Seattle Blog Project Breaks New Ground
TBD’s Community Network has, justly, gotten a lot of digital ink for its vast regional blogger network, launched with the site itself. Within the last year, though we’ve seen local blog network organization in Miami, Charlotte, Sacramento and Seattle, all through the dailies in town. They are all works-in-progress, figuring out workable community relationships, ad networks and technologies.
This week, we see a notable project, harnessing the power of a local network to do — journalism.
With the deep recession making homelessness a widespread and enduring phenomenon, the Seattle Times, worked with seven local blogs (West Seattle Blog http://westseattleblog.com/blog/, Beacon Hill Blog http://beaconhill.seattle.wa.us, My Edmonds News http://myedmondsnews.com/, Seattle Local Health Guide http://localhealthguideonline.com/, Rainier Valley Post http://www.rainiervalleypost.com/, Mercer Island – Surrounded By Water http://mercerislandblogger.wordpress.com/ and Aurora | Seattle http://www.auroraseattle.com/).
The notion: to put a more intimate face on the problem. Take a look the project of 10 stories, 6 videos and more than 75 photographs, “Invisible Families: The Homeless You Don’t See” and you do get a different kind of appreciation of the issue. The blogs’ postings vary in journalistic quality, and add a grassrootsy dimension to metro paper coverage. A great model for others to test.