Capitol Hill Gets its Online Community Back

Capitol Hill mainstays Bruce and Adele Robey have gone back to their internet roots with the recent launch of Hill-Talk, a Capitol Hill neighborhood-focused online news aggregator, discussion board and community calendar.

The Robeys were the force behind the original Voice of the Hill newspaper, which began as a web site in 1999, later expanded to a monthly tabloid newspaper and eventually joined the Current Newspapers in 2005, when the Robeys sold it to the local newspaper chain. Over the course of the next couple of years, the Current kept Bruce Robey on to maintain the paper's web site, but eventually that relationship, along with any sort of online version of Voice of the Hill, now called The Capitol Hill Current Voice of the Hill, came to an end.

"The Current management hired someone else to do [the web site] and redesigned it into oblivion," Robey told DCist via email. "They still run my name as co-publisher, but I have nothing to do with the paper and our financial obligation is finalized in June of this year."

None of the Current Newspapers, which includes the Northwest Current, the Georgetown Current, the Dupont Current and the Foggy Bottom Current, maintains an online version, and the free papers are only distributed in certain parts of the city. Since at least last summer, The Capitol Hill Current Voice of the Hill's web site has also been entirely dark.

The resurrected Hill-Talk has a pretty simple layout: one section of aggregated news stories (which are curiously lacking date stamps, hopefully that will be remedied); a revamped Hill-Talk discussion board; an interactive community calendar; and a directory of Capitol Hill businesses. It's nothing fancy, and it could benefit from a little Web 2.0 polish (you can't comment on the news stories themselves, and instead have to move over to the discussion board anytime you want to talk about anything), but considering the vacuum of locally-focused Capitol Hill online communities, it's surely a welcome return to form.

"Neither the [Hill] Rag or the Voice have interactive web sites," Robey points out. "25,000 people either work or live on Capitol Hill and they have a lot in common - work, family, houses, church, etc. We hope that Hill-Talk is a one stop spot for whatever the viewer needs."