He can write. Mark Johnson passed on this MediaBistro Q and A from '05:
Q: You started out as a police reporter at The Times. Did you like that beat and what were the plusses and minuses on working that beat there.
A: I asked to cover cops. I had covered crime and corruption in Providence, and my view was—is—that covering the NYPD is one of the better beats at the paper, providing insight into a fascinating subculture and an essential organization, as well as a fast way to get to know the city. The NYPD also happened to be one of the principal instruments by which Rudy Giuliani ran New York, so the beat was instructive in ways beyond writing up last night's dead. And I got to work with Willie Rashbaum and Kevin Flynn, a real pleasure of the job.
We worked in a grubby office on the second floor of the police headquarters, trying to beat the tabs. It was city newspapering in an old sense. It's fashionable lately to say old-time newspapering is dead. It's not dead. It's alive and doing not half bad, and you can see it in cop and crime coverage in newspapers all around the world. Look at it in The Times, or The New York Daily News, or The Moscow Times. It's right there, in wonderfully high quality.
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