Well, other major papers have talked about doing this for a while. Makes sense for the Times to try it out. The Boston Globe has something like this already and WickedLocal.com has been doing pretty well in the Boston area as well.
The equation: NYTimes Brand + 1 Nytimes editor + free copy from CUNY j-school + user-generated content.
ESPN's actually launching city-specific sites now, starting, of course, with Chicago.
Every big media company is making a local content play right now. I get e-mails every month from someone developing the next one asking me if I'd like to write for them for free in exchange for exposure.
Interesting idea. Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen and others have speculated for long time now that journalists will all morph into editors rather than the creators of content, picking and choosing amongst both their own writing but also that of the audience in the form of their blog posts. David Pogue already does a form of this by cherrypicking the best comments from his massively popular blog posts and articles.
This will probably make more progress than one of the other newspaper-related HN posts today, the one about Newsday starting to charge for articles:
I wonder how much play these will get on the Times homepage, and how much editorial independence they'll have from the main newsroom. It's possible that these could end up hurting the core brand by putting it on lower quality content.
If I were doing this I'd put the Times logo small and off in the corner and try to give each local blog its own identity.
The equation: NYTimes Brand + 1 Nytimes editor + free copy from CUNY j-school + user-generated content.
Interesting stuff.