The news, block by block

I heard from several readers about their neighborhood publications when I wrote about the online Orting News last week.

Some are business ventures. Others grew out of neighborhood activism. Nearly all are in their infancy.

Andrew Taylor, who lives between Capitol Hill and the Central Area, really likes the Central District News.

"It's provoking polite and quite frank discussions of race and gentrification," among other topics, he said.

The CD News is Scott Durham's creation, and he and his brother Matt do most of the work.

Durham was a techie, most recently with Amazon, but he left in January 2007 to develop a publishing product called Instant Journalist, which he launched in November.

The CD News is part test project for the software and part neighborhood service.

Neighborhood newspapers and newsletters have been around for a long time, but they are often different creatures online. There's real-time interaction for one thing, and more opportunity for people to write their own news.

Big publications are incorporating some of those aspects of the Web as well. This year The Seattle Times, for instance, invited people to write about their caucus experiences as they were happening.

But some news makes waves for only a few blocks. That's what Durham and his peers want to capture.

Taylor, the reader who praised the Central District News, is a blogger himself. He first turned to the Web to address a neighborhood problem.

"I live near Deano's bar; decades ago I set up a neighborhood Web site just to keep up with what was happening there."

The business was known as a hangout for drug dealing. Local media wrote about the situation, but neighbors needed another way to trade information and to organize themselves to press for some solution to the problem.

The Web site evolved into a blog a couple of years ago, but Taylor, who is chair of the Miller Park Neighborhood Association, says, "in all honesty, now that Deano's bar has closed, there is very little for us to concern ourselves with."

I'm sure he'll find something else.

The guy who set up Taylor's blog, Justin Carder, runs Capitol Hill Seattle, a news site of his own, which describes its territory as "the fancy pants part of Capitol Hill."

Several people who run Seattle neighborhood blogs, Web sites, and online newspapers are getting together this week to compare notes about their successes and challenges.

They're trying to understand their niche in the media world better, and so am I.

They're feeling out their relationships with each other and with more traditional media.

These days how we connect as individuals and groups is in constant and rapid flux.

There's a constant proliferation of new ways to communicate and create communities around shared interests.

I think the variety is great as long as we maintain some common points of reference, like good ol' daily newspapers.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.

The original version of this column, published May 12, 2008, misspelled Justin Carder's name.