Updated Oct. 28, 2024.

I retired in July 2024 from The New York Times, after 27 years in various roles, including deputy metro editor, head of the copy desks, and most recently as the founding editor of the Express Team, a 24-hour breaking news and trends desk with hubs in New York, Seoul and London. When I left, the team had grown to more than 35 journalists covering breaking news, trends and social media phenomena, among other things.

I was one of the first journalists on the late, great Twitter, pioneering its use as a news source, reporting and promotion tool. I’ve been more active recently on other social platforms: @palafo@mstdn.social on the Fediverse via Mastodon, @palafo.bsky.social on BlueSky, and palafo on Threads. I am slightly active on a public Facebook page and have accounts on Reddit, Instagram, Discord, LinkedIn and many others.

(My wife is the poet and novelist Jane Rosenberg LaForge. Please buy her books, especially my favorite, her critically praised indie novel, “Sisterhood of the Infamous.”)

I grew up Rome, a small town in upstate New York, where I was an editor of the high school paper, and later attended Cornell, where I mostly spent my time as a reporter and the opinion editor at The Cornell Daily Sun. After many years at various smaller newspapers as a government and politics reporter and later as a city desk editor in York, Pa., I was hired as a staff editor at The Times in 1997. I spent a dozen years on the Metro Desk, eventually working as a deputy editor on numerous major stories, including Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks andn8ts aftermath, and the scandal that prompted the resignation of Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York. I was the founding editor of the now-defunct City Room blog. Once in a while, I even get a byline, including a piece about my experiences with Zen meditation.

I worked under six executive editors: Joe Lelyveld, Howell Raines, Llelyveld again, Bill Keller, Jill Abramson, Dean Baquet and, most recently, Joe Kahn.

From 2009 to 2015, I was the head of the copy desks and digital production desks at The Times, leading the News Presentation Department. During that time, I was part of the editorial team that worked on the revisions for the fifth edition of The Times stylebook, updating entries for the digital news era. I also worked with senior leadership to integrate the separate print and digital newsrooms into one operation, redefining the work of copy editors, producers and news desk editors. In that role I hired and trained hundreds of editors. This “digital first” modernization of the newsroom workflow, job descriptions and staffing coincided with the adoption of an online subscription paywall in 2011, which was controversial at the time but ended up saving The Times from financial disaster. More than a decade later, as other newspapers have cut staff, gone out of business or become vanity projects for billionaires, The Times paywall has proven to be a tremendous success.

In late 2015, I took over a fledgling digital rewrite and breaking news operation and expanded it into what became the Express Team. This team serves as the eyes and ears of the newsroom in monitoring competitors and newsmakers, and as a force multiplier that assists beat desks with quick coverage in sudden news situations.

Express has had a hand in many of the biggest stories of the past 10 years: for example, the 2017 mass shooting at the Harvest music festival in Las Vegas and more school shootings than I care to itemize, from Parkland to Uvalde; numerous hurricanes, floods, tornados, wildfires and other deadly extreme weather linked to climate change; the weirder and darker side of politics and disinformation on the internet; the bizarre first Trump administration; the deadly racist protest in Charlottesville and the rise of online hate; the impact of internet culture and technology on society, including the rise of TikTok and the destruction of Twitter by Elon Musk; the long years of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown; the fatal police shooting of George Floyd and the wave of racial protest afterward; and, most recently, the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Personal stuff: I’m a father, a husband, a seasoned meditator and student of Zen Buddhism, an avid cyclist and indoor rower, a chess player and board games enthusiast, an amateur technologist, an unpublished novelist, a photographer and a big fan of indie podcasts. I have been a companion at one point or another to seven cats. The two hypoallergenic Siberians we have now were adopted as adults just before the pandemic — Audrey, named for Audrey Hepburn by her previous companions, and Max, named for the mathematician James Maxwell. A picture is below.

Also, an important disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. The negligible income will be donated to the nonprofit Still Mind Zendo in Manhattan. You may give directly to the zendo here.

(Hello, Mastodon followers.)