At 7 p.m. on Saturday night, with one of Seattle’s biggest snowstorms in recent memory underway, NorthWest Cable News, the 24/7 news channel run by Belo (my former employer), is running a gardening show. The broadcast channels are in syndicated programming. The TV and newspaper sites were covering the story, but from a city-wide and regional perspective, updating every few hours. If you wanted to know what’s going on in your neighborhood right now — which streets are closed, which streets are being plowed, where the accidents are — you had only one place to go: your neighborhood blog. In fact, the City of Seattle not only emailed neighborhood news sites frequent updates — and monitored the coverage to watch the storm evolve — but they also prominently linked the blogs from its home page.
Of course, I’m a little biased, because my wife and I run MyBallard.com, where we posted dozens of updates on the storm, from photos to text. Our readers provided more reporting than we did, sending us photos of sideways buses, odd accidents and fallen trees. They “crowdsourced’ the traffic conditions, posting road conditions on their block and reporting back after they managed to drive to work. We were stunned by the community response. But that was nothing compared to the WestSeattleBlog: they posted 24/7, seemingly without sleep, incorporating user photos, video clips, Twitter posts, and a user-updated Google map, generating hundreds of comments, which were nearly entirely user reports. Traffic skyrocketed way beyond previous records.
Capitol Hill Seattle and Central District News‘ community bloggers also tracked the storm (both are powered by their Neighborlogs platform), along with the Rainier Valley Post, PhinneyWood and MagnoliaVoice (those last two are in the MyBallard network.) And there are others, too, dedicated nearly entirely to neighborhood news.
It’s this combination — providing a layer of journalism over a vibrant community of people posting news in their neighborhood — that allows neighborhood news sites to drive increasingly larger audiences with a fraction of the costs a community newspaper requires. Think of them as local cable news channels, updated by both publishers and users around the clock, providing unmatched coverage where it matters most: right in your neighborhood.
