Wednesday’s Headlines: We 404’d The Times Edition

We’ve long documented the New York Times’s history of waiting days, weeks or even months before covering essential local issues that we’ve been covering for weeks, months and even years.

Mostly, we’re just joshing with our superiors colleagues at the Paper of Record over how rarely they cover the city that’s in the paper’s name. But on Tuesday, Metro reporter Winnie Hu pushed us too far. Yes, we were pleased that she covered the growing effort to get cars out of city parks, and obviously weren’t surprised that Hu didn’t bother to link back to Streetsblog’s coverage (despite how comprehensively we had documented the issue in these pages).

Look, the Times generally doesn’t link to us. No biggie.

But Hu actually did rely on Streetsblog’s coverage. In her story, she quoted a letter sent by Council Member Joann Ariola to the Parks Department that called the car ban on Freedom Drive in Forest Park “a constant headache.” Hu’s story hyperlinked the words “a constant headache” to a copy of the letter stored in our content management system rather than to the Streetsblog story that contained the letter.

In other words, she purposely decided not to credit Streetsblog for any actual reporting, but was more than happy to swipe an asset from the back end of our CMS (though, of course, she could have gotten the letter from Ariola like we did).

After we caught her red-handed, we renamed the file in our back end, leaving the Times with the dead link you see at the top of this page. (No one at the paper fixed the broken link all day.)

Next time, just ask us for the letter — we’ll be happy to provide it … for a tiny soupçon of credit, of course.

In other news:

• You’ll notice from our daily Mamdani-O-Meter on our home page (and here, right) that the mayor has set a new record for going 28 days without disappointing the livable streets movement (which he last did on March 3). But Hizzoner is officially on notice, given that he refused to commit to repairing one of his predecessor’s great mistakes: the removal of three blocks of the Bedford Avenue protected bike lane at the behest of religious leaders in the neighborhood. Our own Kevin Duggan asked the mayor if he would restore the bike lane — as he promised during the campaign — and make our streets the envy of the world — as he has promised pretty much every day since Jan. 1 — but he demurred. “I’m going to follow up with DOT and get back to you,” he told Duggan.
• The press conference that we attended was about bike-friendly catch basins. (amNY)
• Fast Company has joined the tributes to how Anne Hidalgo completely remade Paris into the amazing city it is today.
• Tiger Woods said he wasn’t drugged or drunk when he rolled over his massive SUV — but he did admit to being incredibly reckless. Oh, so now we’re supposed to take back all the mean things we said about you? (ESPN)
• One of the reasons that Gov. Hochul isn’t going to pass a state budget on time this year is because legislators are not on board with her auto-insurance plan. (Gothamist)
• It’s stunning how when a reckless driver loses control of his car, the mainstream press always reporters it as the car going out of control — as if the car has a mind and lead foot of its own. The NY Post and amNY provided two of yesterday’s examples. We fixed another:

• As Billy Bragg sang, “There’s power in a factory, power in the land, power in the hand of the worker” (even at the Transit Museum). There is power in a union. (Brooklyn Paper)
• The Post had more on the city’s new anti-harassment campaign. Let’s hope Rupert’s minions abide by it.
• We’ll take “YIMBYs” for $500, Alex! (Open NY via X.com)
• And, finally, I’ll close with joyous wishes for the Passover season to our readers who celebrate. Lest we forget, the holiday reminds us to be kind to the stranger, as we were strangers, once.