And another rant about the Newsweek entrepreneurial journalism piece

Tracy Record at WestSeattleBlog.com gave me permission to post her rant about the Newsweek piece in full. In WSB's forum section, she was responding to a question from a community member who wanted Tracy's take on the Newsweek article.

I wrote a comment on that story two days ago - then when Newsweek's site required registration for the comment to post (which the site did NOT disclose BEFORE the "submit" button was hit), I scrapped it. I don't believe in registration for commenting (which is why you don't have to register to comment on our main page).

If I can recall some of what I thought immediately after reading it: It's unfortunate (a) that they focused on the East Coast. (b) It's unfortunate that they chose to focus on someone who is working for a templatized, cookie-cutter, corporate site (Patch), rather than a true independent, community-collaborative, bootstrapped site like ours and hundreds of others - even if they were going to stick to New Jersey, for example, they should have looked at Baristanet
http://baristanet.com
which is the grandma of 'em all, in what we do for a living.

Here's the real story in local online news (it's not blogging, it's reporting): A site inspired by ours, MyBallard.com, won A NATIONAL JOURNALISM AWARD last Saturday night. I was so excited for them that I screamed while watching the live feed from the event in California where they picked it up.

It's the award I mentioned here months ago ... the first "community collaboration" award given by the Online News Association. We never took the time to apply for it. Cory and Kate did. And they won!

The other two finalists: The Los Angeles Times and Miami Herald. Take a look at the screen grab I sent to Twitter:
http://twitpic.com/k749h

That is HUGE for our business. Independent neighborhood news has arrived. But not because of the efforts of Patrick and me, or Cory and Kate in Ballard - because of the true community collaboration, and that means you guys.

(We are partners with Cory and Kate in a couple endeavors, by the way - theirs is among the sites that along with WSB are part of the experimental year-long journalistic collaboration with the Seattle Times announced a month ago - I'm going to post a progress report on that one of these days - and we also have formed an advertising network with them to deal more efficiently with some of the mutual multineighborhood businesses and concerns that are out there - funny how much Ballard and West Seattle have in common.)

If you've ever wanted to be part of a revolution - a good one - guess what, just by being here, you are. And while you probably wouldn't know unless you follow the new-media chitchat, since we don't discuss it much here, WSB and other successful services are watched closely and discussed on a regional and often national basis. I get invited to speak on panels (which is CRAZY!) and at conferences (got another one coming up this Saturday at Seattle U) because the news world is changing and everyone's looking for "OK, if the huge old institutions are falling apart, what IS working?"

This type of news service isn't the be-all and end-all solution - but it's PART of the solution. And therefore you are too - whether you're offering information, asking a question, helping each other, sending a Crime Watch report, a photo or ... "just" reading.

But I digress! Thanks again. Sorry to ramble, ADD.