Local blogs matter, maybe more in some ways than national blogs (or at least the nth national blog to chime in on a subject) because the local media landscape is so barren in much of this country.

Most cities have one daily newspaper and a clutch of corporate-owned TV outlets, along with whatever alt-weeklies can carve out niches. Talk radio is horrible (we're lucky to have something local and smart around here; we're also fortunate that papers like the N&R have tried to become part of the web, rather than trying to own it themselves.)

Maybe it's because I've been banging this drum for so long, and sometimes arguing with people who didn't believe local blogging could make a difference, but I kind of rolled my eyes when Chris Bowers got to the part about local blogging in this post. Local blogs on the rise: ya think?

Local and regional blogs (and bloglike organisms) have been growing for years, and the momentum is building -- I find myself reading North Carolina blogs more and more, and getting more from them. The local sites in my lefthand blogroll and the NC sites to the right are staples of my media diet. And the same thing is happening across the country.

Some of the group-grope trends Bowers describes at a national level are happening at the regional/local scale, too -- one the real pioneers is from around here, and others are clearly on the way to big things. I'm all for it.

But I'm with Atrios --  the power of the internets does not lie only in building a new generation of high-traffic sites. Individual voices speaking to relatively small audiences can be powerful and useful things, and that may be especially true at the local and regional levels, where a few people can make a difference.

Note also that individual voices are important in realms beyond politics. In era of newspaper cutbacks and TV fluff, local bloggers are covering stuff that might otherwise go uncovered, adding to mainstream stories, allowing pros to tell stories that would never fit in print, and doing service journalism, too.

No place like home.

Comments

[TarGator]

Hear, Hear.

The Greensboro blogging community is truly exceptional. Just one caveat, with as many blogs as we now have, make sure that you are saying something different. One obvious way to do that is to be personal, but another is to focus like a laser on an issue or area of importance. Oh yeah, and when you have something on our great state's politics, post it on BlueNC.

[BrianR]

Thank you Ed for highlighting the importance of local blogs. Not matter where you live you're local. Its about time everyone on the planet start thinking about the local/global connection. Its a 21st century essential to think macro<->micro.

[Robert P.]

Imagine if every county had an Orange Politics.

[Brenda Bowers]

I am relatively new to blogging (Sept.'05) but I recognized very quickly how blogs could influence local politics and could be the most important means of communication in the future. People talking to people across town or around the world; think of that. It is awesome! And it is lethal. Criminals in government have no place to hide because their deeds will come out on someone’ s blog and the word will spread. Newspapers have always had their biases; it is only human. Bloggers have their biases, too but by reading and comparing one can generally arrive somewhere near the truth. The internet has given the man on the street a voice, and he is learning to use it and use it well.

[Speeker]

Well said! But how do we keep the blogosphere from getting too lopsided? Do places like technorati do enough to spread the wealth of web traffic? Or will readers keep concentrating more and more? What if we had reverse search engines, that gave us the LEAST popular blogs and sites that deal with a particular issue?