'New York Times' Invades (My) Home Turf

By: Joe Strupp (Commentary) Yet again, a big newspaper industry story hits home.

Months ago when The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. announced its plans for major cutbacks, I lamented the staffing losses in several columns recalling my days growing up as a Star-Ledger paper boy and longtime sports section reader.

Now it?s the New York Times. The "gray lady" this week chose to launch a pair of local community blogs, and decided to put one right in my backyard -- Maplewood, N.J. I broke the news here myself last week.

"The Local," which is actually posting items for our (my wife and two kids) community and neighboring towns South Orange and Millburn, makes clear it is not trying to replace the suburban news coverage the Times has pulled back on in recent years.

The New Jersey site -- and a sister blog in Brooklyn -- offer a mix of news, such as a school board candidate update, with features ranging from coping with the recent snow storm here to the shutdown of a local barber shop.

Like most community blogs, it is not covering the waterfront by any means. But it is a space for daily updates on most anything of interest -- provided in many cases by local, unpaid residents. It will be interesting to see how it develops and judge the credibility of the community "journalists."

The site's space, at www.nytimes.com/maplewood, includes room for children's artwork, comments and photos. It even will have a regular cartoon captioning contest featuring, as the site puts it, "Phil Chen, a cartoonist and king of quirk who lives in Maplewood."

An author's blurb, with photo (just like at the main Times site) for one contributor reads: "Hilding Lindquist, 'the old man,' writes about aging, ageism and end of life issues, all of which he believes are better understood by experience."

For Maplewood, this is just part of a recent online explosion. Our township is unusual in that it has a long list of media types - from TV Guide "Cheers and Jeers" columnist Bruce Fretts to Times columnist Dan Barry -- but always had limited local news coverage.

For years, we had only a local chatboard type of site, Maplewood Online, which offered space for ongoing discussions and diatribes, but no news coverage. Then, in just the past two months, three sites came aboard.

Full disclosure: My blog was one of them. Fed up with what little real breaking news we get from our local weekly paper, The News Record, I launched maplewoodian.com, where I post what I want in news and opinion on nights and weekends.

An eight-year resident, father of two and angry property tax payer, I had been wanting to do it for years. The final straw came when our former mayor, Ken Pettis, resigned in late December and it was not covered, not even by the Star-Ledger which claims to cover Essex County, the state's most populous county.

Weeks later, something called Patch.com hit the area Web scene, with three full-time reporters covering each of the same towns "The Local" is after. They are funded by a national group with a few similar sites in other states, and are posting stories and photos in a similar mix, but with less of a blog look and more of a news site.

So, in the span of two months, our little 23,000-population township has expanded from one non-news site to four mixing news and opinion.

To show the small town element of things, Tina Kelley, the Times scribe running the Maplewood/South Orange/Millburn site, lives just blocks from me. Our daughters are in the same second-grade class and our sons attend the same pre-school.

A bit odd to be running in to each other at school fundraisers and backyard gatherings, then battling it out for scoops online. Sometimes a play date drop-off can turn into our own little McLaughlin Group.

To be fair, my little site is not and does not attempt to post at their level. I am more of a ranting and raving resident, as anyone who reads columns here knows.

Still, this mix of bloggish news is a big change for our little township. Lord knows the five-person Township Committee is not used to such multiple press outlet interest. Just a few months ago, Mayor Vic De Luca had only the weekly paper to contend with, and the spate of name-calling residents on Maplewood Online.

Nowadays, he may well get more press inquiries some days than Michael Bloomberg.

And while Bloomberg contends with mundane things like crime rates, subway fares and big city high school test scores, our mayor has to handle real issues: whether to install parking meters downtown and where to run the farmer's market.