Photo by Josh.
In October, DCist was humbled—yet a bit confused—when voters named us “Best Neighborhood Blog” in the annual list published by the Washington Post’s Express. We were grateful for the accolade, though it wasn’t exactly accurate as, in the ten years we’ve been around, we’ve never been a neighborhood blog.
But D.C. needs more neighborhood blogs, as we pointed out when we interviewed Frozen Tropics’ founder Elise Bernard. Those who have followed Bernard’s coverage of the Trinidad neighborhood and H Street NE corridor since it started, almost a decade ago, probably also followed—and bemoaned the shuttering of—Borderstan, a neighborhood blog that covered the Logan Circle, U Street, and Dupont Circle areas.
Now Borderstan is back, under new ownership and a new editor at the helm. The site was bought by Local News Now, which owns and operates ARLnow.com, BethesdaNow.com, Hill Now, and RestonNow.com, and it officially relaunched today under the editorial helm of Tim Regan, a journalist who previously covered local news for Express, Washington City Paper, and Thrillist, among others.
Borderstan was founded in 2008, by Matt Rhoades and Luis Gomez, who aimed to cover the “slice of the city known to locals as ‘Borderstan,’ the area around the border of two police districts on 15th Street NW.”
After nearly five years, however, Rhoades and Gomez decided to shut the site down. “They were basically at a crossroads … they had to devote all of their time to their site or they were forced to close it down,” says Regan, who was hired to run the site in early May. Regan says that Local News Now founder Scott Brodbeck has a passion for neighborhood news and saw the void left when Borderstan published its last post in 2013.
“Scott thought it would be a great decision to buy Borderstan and reopen it,” says Regan.
In its heyday, Borderstan was a valuable resource for residents in the Logan Circle-Dupont Circle-U Street area. Rhoades and Gomez covered everything from crime to development in the area, with a flare for how it would—and could—impact the local community. Even as similar neighborhood blogs shuttered or outgrew its neighborhood—like PoPville (formerly Prince of Petworth)—Borderstan remained loyal to its intended area of coverage, until it was no more.
After he was hired, Regan met with Rhoades and Gomez to talk shop, learn the beats of the area, and what Borderstan means to them. With their blessing, Regan began work on bringing the site back from the dead and bigger then before, expanding its areas of coverage to include Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights. Regan says he plans to continue the beats that Rhoades and Gomez established while trying out new things.
“We’re really driven by what our readers want to read,” he says. “Crime, transportation, ANC meetings, drilling to the core of information people want to benefit from.” Of course, things have changed for the neighborhood since Borderstan was founded. A lot of things, actually.
“Crime was a much bigger issue when the blog started,” says Regan. “These days … it’s not as big of an issue. The area’s much more developed then it used to be … we hope to loop in other areas of development in D.C … we hope to start telling some new stories about D.C.”
And on its first day, you can see a snapshot of just what kind of stories Regan plans to publish: on top of news about a new interactive mural coming to U Street and a new running store opening near Black Cat, there’s a fascinating profile of one of 14th Street’s oldest businesses, Monarch Novelties.
If that’s any indication, the new Borderstan is poised to be just what makes any neighborhood blog a valuable resource for the community: news, history, and insight that caters to both new transplants and longtime residents.
