New from the New York Times. And check out the blog roll over there.

The newspaper city room was once a vast, loud, smoke-filled place filled with reporters and editors banging away at manual typewriters amid paste pots and clattering Teletype machines. While the tools have changed — laptops, digital recorders and cellphones come to mind — the modern city room has much in common with its lively ancestors. Reporters still hit New York streets with the time-tested methods: asking pointed questions, digging through records, knocking on doors.
A few days ago, the Metro staff left the old Times Square city room for good, but we aim to keep that spirit alive in our new newsroom and on this blog, which has been named with a wink and a nod to our past.
The emphasis here will be on reporting, not punditry or snarky commentary. The blog will feature news-maker interviews, documents, Web resources, photos, videos and other multimedia, as well as updates and follow-ups on the day’s news.
But the most important feature, we hope, will be the reader discussions. We think New Yorkers have a lot to talk about. In his 1949 essay “Here Is New York,” E. B. White wrote, “To a New Yorker the city is both changeless and changing.” Then, he described the dismantling of the El, the growing gaudiness of Broadway, the decline of the great East Side mansions.