“Roosiehood Blog on hiatus,” reads the headline of the last post on the Roosevelt neighborhood blog, posted in September. “Sadly, we no longer have the time or resources to maintain [the site].” On My Green Lake, a good-bye letter from publisher Amy Duncan, posted last May, reads, “The time has come for me to move on to other projects.” Then there are some without good-bye letters: The most recent post on First Hill Seattle is from October. My Wallingford: mid-December. U District Daily: last June.
Just a few years ago, it seemed like new neighborhood blogs were popping up every day. Now, not only are there fewer blogs, but the ones that survive seem to have less content. What happened?
In 2008 and 2009, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer crowed about “hyperlocal” blogs “taking over” and “blossoming”; the Seattle Times started a partnership with neighborhood blogs as “an interactive journalism project,” sharing resources with the neighborhood sites and then linking to their coverage. Particularly after the P-I stopped its presses and went online-only—and newspapers around the country began to shrink as the publishing industry shifted—neighborhood blogs were seen as a savior for the city’s journalism.
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