When you highlight a community website, it's a good idea to check and make sure that it does actually have a community involved with it.

Case in point: Dan Gillmour heaped praise upon GoSkokie.com [alternate link] as a great example of "hyperlocal online journalism". As The Register UK points out, as of Gillmour's blog entry there hadn't been a posting in three weeks.

He'd have been better served to note a site I mentioned in a while back in a comment on "Open Source Journalism", iBrattleboro. They're active, and they use the site for real community news. Of course, we have no idea how much of iBrattleboro's news might be the product of one feverishly detail-oriented brain, but the point remains that it could actually be useful to someone, where GoSkokie won't be. It clearly has no critical mass. (That Gillmour could cite this as a 'done-right' example without it having critical mass is pretty strange -- that should be the most obvious requirement for a successful community site.)

To me, the key and obvious difference between these two efforts is that the one that has traffic and posting activity was actually created by real, bona fide members of the community -- not by students at a journalism school working from a grand plan [1.5MB pdf]. At risk of seeming anti-intellectual: If you're not from there, it's incumbent upon you to explain why the locals should give a damn what you think.

Addendum: Dan Gillmour pointed out that he's featured iBrattleboro before; now that I think about it, he may have been where I heard of it...I'd say my memory isn't what it used to be, but I fear it never was.