Public Biography
Margaret Liu-Chen is a metropolitan affairs correspondent for The New York Time5, where she has covered the greater New York City area since 2019. Her reporting focuses on local government, neighborhood disputes, infrastructure, and the daily friction of urban life, which she treats with the sustained intensity typically reserved for geopolitical crises.
Ms. Liu-Chen holds a Master of Arts in journalism from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the University of Michigan. Before joining The New York Time5, she spent four years at the Hartford Courant, where she won a regional press association award for a seven-part investigative series on irregularities in municipal leaf-blowing schedules.
She has been a finalist for the Polk Award twice, both times for stories that her editors initially believed to be too narrow in scope, and both times for stories that proved to contain significantly more institutional malfeasance than anyone had anticipated.
Ms. Liu-Chen lives in Astoria, Queens, and has described her beat as “everything that happens between the sidewalk and the zoning board.”
Selected Coverage
- The 2024 Gowanus Canal pedestrian bridge naming controversy
- A fourteen-month investigation into discrepancies in Brooklyn community board meeting minutes
- The Bedford-Stuyvesant stop sign that was installed facing the wrong direction for an estimated eleven years