by Ken Walker
Newark06 Hangs It Up
May 22, 2006
??Newark06??: “Our Final Post: Goodbye and Thanks”:http://newark06.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=205. After several months of dedicated around-the-clock reporting, the Newark06 blog at the New York Times is closing their doors. It’s too bad — I was getting used to hearing from the Times about Newark on a daily basis.
Newark06 started with the lofty goal of trying to understand and explain the carnival funhouse of Newark politics. We expected ugliness and debate. We expected a campaign that would resonate nationally with issues of race and class bubbling up as they did in 2002 when Mayor Sharpe James and Cory Booker fought a sandpaper-on-skin “Street Fight” that rubbed the city raw.
On our first day, Mayor James showed up on a police bicycle at City Hall, in a tank top with his biceps bulging, to file his petitions to get on the ballot. When he dropped out a week later, some of our colleagues and fellow bloggers offered sympathy for the loss of a vainglorious character that would have kept us busy.
But it hardly mattered and, in fact, the lack of a re-match between the incumbent and the upstart may have helped. It pushed us to cover not just the horse race of a campaign but also the city – its voters, its quirks, its concerns – and to work harder at putting Newark in perspective.
