Lost in the Ozone... is now listed on the New York Times City Room Blogroll in the category "People and Neighborhoods." I am very grateful for this listing, although I don't how I was selected. If you're interested in checking out some other NYC neighborhood sites, or just want to keep current on what's going on in the 5 Boroughs, check out The City Room!

I'd like to thank the NY Times blog for my inclusion...


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.

Nearly 60 years later, it sometimes seems like the pace of change has only accelerated. The steep drop in crime that began in the early 1990s helped to lay the foundation for a staggering increase in real estate values. Entire neighborhoods have been remade by commercial and residential developments. Ever a city of contrasts, New York seems to be witnessing sharper contrasts of rich and poor. Working and middle-class families cling to their neighborhoods with fervor. An immigration wave since 1965 accounts for 40 percent of the city’s population and virtually all of its growth.

Parents and teachers are divided on whether Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s takeover of the city’s schools has worked, even as the
mayor is advancing a bold plan to put New York at the vanguard of environmental sustainability. Concerns are growing about New York’s ability to sustain its status as a headquarters of commerce and finance, the twin forces that transformed the Dutch settlement of 1624 into the global metropolis of today.

When we look around the Web, we see people in their separate corners, divided by ideology, by neighborhood, by their obsessions. Our obsession is New York City, and we hope New Yorkers will gather here in good faith for civil discussion about the issues and problems of the day.

Come in. Start talking.