“One of the issues that we’re wrestling with is: How local do we want to be, and how much do we want to zoom in on some of these stories,” Levy said. “In the best of all possible worlds, would you want three or four reporters covering Brooklyn as a whole, or would you want a reporter covering Greenpoint and Williamsburg? In the digital era, one of the big challenges is, if you report a story about a particular neighborhood, how much interest is it to people outside the other neighborhoods? How can you actually ensure that the people in the neighborhood read it? That becomes a platform and promotion and engagement challenge. How do you ensure that it resonates with people outside the borough, outside the neighborhood, outside the city?”

Just as Zagare spent a period last year as focused on garnering subscriptions as she was on editing and reporting, Levy understands that more expansive metro-news coverage requires the involvement of both the newsroom and the business side of the Times. “I’m just getting started, [but] I will say I have very big ambitions when it comes to thinking about how we cover the boroughs, and I’ve been having a lot of discussions, not only with people in the newsroom, but also with my colleagues and on the business side of the Times, in the marketing department in particular, about: What is the business model for covering the boroughs, and how do you do that?”

One of Levy’s key insights is that New York happens to be fascinating, not just to New Yorkers, but to people in Peoria and Portugal. “[There are] stories about New York that will resonate for people in Chicago or Texas or Seattle or Japan or Paris because people around the world are obsessed with New York, they love New York, they visit New York, they believe that New York is a trailblazer in many respects. So that’s one of the big audience riddles—who are we for? Who is the metro desk for? And how does that align with our mission? Our mission is to tell important stories about life in New York. Our mission is to do great investigative work to shine a light where some people don’t want that light to be shined, to provide investigative scrutiny into all these kind of areas. Something I believe deeply in.”

Often, even the granular, hyperlocal piece about New York goes viral. “One of things we discover from the audience data is there are certain types of stories that you think are kind of granular, that will only be of interest to New Yorkers, but actually people around the world love them,” Levy said. “The most obvious example, then, is the subways. People love reading stories about the subways. And we have a fantastic transit reporter, Emma Fitzsimmons. And she writes these stories that you think, ‘Oh, the L train is going to get shut down for a while, that’s a Brooklyn story and maybe a Manhattan story.’ You wouldn’t think that people around the country, around the world, want to read about that. Those stories get really strong engagement and really strong traffic. That’s a sweet-spot story because you’re serving your audience in Brooklyn and Manhattan, but you’re also enlightening an audience around the world. So figuring that out has an interesting area to explore.”