Starting today, I’m going to be writing a weekly op-ed each Monday for Metro New York, which for the uninitiated is one of New York’s two free daily papers. (Metro is most readily identified as “the green one.”) For my debut column, I revisit a topic I touched on here before: how much the recent theater strike really cost the city economy, and whether the numbers being thrown around by the news media are really justified.

If most New Yorkers gave much thought to the stagehands’ strike – other than those in the theater district, who were either bemoaning lost customers or cheering the suddenly uncrowded sidewalks – it was because, we were told, the dispute was of vital importance to the city. The shuttering of one of the city’s key industries, news coverage incessantly repeated, was costing the city millions of dollars every day Broadway remained dark… [read more]

[NOTE: I haven’t quite figured out the inner works of the Metro website just yet, so until I do, the only link I have is to an image of the actual print edition page.]