LEV stands for The Local East Village.  

It's a news site run by the NY Times and NYU. 

I am an adivser to this project in my capacity as a Visiting Scholar at NYU.  

One of the first things I did was put together an aggregator of all the East Village news sources I could find, to try to quickly get an idea of what was already there. This has proved useful to the team, so they've added it to the navigation bar at the top of every page on the site. 

I think it will really start being effective when: 

1. We really start to feel the pulse of the community through the aggregator.  

2. When the bloggers of the East Village start to get traffic from both LEV and the aggregator.  

The second is more important, because flow is the currency of the web, it's the ultimate respect. Pointers are nice, but traffic is even nicer.  

But to get to #2 you have to first, imho, get to #1. Along with their course credit and a grade, our students should also come away with a feel for the community they covered, and probably more important if they're going to have a career in journalism, what it means to have the feel for a community. 

Right now it's still the early days.  

PS: I used the River2 aggregator, which I wrote myself. It's pretty easy to set up and it's free. I recommend it to any news organization that wants to keep in touch with the community it's serving. 

PPS: This is how NYU is viewed by some in the East Village.