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A look at local web happenings in Tacoma, Pierce County and South Puget Sound
Thursday, September 27th, 2007
Posted by Mark Briggs @ 11:39:43 am

Walter Neary was elected to the city council in Lakewood in 2004. He's also contributed news articles and columns to local newspapers for more than a decade, and produced his own email newsletter, so it makes perfect sense that he would author an informative blog (called Neary-Sighted).

Neary began sending out email bulletins to people in 2003 when he was running for city council. He was the editor of The Lakewood Journal back in the mid-1990s. I asked him about his experience with the blog. Like a lot of bloggers, he found gaps in the flow of information that weren't being filled by the current news publications available. Here's his take:

Because Lakewood doesn't have a weekly print paper, it is much harder for people in Lakewood to know what is going on. It drives me crazy, and more importantly, frustrates me for every reason that I became a reporter, that every week five or six great weekly newspaper stories of great significance go by in Lakewood without being written. People in Gig Harbor, in Puyallup, in Federal Way all know vastly more about what is going on at the very detailed level in their cities than the people of Lakewood. I hate that.

Neary noted that Lakewood's e-paper, The Suburban Times, is "a valiant and useful effort to break through the information wall as well." But the lack of a traditional weekly newspaper focusing on the hyperlocal issues of the Lakewood community leaves Neary, and presumably his blog's readers, wanting for more.

If you fall in that category, check him out.

Categories: Local Webosphere, Online journalism 1 comment

COMMENTS:

wtneary @ 12:46 - Thursday, September 27th, 2007 Email
http://www.walterneary.net/blogger.html
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Mark. I wish more elected officials wrote more about their communities.

You are being properly modest since you work at The News Trib, but I do want to make sure people know we also appreciate the TNT. Today's story about lake access is a good example of the good that the daily paper can do by providing a lot of context about a local event. But a bit of that is luck for Lakewood, because during my time on the council, Lakewood was assigned reporters Angie Leventis and now Rob Tucker. They're both good reporters who can pick up on nuances and context, the latter of which is what is often missing in newspaper stories. And their stories are fair to the sides, which is always a huge challenge when a paper only has time and resources to write one or two stories about a topic. Trying to capture eternal truth in 15-17 column inches is, when you think about it, a terrifying challenge.

What I'm bemoaning is the lack of, as you put it, 'hyperlocal' depth that you get at, say, http://www.gateline.com/
People who live in the 'big city' and are unfamiliar with weekly community papers can check out that link, or http://www.fedwaymirror.com/ , to see what I mean.

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