Filling in the Gaps
"I wanted to be
H.L. Mencken and Upton Sinclair,
but I had issues
working for a newspaper
and I found the
Web was the best medium to do what I want to do."
Rob Goodspeed founded several dynamic hyperlocal sites ArborUpdate, DCist,
RethinkCollegePark. All
are essentially blogs. Although Goodspeed got us giggling with his reading of
the urban
dictionary definition of a blog as "a meandering, blatantly uninteresting
online diary that gives the author the illusion that people are interested in
their stupid, pathetic life," he reminded
us of the raw power of this self-publishing tool. Technorati
tracks over 108 million blogs and the number of blogs increases at a rate of
175,000 a day.
A blogger graduating from the
University of Michigan,
Goodspeed recruited "10 diverse contributors to form an editorial collective
to
do civic-oriented news and then I checked out and left. ArborUpdate is strong and has become an
important civic hub." Goodspeed said the most significant thing about the site
is the comments, "It's a better conversation than happens at town hall
meeting." The site has gotten up to 1,000 unique hits a day.
When Goodspeed moved to the nation's capital, he proposed to
the NYC placeblog called Gothamist to expand south. Within two years, DCist went from 0 to 10,000 visitors a day and
became self-supporting.
Now, as a graduate student in urban planning at the University of
Maryland, Goodspeed teamed up to create RethinkCollegePark, an "advocacy planning" site
that bridges the on and off-campus communities, bringing together the various
factions/parties interested in the future of the
town: university administration,
the student body, city residents, county and state government officials. Said Goodspeed, "It's a go-to resource
for the 27,000 residents of College Park.
It's primarily pictures and text and maps. A City Council member even
wanted to announce his candidacy on our site. We're engaging in a meaningful way."
The total cost: $12.95 a month for web hosting. Time spent: zero to several hours a day, depending on exams.
"Sometimes, I
think we do a better job covering Chicago than The Tribune.
We should never
be able to come close to outdoing them on local news,
but
some days we
do."
Former
Tribune journalist Geoff Dougherty launched ChiTownDailyNews, which he calls
a
non-profit, hyperlocal, pro-am (professional-amateur) community Web site. "Our
goal is to give people the information they need to participate in city
life. We cover Chicago
xenophobically. If it happens two blocks across the line in Evanston, we just
don't cover it."
A recent recipient of a prestigious Knight News Challenge
grant, Doughtery hopes to expand the site and realize his vision of recruiting
one citizen journalist in each of Chicago's 75 neighborhoods. To make this
happen, Dougherty has hired a community organizer whose job it is to go out to
school, churches, neighborhood associations to make connections and pitch to
correspondents.
There are no paid reporters on staff. Instead, the ChiTownDailyNewsroom is
fueled by interns who pay attention to what's not being reported in the
mainstream media. "It's yielded some great stuff," said Doughtery, "like
coverage of community policing and the Chicago Housing Authority." Local is the mantra; on the day of the
Minnesota bridge collapse, the front page of the Tribune was all over that
major national story, but "our site was just Chicago Chicago Chicago."
ChiTownDailyNews' is aiming to reach people who no longer
read newspapers and its readership has been growing about 20 percent each
month. The site's budget this year is $160,000.
Said
Dougherty, "We're
nonprofit. We don't want to become
the next Google. We've had
conversations with people about changing the business model, to monetize this,
but I'm glad we said no to Backfence.com.
We're still here and they're not.
It seemed like a bad decision at the time, but now it seems
brilliant."
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