- Damian Ghigliotty and Joe Hirsch contributed to the Queens Courier’s ongoing series about immigrant day laborers: Damian tells the inside story of clubs where men who left loved ones at home go after work and pay $2 a dance to wile away the loneliness. Joe profiled a 50-something laborer who is ready to return to his family in Mexico after a disappointing 12-year stint in the U.S.
Damian also wrote a piece about voter apathy for the paper. - Loren Bonner reported that Bay Ridge’s Victory Memorial Hospital appears on its deathbed in this story for The Brooklyn Paper.
- Matt Townsend chronicled the unlikely alliance between bike polo players and Lower East Side kids to stop a dogrun from opening in Sara D. Roosevelt Park. Check out his piece in The Villager.
- Francesca Levy also made The Villager with this look at what little kids’ Halloween costumes say about their parents.
- Dmitry Kiper profiled Gogol Bordello “gypsy-punk” violinist Sergey Ryabtsev for the latest Brooklyn Rail.
- Marlene Peralta covered the arrest of a suspect in an Upper East Side jewelry store slaying that grabbed headlines in this Newsday story.
- Danny Massey also made Newsday with this Day 2 story about the Broadway strike.
- Andrew Hawkins is the hardest working man in City Hall. Here are just a couple of his stories: One about how some pols are riding Mayor Bloomberg’s financial coattails and this piece about effort to get the city to help veterans.
- Mariel DiSibio and Georgia Kral were busy at the New York Times. Mariel wrote about the increase in cats flooding pet shelters in Yonkers and beyond.
- Georgia reported on how a Westport school has learned what a drag it is getting mold.
- This week’s podcast was sounds as a dollar, er, euro. The sad state of the dollar and its effect on New York was the topic of the show, which featured reports by Vinita Singla and Sebastian Bednarski, who also produced the podcast. Check it out on the News Service site.
- Speaking of the News Service, Joseph Gargiulo scored our first Staten Island story: a piece about a new city bus route connecting Staten Island to Bayonne.
- Claudia Cruz had a front page piece for the Manhattan Times on anger at P.S. 314 over the Dept. of Ed’s new school rating system.