminal justice, transit, fiscal oversight), NYC locality, outlet tier, byline attribution, and recency. Stories mentioning both the mayor and governor get a bonus for state-city policy significance. Wire-style breaking news, shallow aggregation, opinion, sports, and entertainment are deprioritized or excluded. Today's Picks requires at least one policy, investigative, or explanatory signal -- high scores from freshness and outlet tier alone are not enough. Opinion pieces (op-eds, editorials, columns) appear in the sidebar but never in Today's Picks. When multiple outlets cover the same story, the deepest version is kept using title-similarity deduplication. Overlapping policy keywords are deduplicated to prevent inflated scores.

Buzzing in NYC: Combines hot posts from Reddit (r/nyc and r/newyorkcity) with Google News trending results for New York City. Reddit posts are filtered to news links only (no self-posts, images, or memes) and ranked by upvotes and comment count. Items that overlap with stories already in Today's Picks are removed. This section reflects public conversation, not editorial judgment -- it may surface stories the scoring algorithm would not prioritize.

Archive retains 6 months of stories. This is an editorial lens, not an algorithm.