I already told you this site is for
your benefit. It turns out that I also had a selfish motive.
It all started
in 1998, when I discovered Slashdot and
convinced myself that every urban neighborhood needed a grassroots news site of
its own.
Then recently, the Newspaper
Association of America asked me to write an article about how “citizen
journalists” are starting to create “hyper-local” news for ridiculously small
readerships. I started playing around with a trial account with Typepad. Now, Prospect Heights has is own
“hyper-local” news outlet.
Why is this important now? For starters, those fancy
Inter-net “web-sites” that cost tens-of-thousands to develop back in the
dot-com days are now pretty much free for anybody to build, thanks largely to
bloghosts. So you can imagine what career newspaper people must be thinking.
And in terms of getting the word out, Google’s near-proletarian
indifference to the P/E ratio of your publisher’s stock must have some
chilling effect.
So, go take a look at my article, “My Neighborhood News”
and the sidebar, “Who
Says You Can’t Get Micro-Local News in Print?” in which I was able to give
shout-outs to some of your blogs, LiveJournal accounts, and other Internet
distractions (but not all, I’m afraid).