Updated Dec. 28, 2022.
At The New York Times, I am the editor of the Express Team, a 24/7 general assignment desk of 25 people based in the U.S. (New York, Los Angeles and other locations), Seoul and London that covers breaking news, trends and social media phenomena, among other things. One day it might be mass shootings and extreme weather, and another day it might be TikTok videos, animal stories and rainbows.
I was one of the first journalists on Twitter, pioneering its use as a news source, reporting and promotion tool. And that is one place to find me as @palafo. For reasons that are obvious, I’ve been more active recently on other social platforms: @palafo@mstdn.social on the Fediverse via Mastodon, @palafo.bsky.social on BlueSky, and palafo on Threads. I am also trying out Post.News but I don’t recommend it. I am slightly active on a public Facebook page and have accounts on Reddit, Instagram, Discord, LinkedIn and many others.
(My wife is the poet and novelist Jane Rosenberg LaForge. Please buy her books, especially my favorite, her critically praised indie novel, “Sisterhood of the Infamous.”)
One thing I am not: a corporate spokesman. If you have a complaint or correction about something in The Times, please write to the official newsroom email, nytnews@nytimes.com. The editors there will see that the matter reaches the appropriate people more quickly than I could.
If you do send me an email, or contact via social media, and I don't reply immediately, or at all, please accept my apology in advance and don't take it personally. If I answered every single inquiry in detail, I'd never get anything done.
————
Still want to know more?
I grew up Rome, a small town in upstate New York, where I was an editor of the high school paper, and later attended Cornell, where I mostly spent my time as a reporter and a top editor at The Cornell Daily Sun.
After many years at various smaller newspapers as a government and politics reporter and later as a city desk editor, I was hired as a staff editor at The Times in 1997. I spent a dozen years on the Metro Desk, eventually working as a deputy editor on numerous major stories, including Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and aftermath, and the scandal that prompted the resignation of Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York. I was the founding editor of the now-defunct City Room blog. Once in a while, I even get a byline, including a piece about my experiences with Zen meditation (free link!).
Over more than 26 years, I’ve worked in the newsroom under six executive editors: Joe Lelyveld, Howell Raines, Llelyveld again, Bill Keller, Jill Abramson, Dean Baquet and, most recently, Joe Kahn.
From 2009 to 2015, I was the head of the copy desks and digital production desks at The Times, under the now-defunct News Presentation Department. During that time, I was part of the editorial team that worked on the revisions for the fifth edition of The Times stylebook, updating entries for the digital news era. I also worked with senior leadership to integrate the separate print and digital newsrooms into one operation, redefining the work of copy editors, producers and news desk editors. In that role I hired and retrained hundreds of editors. This “digital first” modernization of the newsroom workflow, job descriptions and staffing coincided with the adoption of a digital subscription paywall in 2011, which was controversial at the time. Digital content had been free and ad-supported before then, and many “experts” doubted that people would pay for online news. I myself was skeptical. More than a decade later, as other newspapers have cut staff, gone out of business or become vanity projects for billionaires, The Times paywall has proven to be a tremendous success.
In late 2015, I took over a fledgling digital rewrite and breaking news operation and expanded it into what became the Express Team. This team covers a variety of trending and spot news stories, serves as the eyes and ears of the newsroom in monitoring competitors and newsmakers, and assists beat desks with fast-response surge staffing in sudden breaking news situations.
Express has had a hand in many of the biggest stories of the past 10 years: the 2017 mass shooting at the Harvest music festival in Las Vegas and more school shootings than I care to itemize, from Parkland to Uvalde; numerous hurricanes, floods, tornados, wildfires and other deadly extreme weather linked to climate change; the weirder and dark side of politics on the internet, a topic that became all too familiar during the 2016-2020 Trump administration; the deadly protest in Charlottesville and the rise of online hate; the impact of internet culture and technology on society, including the rise of TikTok and the decline of Twitter; the global coronavirus pandemic; the Covid-19 pandemic; the fatal police shooting of George Floyd and the resulting racial unrest and protests; and, most recently, the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Besides writing the first takes of trending and breaking news, and lending support for big stories, Express has worked closely with the newsroom’s Live news team on briefings for major coverage efforts, including the pandemic, the war, mass shootings and natural disasters. In quieter moments, we focus on overlooked topics and offbeat stories. (Little stories often turn into big stories.)
Personal stuff: I’m a father, a husband, an avid cyclist and indoor rower, a chess player and board games enthusiast, an amateur technologist, an unpublished novelist, an amateur photographer and a big fan of indie podcasts. I have been a companion at one point or another to seven cats. The two Siberians we have now were adopted as adults just before the pandemic — Audrey, named for Audrey Hepburn by her previous companions, and Max, named for the mathematician James Maxwell.
If you follow me on social media, you will encounter them.