Daniel Weintraub, the columnist for the Sacramento Bee opinion pages since 2000 and before that a reporter in the capital, is leaving the paper on Friday. He will be starting a non-profit website on California health policy and writing a weekly politics column for the New York Times' new Bay Area edition. He'll also be writing about California in other forums. Longtime LAO readers might remember Weintraub was one of the first newspaper columnists to blog regularly as the California Insider, starting during the 2003 recall campaign that invented Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Republican office-holder. In 2007 the Bee put Weintraub behind the pay wall, with the expected results. Before the Bee, Weintraub covered Sacramento for the Los Angeles Times.

NYT: The Bay Area edition launches Friday.