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Some of the TBD people have been talking about David Rothman’s suggestions for their business today. I found the post interesting, not just because of the TBD angle, but because of what it seems to say about Rothman’s understanding about the local blog scene. 

Rothman suggests that TBD needs to cultivate bloggers into “steady providers of compre­hensive neighborhood coverage,” after noting that the local bloggers affiliating with TBD seem to have the following formula: “take a certain geographical area and filter it through the bloggers’ passion for sports, cooking, nightlife or whatever.”

But expecting coverage that is more comprehensive than the blogger’s personal passion completely misses what it is that makes these blogs interesting for TBD to partner with.

Here’s the thing. Local bloggers do this for fun. We work whole days at whatever our jobs are, and then we come home and write our blogs in the evenings, on weekends, on our lunch breaks. We spend incredible amounts of time on them. The only way that’s sustainable over any period of time is that we’re writing about the stuff we enjoy sharing with others. That’s why there are so many sports and food blogs on TBD’s roster. It’s not that it’s by any particular demographic aim, it’s that those are the things people want to write about in their free time. 

At We Love DC, we’ve wanted to enhance our local politics coverage for a long time, but realized long ago (before we were We Love DC, in fact), that trying to assign that topic to someone who isn’t personally that interested in writing about it is a losing proposition when you’ve got an all-volunteer staff. Far better to find someone who actually enjoys writing about local politics and set that person loose. (Which is why we were so ecstatic when Dave Stroup came on.)

So you end up with a lot of food and sports writing because that’s expertise people cultivate for fun. It’s not that there could never be a really great local education policy blogger; it’s that considerably fewer people find that engaging enough to do in their spare time. The people who are really passionate about it tend to work in that field as their day job and would find spare-time blogging about the topic to be a problem for their career. In fact, one of our staff works for DCPS and has been explicitly forbidden from blogging on the topic. So the blogs you’re left with in that case are frequently run by think-tanks or other organizations, which make them less eligible for a relationship like TBD’s blog affiliates have.

If you’re building a local blog network and you want really great education coverage, you either have to convince someone to do it who doesn’t already love it enough that they were doing it anyway, or you have to convince someone who does love it to stop being afraid of losing their job over it. It’s a recipe for failure either way. Or, you know, you could get your reporters that you hired to do it for you, which seems far more workable to me.

But what do I know? I’m just a hobbyist.

(My big suggestion for TBD? Call me back to close the loop on that meeting we had a month ago. ;) )