Monday, January 14, 2013

Local news scraper/occasional blog falls silent for months

We local observers who stick out the vagaries of online publishing (especially gratis blogging) know full well that it is a rather transient endeavor, a field-in-flux where efforts disappear as quickly as they emerge. Local, popular website Nashvillest, which aggregated local news and marketed deals for consumers daily for several years, appears to have fallen silent for the last 6 months. I do not know whether the project has been shuttered and shelved, and I could not find anything online to clarify the status of Nashvillest is at this point in time.

Given the push in pro journalism to emphasize "local coverage" (the quality of which is open to debate) especially via reporters' social media and to aggregate local coverage on news media sites, I'm not surprised that Nashvillest has ground to a halt. News corporations generally co-opt everything. We will see if the break is permanent if its founders, Morgan Levy and Christy Frink, ever make public comment.

Nashvillest played a positive role at trying times. Other times, they left something to be desired. One thing I will absolutely not miss about them if they have called it quits is their failure to acknowledge the community that I have blogged about for nearly a decade:


North Nashville neighborhoods did not exist at Nashvillest


I totally get that a lot of energy (and money) flows west-to-east in this city. But if the Nashvillest authors made an effort to list South Nashville, how could they logically fail to list North Nashville on their site? When news scrapers ignore news in certain neighborhoods, they render the happenings in those communities invisible. On the flip side, websites like Nashvillest prove to be irrelevant for North Nashville when they ignore us.

2 comments:

  1. So they missed North Nashville---and Madison, Inglewood, Goodlettsville, Antioch, the list goes on.
    This attitude, shown both by the govt and the media and "elites" that nothing is important beyond a mile or so of the Ryman is very aggravating.
    The only time Madison(a wonderful place to live) gets mentioned is when it's negative.
    E.g. There are two places that have live music each weekend in Madison. Does that EVER get a mention? It's not downtown so no one gives a frak.

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  2. I am quite confident it is not only the government, the elites, and the media that ignore Madison.

    In fact, I think a Venn diagram showing the people interested in Madison and the people living in Madison would be two circles neatly stacked on top of each other.

    Brian

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