Local blogging

Rick at City IT emailed this morning about an editorial in the Herald-Times about increasing the paper’s blog presence. Of course, thanks to the H-T’s business model, no news is free news. This is the sum of what is available to me:

We stopped getting the local paper during my first year of grad school at Indiana University, trying to pare down our budget as much as possible. As a print subscriber, I could have gained access to the online version, but it was an inconvenience to do so even if the account was free. Now, the only way I can get news from the local paper is to have someone give me a second-hand copy or pick up a discarded one on the City bus. I’m thankful there are other options, like the IDS and Bloomington Alternative. The pay-per-read model is conceived by those who (a) are facing financial cutbacks in the brick-and-mortar world, and (b) don’t get the value of information is in its exchange, not proprietary knowledge. Those days are over.

The H-T’s interest in blogging is no surprise. Even though representatives from the paper didn’t attend, one of the outcomes of our most recent local unconference was the pursuit of a local blogosphere as a way to increase awareness of local authors and solidify the blogging community. After posting a few calls in online forums, my knowledge of local blogging has increased. There is still a long way to go to be able to root out blogs by and about Bloomingtonians.