It's sort of ironic that residents of Richmond are using technology to build on a rich past, but that's exactly what the burgeoning Richmond weblog community has been doing.
Richmond was touted back in April for being overly developed for its age group by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which studied the community weblog penetration of 15 cities across the country:
Richmond, Virginia, was the most developed community of citizen journalism sites in the sample. Richmond has 16 citizen journalism sites, 10 of which were citizen neighborhood news sites, two were neighborhood blog sites, two were blog sites that addressed the Richmond area, one was a news aggregator for Richmond, and one was a blog aggregation site. Of particular interest are the neighborhood sites...
Most of those sites trace their origins back to an angry burst of idealistic energy emerging from Church Hill during the winter of 2007. Within a year of John Murden's call for more community weblogs, there were not only more than a dozen churning out hyperlocal news -- there was a community weblog aggregator that pulled all of that content together to create a broader community news site.
But the history of citizen-fueled media in Richmond didn't start with the Internet.
And while it probably didn't start with the launch of the Richmond Mercury in 1972 (the weekly launched the careers of a host of writers and artists, including Lynn Darling, Harry Stein, Frank Rich, Garrett Epps, Glenn Frankel, Peter Galassi and Bill Nelson), that's where my second-hand memory of it starts. In the span of two decades -- the 1980s and 1990s -- Richmond saw the launch of Throttle, Circuit, Caffeine, Punchline, the Richmond Music Journal, the Richmond State, Style Weekly, Richmond Magazine and the Richmond Free Press (most can be perused the old-fashioned way at the VCU Library). Rest assured I missed a few.
Richmond has always been a bit crazy for independent publishing. It's just migrated to the Internet.
Migrated with a passion, apparently.
Over at Bacon's Rebellion, Jim Bacon suggests that technology and a passion for the community are behind the Richmond weblog boom. The running dialog in the comments section of his post gives other, more entertaining reasons -- and delves into a bit of dreaming about the future of media in the region.
Richmond.com recently noted the craze in a two-part series (part one being utterly devoid of meaningful content, and part two actually doing a good job of mapping out some of the current state of Richmond's online network). Writer Stephanie Brummell took her own stab at deciphering Richmond's flourishing culture of quasi-journalism:
For starters, look at our history.
"Richmond is fertile ground for publishing," said Terry Rea, creator of SLANTblog and the Fan District Hub. "It's been a printing center for over 100 years…and has become an ad agency town. I would say VCU has worked into that mix quite a bit as well."
Look at our geography.
"It comes down, I think, to the fact that Richmond has these great, old neighborhoods," said John Murden, creator of one of Richmond's first community sites, the Church Hill People's News. "Church Hill is distinct from Jackson Ward and is distinct from the Fan and Oregon Hill, and so we have all these little areas that were well served by community newsletters in the past – it just goes back to the neighborhoods."
And look at our people.
"We're a good size [city], but we're small enough to where, I know who runs the community blogs," said Ross Catrow, creator of RVABlogs and RVANews. "We have a great confluence of the right people – it seems the most active people are also prolific bloggers."
Bingo.
Links:
- John Murden's original call-to-action about community weblogs in Richmond (January 2007)
- Buttermilk & Molasses' coverage of Murden's initial spark (January 2007)
- Project for Excellence in Journalism report on citizen media (PDF document)
- Richmond.com two-part series on Richmond's weblog mania (Part One and Part Two)
- RVANews, the community weblog aggregator and creator of original news and commentary
- VCU Cabell Library Special Collections and Archives
- Bacon's Rebellion on Richmond's weblog reputation
