Some examples of hyperlocal journalism, please
A reporter I know is looking for some examples of hyperlocal jouralism by real folks, broadly defined. An example is a young blogger who put up a yearbook letter written by a principal and corrected its many grammatical errors, causing a kerfluffle in town. Please leave comments with any examples you know of — with URLs, if possible. Thanks.
Tags: journalism, Weblogs
November 10th, 2005 at 5:18 pm
An oldie but a goodie I was involved in.
Athens, GA fails to give public notice that they are demolishing some historical train trestles, one of which is on the back of REM’s first record. The Athens community doesn’t even know. REM fansite finds out, floods the mayor with thousands of e-mails and raises the money to buy the trestle. Mainstream press picks up on it, more for the fact that it was a local community issue brought to light through a global online community.
http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,7195,00.html
Since then, the trestles are being rebuilt/refurbished for use as a bike trail.
November 10th, 2005 at 6:08 pm
The most recent one I’ve got is a blogger in NYC who blogged about getting mugged by her Fresh Direct delivery person:
http://nyc.metblogs.com/archives/2005/10/i_just_got_mugg.phtml
There are a ton of links to local coverage in Pakistan and New Orleans here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroblogging
Also, these Berlin metbloggers were the first to report on Berlin’s largest drink supplier being caught tax-evading.
http://berlin.metblogs.com/archives/2005/10/big_tax_bang_sh_1.phtml
November 10th, 2005 at 6:33 pm
Shalom Jeff,
Here in Cleveland we recently had a blog storm over the now-trounced mayor awarding a quarter-million contract to an outside company to design and maintain the city’s website. To follow two of the threads of the story see:
Luring Companies Into Town With City Contracts and Ron Copfer Challenges Cathy Panzica’s “Bullshit Diatribeâ€
Both posts ran on George Nemeth’s Brewed Fresh Daily.
Hope this helps.
B’shalom,
Jeff Hess
November 10th, 2005 at 6:42 pm
Is there a link for your initial example? I’d like to see that…
November 11th, 2005 at 1:20 pm
Jeff: Lisa Williams is full of real life stories of hyper local citizen blogging from her H20town in Watertown, MA. Many are quite interesting.
Her bio.
November 11th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
I know about a hyperlocal site that’s perfect for this article: Mine.
As the name implies, I cover the city of Peoria. I do original reporting and link aggregation of Peoria news media. There are some local politicians who can tell you about the effect blogs had on recent municipal elections. I also feed and encourage other local bloggers at a sister site I own called “Blog Peoria.”
Peoria Pundit gets more than 2,000 page views a day.
November 12th, 2005 at 12:12 pm
Of course I find my site Philly Future a great example, but for specifics:
1. Our live, onsite Live8 coverage was second to none: http://www.phillyfuture.org/live8
2. Our community interview with Dianah Neff, CTO of Philadelphia, about Wireless Philadelphia, was terrific.
3. Our growing interview section, which features bloggers, photographers, and musicians, highlights voices in our region that deserve mention.
4. We took part in, and helped promote a huge regional blog focus on Latoyia Figueroa - a pregnant missing woman that the press was ignoring during the Natalie Holloway coverage-fest. Richard Cranium at the All Spin Zone got it started and we rallied the Philadelphia blogosphere using blogads and more to action here. What eventually occured was the press started to come around and covered her situation.
November 14th, 2005 at 1:56 am
Olympia Washington has Olyblog.net
November 14th, 2005 at 5:15 pm
Hey Jeff
TGS, a relatively small CAT earthmoving machinery parts supplier based in Johannesburg, South Africa, runs a blog called Earth on the Move:
http://www.earthonthemove.blogspot.com/
A while back one of the employees posted an anonymous entry questioning the boss’s recent purchase of a Nissan convertible. See the permalink and ensuing conversations here…
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=13384504&postID=111926647969005383&isPopup=true