Want to know which New York City block is safest? Or offers the best pastrami sandwich? Or, if a model is wearing a correctly fitted bra? Ask The Times’s Metro editor, Wendell Jamieson.

Mr. Jamieson joined the Times in 2000; after the attacks on the World Trade Center, he edited The Times’s “Portraits of Grief” coverage, which won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2002. During his tenure at The Times, he’s worked on Metro as an assignment editor, city editor and editor of the City Room blog, and he has worked for the Styles desk.

He says he decided, in high school, to write for newspapers, because he wanted to tell the story of New York City, his hometown and, he says, “the greatest story in the world.”

How does one man oversee coverage of a teeming metropolitan area, boiling over with stories full of pathos and tragedy and outrage and comedy? Mr. Jamieson explains.

What exactly is Metro? Geographically and otherwise?

Metro is the news department responsible for covering New York City, the company’s hometown, and the surrounding region. Metro includes our Sunday feature section, Metropolitan, and our daily mobile morning report, New York Today.

How can you possibly cover all the news in such a giant, dense, culturally variegated, area?

We are very, very selective. We aim for big-themed stories that hit on universal issues that resonate far beyond the five boroughs, yet that also tell those who live here something about their city, their neighborhood, even their own blocks.

Where do you start. What does a typical day look like?

No such thing as a typical day. Up at 6 or 6:30 a.m., checking email, looking over our mobile, web and print report, which still arrives on my doorstep in a blue bag. Curiously, this is when I tend to have good ideas for stories. Others pop into my head on the subway.

Have you read all four city papers before 7 a.m.?

Nope. Most of their good stuff comes to me via social media. I don’t edit the Metro report for the competition, or because of the competition. We no longer try to just beat the local players — for whom I have worked, and for whom I have endless fondness and respect — but an entire planet of news and entertainment and information sources.

I always read The Post and The Daily News on my tablet on the subway, though I find The News software is pretty buggy and sometimes won’t load. During the course of the day, I’ll likely look at Politico New York and DNAinfo, which I find has supplanted The Daily News as the home of curb-level, neighborhood-set stories. I’m also fond of Gothamist, though mostly as a convenient aggregator of what others have produced.

Are local TV and radio a part of your morning media diet?

Not really. I like Errol Louis and his show “Inside City Hall” on NY1, though. I can 

sometimes watch him at night, but it’s a bit too wonky for my children — they’re like, “Dad? Really?” I have a strange fondness for Bernie Wagenblast’s traffic reports on 1010 WINS on the weekends. Don’t ask me why.

Is it obvious which are the big news stories of the day?

To me it is. I was stuck on a train the other week, in a station, and a bunch of construction workers got on. Then the train moved into the tunnel and stopped again. We were down there for at least 20 minutes. The construction workers were saying they were off work because their job had shut down — after a crane fell and someone got killed. I was like, “holy cow.” But I was stuck. No cell service. Nothing. We finally moved and I bolted into the newsroom, where the other editors had everything quite under control. So that’s an obvious big story.

Others are big because I’ve been doing this for a long time: For example, when I heard there had been a police chokehold episode on Staten Island and someone died, I knew that was a huge story. It was 20 years ago when I was writing about police chokeholds.

How do you identify those that are less obvious?

I have a pretty creative sense of what makes a story, but most important, I’m lucky enough to be surrounded by a great team of editors and reporters, many of them friends, who all have different views of the world.

My greatest happiness is finding a big thought — we used to say a “front-page thought” — in a seemingly mundane event. Others around me try to do that, too, and we compete for the smartest way to make a small story into something really memorable. It can be a hugely fun conversation.

How many Metro reporters are there? Are you in contact with each one daily? Do they each have specialized beats?

We are in the mid-40s. Some are now on the presidential campaign, so I can’t give an exact count. Each reports to an editor. And yes, everyone has a beat, whether it be geographic, like Brooklyn or Queens, or a topic, like housing. We also have a big group of investigative reporters. Keeping them free of the daily tumult to stay focused on their targets, while others cover the news of the day, is perhaps my biggest challenge.

How autonomous are Metro reporters? How much do you direct their reporting?

I usually dip in on the big one or two stories for the day. But it’s the other editors who report to me who do most of the directing. I occasionally step in to point one story, say, 10 degrees this way, or 10 degrees the other way, but more often than not we’re already headed in the right direction.

Have you ever had a non-journalism job? Did you always know you were headed for the Metro desk?

When I was in high school I was a walking messenger for the law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler one summer — which was in 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where I loved going to work — and then answered phones at a travel agency in an office building on 49th and Madison the next summer. (This was a happy time because my friend Matt happened to run the Chipwich stand on that corner, and I would cover for him when he ran into Saks to use the men’s room.) But that was it.

I started as copy boy at The New York Post during my summers in college. When I decided I wanted to write for newspapers, which was during my senior year of high school, it was because I wanted to write about New York City.

This is what excites me: This is my hometown. I’ve seen it change remarkably in the last 50 years, and I think it is the greatest story in the world. Anything that happens anywhere happens here, only more so. I reject outright any idea that it has become a scrubbed Disneyland. Maybe a few stretches of Manhattan or Brooklyn, but it is still New York and it is still deeply troubled in many places.

Is your approach to Metro different than your predecessors? How?

Yes — they had more reporters! But seriously, I’ve been at the helm at the moment when The Times has truly shifted to becoming a digital-first organization. I have almost nothing to do with the print edition. We have a print editor on Metro who does that. I’m insanely and obsessively focused on our live digital and mobile report. We’ve eliminated all meetings focused on print, and we pursue a 24/7 strategy of publishing stories at the exact moment the readers most want them, not when we happen to be turning on the printing presses.

On the other hand, there’s much that my predecessors would recognize, even going back to the days of mutton chops, wax mustaches and spittoons. New York is a boiling place, rich with pathos and tragedy and outrage and comedy. Stories are here waiting to be swept up by the bucketful. And they always have been.

Are there key figures that the Metro section observes with special interest?

The obvious ones. But we see them as national figures: Bill de Blasio is not just the mayor, he is a major force in the current progressive movement, or would like to be. William Bratton is not just the police commissioner, he is the most high-profile municipal law enforcement official in the United States. Gov. Andrew Cuomo is also a nationally known figure. So is Chris Christie. We like to approach these and other characters writ large, for our local readers, our national readers and our worldwide readers.

Particular kinds of stories you try to avoid?

Incremental developments on continuing stories. I’d rather wrap it all together into something big, that stands alone, even if it comes down the pike a little bit later. This has long been The Times’s model, but the new web analytics tools have made it painfully clear that interest is minimal in small stories that move the ball only a few yards down the field.

I’m betting there are lots of people who would like to shape your coverage of their business or projects? Are there rules about that? Whom do you have lunch with?

Yeah, the rules are: No.

I’ve had lunch or dinner with those who make news in New York City. Not to report, but to be sure the lines of communication are always open between us. Also, so they can complain about me to my face.

No shortage of semi-scandalous Metro stories — Eliot Spitzer’s fall, Anthony Weiner, etc. — how is The Times’s approach to these stories different from that of the paper’s competitors, especially the tabloids? Or maybe it isn’t?

It is and it isn’t. Obviously, we do these stories — The Times broke the Spitzer scandal — but we aim to frame them in a larger context, and not focus solely on the prurient details. But I’ll tell you — those two gentlemen made it very, very, very hard for us to do that.

Do you make a special effort to represent news pertaining to higher and lower income brackets within the Metro region? How exactly do you do that? 

It’s a daily puzzle. I want to cover all strata of life in New York City, highest to lowest and everything in between. We aim our reporters at the proper areas, and the mix takes care of itself.

What adjective would you use to describe the current mayor’s relationship to the Metro desk?

Respectful, weary, annoyed. (Wait — are those adjectives?)

What city organization is most antagonistic to the Metro desk and how does that affect your coverage?

We have a nice balance with city organizations and agencies. I’ve had disagreements with the Police Department, with City Hall, with the Health and Hospitals Corporation. Certainly with folks in Albany. Many who are involved in the nail salon industry were furious at our “Unvarnished” series. In the first examples, I think the people in charge are professionals who accept that we might not always see eye-to-eye, that Times reporters have to be aggressive, and that they are going to take some hits. They make their complaints, I hear them, I acknowledge when they are right and do my best to correct it, and then we move on to the next day and the next argument. I don’t think the nail salon folks will ever move on.

Favorite thing about the job?

The New York Times is a global brand, with a global future, and I get and applaud that. But we can bring about change in New York City in ways that we simply cannot in many other places on Planet Earth. Here we are a local institution. When a firefighter is killed, or a police officer is killed, or a police officer kills someone by using an illegal chokehold — people turn to us. Watching as, say, Sarah Nir’s “Unvarnished” stories brings about much-needed change in the nails industry, or as Kim Barker’s exposé on so-called three-quarter houses brings a modicum of dignity to those forced to live in them, or as William Rashbaum, Susanne Craig and Thomas Kaplan investigate the Moreland Commission and turn Albany on its ear, that’s my favorite thing about the job.

Does your time on the Styles desk inform the way you approach your job?

That was a great experience. It was fascinating for me to apply the standards of classic urban journalism to a menu of new topics. The reporting must be just as rigorous. I learned that anything about yoga sails to the top of the most-emailed list. And I got to know the fashion writers, who are a killer bunch — they are as good as covering the fashion industry as our police reporters are at covering the N.Y.P.D. I also learned how to tell if a model is wearing a correctly fitted bra, and that it’s O.K. to wear brown shoes with a gray suit (not her — me).

Any big stories that Metro missed?

We were late to the beginning of the George Washington Bridge lane-closing scandal a few years back, but thanks to some patient and fantastic reporting, we eventually caught up — and, I’d argue, pulled ahead.

What do readers complain most about and how do you respond to reader complaints?

That we missed a story, or didn’t do a story, that affects them and their lives. And they are probably right.

Anything about the job that keeps you up at night?

Spelling names right. No matter how many times I check a name, I wake up at 4 a.m. convinced I got it completely wrong. I’ve been like that ever since I was an intern at New York Newsday in 1988. I literally bolt upright and blurt out, “My God, I spelled John wrong.” And my wife is like, “Whaa?”

On a larger scale, doing my part to deliver The New York Times successfully into a digital world, where it can grow and grow, and figuring out how best to deploy Metro’s resources to make that happen, does indeed keep me up at night.

Did I imagine it or did I read that you are a champion fencer? Any connection between fencing and editing the Metro section?

Hahahaha. You might have read that, for a long time I studied Kendo, which is Japanese fencing. I am actually a second dan — which is roughly equivalent to a second-degree black belt in other martial arts — although my job, my desire to spend time with my family, and my 49-year-old knees and neck have more or less ended my Kendo career. It’s a shame because it was a great joy to me. I played in only one tournament, fighting three matches — I lost one, won one and had a draw. But maybe there is some connection between fighting a duel and coming in to do battle with the news of New York City every day.