The New York Times has announced that  Clifford J. Levy, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a leader of the newsroom’s digital initiatives, will be its next metropolitan editor.Mr. Levy, 51, has served as a deputy managing editor since 2016, overseeing The Times’s online platforms. Inside the newsroom, he is viewed as an energetic evangelist of the online-first mentality that The Times has increasingly adopted as it adjusts to the digital age. His appointment signals a renewed focus by The Times on its coverage of New York City. The scope of that coverage — and the staff dedicated to it — has shrunk in recent years as the paper endured layoffs and shifted its focus to national and international readers.

This will be  Levy’s first time running one of the paper’s news desks, a role is commonly seen as a prerequisite for those who might ascend to the top newsroom position, executive editor. He belongs to a cohort of Times editors who could emerge as contenders to succeed Dean Baquet, who currently holds that position.

In a memo to the staff announcing Mr. Levy’s new role, Mr. Baquet described the appointment as “a new opportunity for one of our finest editors.” He added that Mr. Levy “will be a leader of The Times for years to come.”Mr. Levy succeeds Susan Chira, a longtime Times editor who had been running the department on an interim basis. Ms. Chira stepped into the role after the previous metro editor, Wendell Jamieson, resigned in April following an internal investigation into workplace misconduct.

For Mr. Levy, who joined The Times in 1990, the job is a return to familiar territory. He is a Brooklyn resident who grew up just outside the city, in Westchester County, and previously served as Albany bureau chief and as a deputy metro editor, overseeing coverage of stories like Hurricane Sandy. As a reporter, he received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for a series in The Times that exposed abuse of the mentally ill in state-regulated homes in New York City. As Moscow bureau chief, he shared a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2011 with a colleague, Ellen Barry.

While Levy’s name will no longer appear on the Times masthead, he will remain an adviser to the newsroom’s top editors on digital initiatives. He led the creation of NYT Now, a Times app that operated from 2014 to 2016 and was an early experiment by the paper in digital products, and helped develop the paper’s Smarter Living section, which focuses on service and lifestyle journalism.

Levy takes charge of a metro desk with a rich tradition of blockbuster reporting — including exposés on the subway system, city jails and the scoop that led to the resignation of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer — at a time when local news in New York City is ailing.