New York, NY — On a grey February morning in lower Manhattan, inside a warmly lit, wood-paneled room, Ben Smith drew my attention to the smoked salmon benedict. “You should eat,” Smith, the CEO and cofounder of Semafor, mouthed. Across the table from him, a man named Jim Walden was getting animated about how he would replace congestion pricing.

“Let me articulate the plan,” said Walden, an independent candidate in this year’s New York mayoral race. “The plan is to have planning around creating incentives for drivers to get out of their cars.”

I was in the wood-paneled room to watch Walden get grilled by eight journalists — Smith, Juan Manuel Benítez, Christina Greer, Alyssa Katz, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Harry Siegel, and Liena Zagare¹— about his vision for the city. None of the journalists were technically there for their day jobs (though many of them work at publications covering local politics); instead, they came as members of the New York Editorial Board.

“We’re sort of an Occupy Wall Street-style collective,” Smith told me. Smith had the idea for the editorial board after The New York Times announced it would no longer make endorsements in local elections, and over dinner at his house one night last fall he and his collaborators, all of whom had years of experience covering local politics, hammered out the details: they would extend invitations to all the mayoral candidates, sit down for an hour or so over breakfast with any candidate who agreed to an interview, and publish the transcripts and audio in full, for free, on Substack. The interviews are usually closed to the public, but Smith and his colleagues invited me to join as an observer for Walden’s.

Much like The New York Times, the editorial board will not be making endorsements of its own. Instead, they hope their conversations with candidates will help readers make their own decisions about who deserves their vote.

“We don’t have a hive mind about what the right answers are, or even what the right questions are,” said Siegel, an editor at the nonprofit local newsroom The City and co-host, with Greer and Katie Honan, of the podcast FAQ NYC. “But if the whole city is like a body or a living organism, we’re the teeth. The only job of something like this is to chew it, and chew it evenly. Then, if people want to swallow, digest, or just leave it on the table, that’s not really our role as journalists. We’re not trying to make any of this viral. I don’t think that’s our job, either. We’re just making sure it’s getting done.”

In many ways, the editorial board feels like an anachronism, and perhaps the wood panelling is a nod to that (though Smith told me it was really a matter of logistics and the difficulty of finding a centrally located private space that served breakfast). It’s rare, for starters, to see candidates submit themselves to contentious, in-depth interviews with multiple journalists at once, and to allow themselves to be laid so bare. Then there’s the final product: the interviews published on Substack so far all run over 10,000 words long, or an hour-ish of audio each. As of publication, 10 people have announced they are running in this year’s mayoral election — which means if they all agreed to an interview with the editorial board, readers would have more than 100,000 words to sift through to get the clearest picture of what each candidate thinks. Nothing could be further from TikTok.

Which isn’t to say the full transcripts are the only way readers will be able to engage with the editorial board’s work. Katz, executive editor of The City, told me the interviews will inform The City’s 2025 version of “Meet Your Mayor,” an interactive quiz it published for the last mayoral election. Benítez, a former reporter at NY1 and current professor at the Columbia journalism school, told me his students are reading the transcripts as part of his class, after which they’ll host a debate with the candidates on campus. And, he said, the full transcripts also lend themselves well to AI tools like ChatGPT: readers who don’t want to sift through the entire conversation can upload the transcript and ask questions about each candidate’s position on various topics.

Mehta, co-founder and editor-in-chief of New York Focus, said publishing the interviews in full has an additional benefit: “It peels back the layer on who the journalists are,” he told me. “In traditional news articles, you don’t have the questions. You’re sort of hidden. This puts us on trial, and I think that’s healthy.”

The anachronism works. The editorial board is inherently collaborative: before Walden arrived that morning, Max, host of the Max Politics podcast and Executive Editor at the Center for New York City and State Law, passed around a question plan that the contributors had decided on during a planning call they held a couple of nights prior. Smith largely directed the flow of the conversation, but every journalist could jump in at any point with follow-ups or — as Siegel did after Walden called one of Smith’s questions “offensive” — to defuse tensions (“This is a conversation, not a deposition,” Siegel reminded Walden).

The intimacy of the setting (pastries, fruit, warm lighting, those salmon benedicts wobbling forgotten on the plate) also helped when things got contentious, which they often did. “The word ‘plan’ is dangerous here,” Katz remarked at one point after Walden dodged a question about campaign finance reform.

“Ouch,” said Walden, sitting in the chair next to her. He turned to look her in the eye, their faces about a foot apart. “But that’s a fair point.”

The interview wrapped up soon after. Walden thanked everyone, grabbed his coat, and left to head back into the February chill. The New York City mayoral primary — which, in many people’s estimation, will decide the city’s next mayor — will be held on June 24, and the editorial board plans to get its interviews done before then (as of writing, they have published interviews with five candidates). But they don’t intend to stop with this election; Smith told me the project has had a great reception, and they will probably reconvene for future local races.

“We’re not a media company,” Smith told me. “We’re running a public service. The candidates don’t have to do this, but I think that if you’re someone who’s dreamed their whole life of running for mayor, and is now running for mayor, part of what you want is really deep engagement with journalists who are very focused on this. And it’s kind of sad for them that there’s not that much of that anymore. It’s been nice to see how eager and psyched they are to engage with journalism at the moment when there are a lot of theories about politics in which you no longer need to engage with journalists.”

Suddenly, a bustle at the door: Walden was back.

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “Forgot my hat.”

1. Nicole Gelinas and Josh Greenman are also members of the editorial board but weren’t present for the Walden interview. []