WE WELCOME YOUR COMMENTS BELOW
DeKalb bloggers lure new readers
by Jonathan Cribbs
jonathan@dekalbchamp.com
You could say John Heneghan’s city council campaign began when he started Heneghan’s Dunwoody Blog. The site, hosted on Blogger, launched in 2005 with the headline: “DHA – Dunwoody Mom and Dad Crowned.” It was a simple piece of community news lifted from The Dunwoody Crier, the local paper.
Cut to March 2009. Heneghan sits on the City of Dunwoody’s newly created city council, representing Post 6. He won more than 4,000 votes, more than 60 percent of the vote in the city’s first elections in September. And he did it bypassing a good number of tried-and-true campaigning methods, including campaign signs and advertising.
He credits his blog.
“I wanted to make sure my neighborhood got efficient government services,” he said. “When I have the ability to make a difference, I have a responsibility to do so.”
Heneghan is one of a several bloggers across DeKalb County who earned a following and recognition over the last year as readers embrace personal, independent, hyper-local coverage.
And the “hyper-local” part can’t be stressed enough. Take, for instance, another very popular, local blog, inDECATUR, run by Decatur resident Dave Kell. One item on Sunday was headlined “Patio dining in Decatur.” The news? Two photos showing diners on outdoor patios at Parker on Ponce and Leon’s restaurants in downtown Decatur.
“Decatur diners enjoyed patio dining Saturday and much of Sunday following days of rain,” the post read. “Temps in the low 70s and virtually no bugs this early in the year made conditions ideal.”
It’s the sort of item that would bore newspaper editors and television station producers used to a daily slate of meaty local government and police coverage. But it’s more of what locals, particularly Decaturites, seek, Kell said. Local city blogs like inDECATUR not only report the news – even if it’s been reported by someone else – but they’re responsible for capturing a city’s culture in ways other media cannot, he said.
inDECATUR frequently features weather shots and funny photos, and on Monday the blog welcomed a new resident, Heather Knight, to Decatur who had moved from Asheville, N.C., and brought her clay studio with her.
“She made the comment that Decatur people seem more friendly than people in Asheville,” Kell said. “That’s a little bit of the culture. I thought that was worth mentioning.”
Nick, a 29-year-old Decatur resident, runs the popular blog, Decatur Metro. He declined to reveal his last name because he said he prefers to remain anonymous. But the blog has become required reading for anyone interested in knowing what’s going on in the city on a given day.
When local restaurateur Rob Atherholt retook control of Thumbs Up Diner in downtown Decatur last October, Decatur Metro became a frequent site for discussion among residents and disgruntled waitresses who had worked at the restaurant when it was called Crescent Moon.
“Yes, we are on strike!” commenter Looney Mooney wrote on the blog Sept. 7. “Anybody who is working there now, isn’t original staff that has gone through the heck they put us through.” Other waitresses and insiders commented on Crescent Moon’s demise.
“These, like, hyper-local sites can really only exist in areas where there’s already a sense of community on the ground in real life,” Nick said. “Because if someone’s going to run a Web site or a blog for free… there has to be a sense of community already there.”
Decatur Metro gets more than 3,000 hits per day and more than 1,000 unique visitors, Nick said. inDECATUR gets about half that, Kell said. Both were named the two best blogs in the metro area by Atlanta magazine last year. “inDECATUR and Decatur Metro’s perspectives on this DeKalb burg may differ slightly… but what these two blogs offer does not: copious posts on anything and everything Decatur,” the magazine wrote.
Decatur school system officials also said they monitor what’s said on local blogs, including Decatur Metro, to see what parents think about their current reorganization plans.
But Nick and Kell said they both started a blog to create a place for residents to participate in the newsgathering process, and it’s that, in part, that seems to draw readers to both sites.
“They have a bit more personality to them,” Kell said. “It’s a little more like having a conversation. They’re more specialized. … We didn’t used to have all these ways to communicate on a small scale, and technology has enabled it.”
Kell said he has bigger plans for inDECATUR, including a larger site with more writers and possibly paid advertising, though he doesn’t have a hard-and-fast game plan in place, he said. Heneghan now uses his blog to post public documents he reads and uses as a councilman.
He also posts local news items and chronicles the rise of Dunwoody, which incorporated last year. He said he gets about 1,000 hits a day on his site, and about 250 people get an e-mail each day full of coverage from his blog. It’s still the best way to reach constituents, he said.
“I’m an open book,” he said. “Somebody laughed and said, ‘Well, we know how you’re going to vote; you blogged on that subject three times.’”
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