Thanks to the pandemic, I had never met Akash Mehta in person. But I’d read several of his pieces for New York Focus, a new nonprofit newsroom devoted to in-depth coverage of New York State government and politics. His stories are nuanced and contextual, which is critical when covering a beat more densely layered than baklava and not nearly as sweet.

Imagine my surprise when he told me that prior to being tapped as editor-in-chief of this new venture, he was a "freelancer for a few months and before that, I was a college student in Chicago."

Mehta’s college decisions may portend a promising future for New York Focus. He attended college at Deep Springs in California, "which is about as far from the world of New York politics as you can get," he said.

Not only is Deep Springs a cattle ranch where the handful (between 12 and 15) of students admitted each year are expected to labor, but the same students are also responsible for running many aspects of the college, including hiring the professors who will teach them. 

After the two-year program at Deep Springs, Mehta graduated from the University of Chicago. He then returned to New York City, where he was raised and where his interest in politics was established early. During high school, Mehta was a member of his local community board.

New York Focus is the outgrowth of several months of successful freelance work focused on Albany politics. It received its original funding from the Open Society Foundation, George Soros' organization. Mehta told Capital Tonight that he and his colleagues, Lee Harris and Sam Mellins, have full editorial control. 

They’ll need it if they plan to afflict the comfortable. 

"We have this strange situation where New York probably has more journalists than anywhere else in the world, and yet our coverage of local politics has been diminished," he told Capital Tonight. "And that’s the case even as the importance of New York politics has, if anything, only grown."

Indeed, there is a lack of capacity at many news outlets for in-depth reporting on complex issues. According to Mehta, that’s where New York Focus will add value to the media landscape.

"We just passed a $212 billion budget. That’s literally 14 times as much per capita spending as the entire government of Indonesia, and that’s ignoring federal spending. And yet, while there are so many journalists doing great work, I think, as any journalist would be the first to say, there is so much need for more and there’s so much that goes uncovered," he said.

New York Focus currently has three full-time editor/reporters "and we’re hiring a fourth person who will be our publisher," Mehta said.

"We’re very small. We’re super scrappy. But it’s been exciting, even at our size, some of the early successes we’ve been able to have," he told Capital Tonight.