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February 23, 2007
No News is Good News in Watertown
"So, you're in Watertown - is there any news there?""No. If there were, I'd move."
This is Lisa Williams recounting a conversation she had with someone during her talk about placeblogging. Lisa runs H2Otown, the successful community blog for Watertown, MA. Lisa is talking about local news and their reticence to work with local bloggers to cover what's going on in a community. Media outlets get nervous with terms like "citizen journalism," but they don't realized there are groups of bloggers in communities who aren't trying to be journalists, per se, but are still trying to create an online place where residents can come together and talk about their community: things that need to be fixed, road conditions, events and the like. Unless there's breaking news in these communities, the media ignores them, but that doesn't mean there isn't lots of important things to talk about it. As Lisa puts it, "Why is it possible to know more about what's going on in Indonesia than the East End?" As soon as you step out of the metro area of a given city, media coverage just evaporates. -andy
Posted by acarvin at February 23, 2007 11:37 AM
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