Friday afternoon, Steve Buttry, TBD’s Director of Community Engagement, emailed members of TBD’s Community Network to let them know about how the changes to TBD/WJLA will affect their relationship (full disclosure, my neighborhood blog is a member of the network). TBD will get rid of the “News Near You” feature currently on their website. They will begin to only link to content that is of interest to the metro region in general, instead of localized neighborhoods.

Buttry notes that for content that TBD will no longer cover, such as sports, they will rely heavily on linking to outside sources, such as sports bloggers within their community network. And now that the site will primarily cover arts and entertainment, they are likely to link to more content that is arts and entertainment based. This seems to leave the neighborhood, news focused blogs out in the dust: unless a blog is writing about content that is appealing to the D.C. area at large, TBD will likely not link to it – which I think for most blogs is the main benefit of being in the Community Network.

No word on when these changes will be implemented, but we’ll keep an eye out.