Andy Newman, editor/reporter/blogger for  The Local, a new Brooklyn Blog run by the New York Times in Clinton Hill, Fort Greene and Maplewood, New Jersey wrote this by way of an introduction to The Local

Welcome to our big little experiment.

Greetings, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. This is your Local speaking. Soon, we hope, you will talk back to it.

Starting today, The Local is an online news site for these
communities. But if we build it right together, The Local will be
something much more: a glorious if cacophonous chorus of your voices
singing the song of life itself in these astoundingly varied and
vibrant neighborhoods.

With your input, The Local will tell stories that matter: crime and
politics and culture and civic life and everything else. Some stories
will be snapshots, mere moments. Others will unfold over days or weeks
or marking periods — the birth pangs of a food coop or a high school
newspaper, the aftermath of a crime, and, as the unstoppable wave of
local gentrification crashes into the unstoppable wave of global
economic meltdown, an ever-growing tale of loss and struggle.