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Breaking news in The Washington Post today: Blogging community news isn’t as easy as it looks.
In a stunning exposé of the Internet folks who chronicle the ins and outs of the District’s diverse neighborhoods, the Post discovered that—gasp!—not every blog gets updated forever. Just like the rest of the Web, it turns out that the gallery of neighborhood blogs is littered with the ghostly shells of once-hopeful citizen journalism projects.
Are D.C.’s neighborhood bloggers, as the Post’s headline suggests, “struggling to thrive?”
For starters, they should try our job.
But seriously, the struggle might be overblown. Consider Nikki Peele, a Ward 8 resident who in 2008 started the blog Congress Heights on the Rise as a way to publicize all the developments and intricacies of her new home. (Peele moved from Prince George’s County in 2007.) Of Peele, the Post reports:
Peele, 35, reached out to David Garber, who wrote the now-defunct blog And Now, Anacostia, and he encouraged her to consider blogging. She started to attend community meetings but found she wasn’t always welcome. One night in June 2008, she had an argument with an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner member who Peele said tried to prevent her from getting involved in the neighborhood. Determined, she vowed that night to attend every meeting in Ward 8 over 30 days and blog about each one.
“These meetings were covering public information that was relevant to the community,” she said. “I just figured, I live here. I have a right to know.”
In the four years since she started her website, Peele has grown to posting up to 15 items a day and attracting about 3,000 from visitors interested in life east of the Anacostia River. And there’s no denying that she’s aggressive in making her site a must-read for anyone interested in real estate, development, transportation, culture and life in Ward 8.
But more bloggers in the Post’s story are like Georgetown Metropolitan‘s Topher Matthews, an attorney working for the federal government who fires off three posts a day, one of which is a link roundup, another of which is just a photo of the day. (Wonder where he got that idea.) For people like Matthews, the neighborhood blog is what most blogs are—hobbies!
Yes, there are the clear market leaders, like Dan Silverman, better known as the Prince of Petworth, who quit his consulting job in 2009 to blog full-time about flowerbeds, Craigslist rentals and restaurant build-outs.
However, most of these neighborhood bloggers do it as an avocation, says Rebecca Mills, who writes The Brightwoodian, a blog devoted to goings-on in upper Northwest D.C.
“I’ve never felt like maintaining the blog is a struggle,” Mills writes in an email to DCist. “And I don’t think most neighborhood bloggers feel that way, so I think ‘struggling to thrive’ is a really ridiculous angIe.”
Mills says she started The Brightwoodian “because I realized that I knew a lot about what was going on in the neighborhood” and because no one else in that corner of the city was keeping a running journal of issues like development along Georgia Avenue, the quality of the roads and, most visibly, the planned entry of Walmart. The Brightwoodian publishes a few posts a week, and that’s good enough for Mills.
“That’s my goal, disseminating information,” she says. “Not much of a struggle, really.”
As far as the writers who gave up on their neighborhood blogs, like the authors of And Now, Anacostia and Barry Farm Remixed, they didn’t quit out of frustration or defeat. Susan Kennedy, who wrote Barry Farm Remixed, signed off because, in her own words, “it’s been one week since I packed up a 22′ moving truck and drove off into the sunset with all my belongings.”
That’s right, she moved! Not exactly a white flag of defeat, as the Post’s lede suggests. Kennedy’s finish was more of a graceful conclusion, Mills says. “That lede was ridiculous, too,” she says.
The District’s newest neighborhood blogger, the so-called Titan of Trinidad also refutes the idea that his site is in a deathmatch for attention. Yes, Titan of Trinidad is mostly parody, but even through his diet of doorknobs and 40s, the site’s author, “Calvin Raines,” disputes the Post’s insinuations.
“Struggling to thrive as a neighborhood blogger? Not sure that’s possible for me, or anyone else,” he says. “In all seriousness, if most of an article’s content focuses on a self-appointed prince of a specific neighborhood, the Post has issues.”
Seriously, this neighborhood blogging thing isn’t some knives-out brawl. It’s about the individual bloggers’ persistence. Most of them aren’t doing it as a full-time career, just an extracurricular activity. And like any hobby, one’s success is determined in large part by how much one practices.
Take Dan Reed, who does the Silver Spring blog Just Up the Pike. He garners about 2,000 hits a day based off a couple posts a week, the Post reports. Well, when you only write a few things a week on a spare-time website, that’s probably the best you can expect. Prince of Petworth pulls down about 35,000 views a day, largely because despite what one might think of his content, Dan Silverman is nothing if not voluminous.
And because people really like photos of cats and roof decks.
