"Who cares?" I can hear many of you asking, not unreasonably.

After all, it was Ben Smith who built The Politicker into a local phenomenon. It was Tom McGeveran and company who nurtured it over the last few weeks.

My only job, then, should be not to screw it up.

Some things will certainly stay the same.

As always, it will be a source of relevant and frequently updated material from me and the scary-smart Observer staff, geared towards the sorts of people whose hearts sink each time they reach the end of a Fred Dicker column.

More importantly, The Politicker will continue to serve as a vehicle for interaction with our readers, giving us the chance to tap directly into your politely-rendered collective wisdom about who to look at, what to write and when we've got it wrong.

The catch, of course, is that with the recent proliferation of New York politics blogs -- Ben remarked on it with the resigned air of a local whose neighborhood has just been overrun by hipsters -- it's going to be more of a challenge than ever to distinguish ourselves.

We accept it.

In the meantime, as I slowly recover from two years of writing about people with names like George Norcross, Sharpe James and Jim McGreevey, The Politicker may veer unpredictably. You may well read it for the same morbid reason that you watch car chases, magicians in water bubbles or a Jeanine Pirro campaign speech: it's a live spectacle that can go horribly wrong at any time.

That's fine. We're here to amuse as well as to inform.

Either way, we'll give it everything we have. All we ask in return is your continued attention, comments and tips.

Please.

-- Josh Benson