The New York Times is shutting down its national race and ethnicity beat, naming reporter Tanzina Vega its first-ever full-time Bronx courthouse reporter. Memo below.

That the Times has never had a reporter dedicated to Bronx courts—whose unbelievable failures and delays were the subject of an excellent series in the paper in 2013—seems like its own interesting parable to How Race Is Covered in America, doesn't it? But surely the Times has room for both a Bronx court reporter and a journalist dedicated to covering the kinds of pressing stories that Vega did. (Nick Bilton's salary could probably hire you a couple of these!)

In recent months Tanzina Vega showed how varied and powerful a national beat focusing on race could be: She explored the psyches of minority gun owners, looked at school discipline and how it varies by ethnicity, and was tear-gassed in Ferguson while covering the events there. But as we've told many a Foreign correspondent, you don't need to travel abroad to find adventure: The Metro desk can accommodate you right here in New York. So too is it true that all the issues of justice, race and inequality play out in the five boroughs just as they do elsewhere, perhaps even more so. And nowhere are they more evident, and in technicolor, than in our teeming courtrooms.

So we're excited to announce that Tanzina, who first worked for The Times as a Metro stringer and graduated next door at CUNY, will return and open up our first full-time Bronx courthouse beat. Dean Chang and I have wanted to do this forever, and feel deeply lucky thatTanzina came our way. Here is the borough that is home to the congressional district with the lowest income level in the nation, where the bad old days are still alive in some neighborhoods while residents in others welcome improvements but fear gentrification, where a police ticket-fixing scandal exploded, and where all cases involving Rikers Island are heard. There is also an inscrutable district attorney who has been at it long before Tanzina went to CUNY.

Just to fill her plate, Tanzina will also keep an eye on the federal court in Westchester County, where other kinds of issues tend to play out.

Tanzina is a native New Yorker, born and raised on the Lower East Side. Before she started at The Times, she lived in Barcelona, Spain, and was a translator and English teacher. She has also worked at United Business Media, where she was a research editor and pioneered a weekly podcast. After her time as a clerk and Metro stringer, she moved on to an internship on the website and then a producer job in Bizday, where her multimedia work was recognized by the National Press Photographers Association. Before joining National on the race beat, she spent three years in Media covering advertising.

Please join us in welcoming here to Metro, and the Bronx.

Cheers,

Wendell and Dean

In between retweets of people frustrated or angry over the Times decision, Vega tweeted thanks to "those who read, commented, shared my work."