"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."