Back in May we told you about Capital New York, the brainchild of former Observer editors Tom McGeveran and Josh Benson. Then, we reported it would “contain magazine-quality journalism in a continuous format, accessible through a Politico-like homepage portal that brings together all their areas of coverage” and that it would publish “the kind of young name writers you’d expect from a couple of Observer expats — think contributors to the Awl, magazine writers, and New York bloggers of note.” Well, now the website capitalnewyork.com has launched in beta form, and much of that appears to still hold true. Writers like Azi Paybarah, Devin Leonard, Meredith Bryan, Eliza Shapiro, Katharine Jose, Terry Golway, Zachary Woolfe, and Zachary Baron each have their own space on the site. Above you can see the homepage — busy but penetrable, with a feed on the left organized by writer, and one on the right that picks up Twitter posts from contributors and elsewhere.
So far, there’s just the main vertical, which includes cultural and news pieces, but we’re told there will be more soon. The pieces are long: blog posts these are not. One piece, about the overexposed addiction memoirist Bill Clegg rings in at 2,100 words. To be fair to the writer, Zachary Woolfe, he does attempt to figure out why it is that New York media types are so fascinated with Clegg’s story, and insist upon putting his face in every publication (including ours). It’s the “ultimate New York story. Or maybe it’s just the ultimate publishing story,” Woolfe writes, describing it as the age-old tale of “a handsome, ambitious rube comes to town and wants to make a mark.” (When it comes to seeing his mug everywhere you turn, emphasis is on the “handsome” part.) But we digress. It is the type of story that fits quite appropriately in a publication tagline, “This is How New York Works.”
Homepage [Capital New York]
