Some think the idea of the Times Dispatch developing neighborhhod blogs is lame and the end product will be fake ass :) (that phrase really cracked me up)! Let’s wait and see. One obvious thing Media General has for it is lots of paid staff (ok, shrinking a bit). Other newspapers have pulled off the blog thing pretty successfully (think NY Times Dealbook, Washington Post’s D.C. Sports Bog, two of my personal favorites). Yeah, yeah, the Dispatch ain’t no NYT. Â
DiscoverRichmond.com is actually a pretty decent resource for things like park guides. I believe the folks at the Dispatch are positioning DiscoverRichmond to be their answer to Richmond.com and, to some extent, Style (but wasn’t that supposed to be the Brick? It seems Brick is more like the TD’s answer to Wadi). If they want to go radical, DiscoverRichmond could be the new gateway to the newspaper itself a la the hamptonroads.com/Virginia Pilot model.  Basically, it would be a city guide/calendar fortified with news article from the print paper and these neighborhood focused micro blogs supported by the existing writing staff. It always perplexed me that Media General didn’t jump at the chance at buying Richmond.com when that company was up for sale. That is the right url for a gateway….Â
BTW, this would be my idea of the ultimate dream website:
- The Richmond.com url and aesthetic navigation structure
- Times Dispatch/AP Virginia local news mixed in with some Onion articles
- A really good crime beat reporter (is the Wire’s David Simon available?)
- Bacon’s Rebellion editorial page balanced with Richmond Indie Media
- Style Weekly’s cover story and their arts calendar
- Brick’s Chris Bopst music reviews
- A tongue in cheek gawker-like section (ie, Juan Conde eating at the Midlothian Spinnaker’s, Joel Bieber spotted at DMV lobby, etc)Â
- For restaurant articles, combine Style’s Side Dish, TD’s Table Talk, Richmond.com’s Eat Beat, and Brandon Eats
- Movie reviews from anyone but Neman
- Graphic design by RVAmag
- Craigslist classifieds
- The Wadi sex column written by the hot chick who owns Taboo
- Finally, a free weekly print companion that comes out on Thursday
….I’m sorry, I digressed….The de-centralized grassroots alternative being proposed by some local bloggers seems to be a great idea as long as the commitment is there. It would take a lot of endurance and focus to maintain a blog of that kind of magnitude…just look at all the abandoned blogs littering the net. There’s a better chance to compete against the well-funded corporate competition if all the “hoodblogs†combined at one rss aggregator site (active blogs can pick up the slack for sites that have slowed down….all blogs go through slow periods…)Â
If I were a betting man, I’d put my wager on the hoodblog underdogs. As this battle for middle Earth is being waged, I will maintain/update a list of all the new neighborhood blogs that’ll begin to pop up.