The one-time “undisputed king of Tumblr” and member of NBC New York’s 20 to Follow Anthony De Rosa, founder of blog SoupSoup, was frustrated by the content on local news sites, so he and friend Richard Blakeley decided to do something about it. De Rosa spoke with Chris O’Shea of sister blog FishbowlNY about his latest initiative, Neighborhoodr.
De Rosa told FishbowlNY:
(Blakeley’s) idea was to crowd-source the content from any neighborhood by making it user-submitted. He designed the look of the site, and I put together the user interface and coding. We originally launched with 40 or so neighborhoods in New York City, which eventually grew to 60 because of demand.
Patch is bleeding money. They think that if you spend enough, you can breathe life into a long-dead top-down newspaper model. Even with the amount of money they’re spending, the people writing for them can’t live off that small a stipend. We spread the work out amongst the entire community, and the updates are frictionless. Anyone can submit content, and there’s a ton of content a click away for us to share. It allows us to get all the way down to the neighborhood level in even the smallest town without having to reinvent the wheel.
For the complete story, please see FishbowlNY.
