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Remember when hyperlocal blogs were the future of news? Well, although The New York Times ended their partnership with New York University’s hyperlocal East Village blog after two and a half years, New York magazine is picking up the slack—and changing the name to something catchier, reports Nieman Lab’s Adrienne LaFrance.
Later this spring, the blog will relaunch under New York’s umbrella as Bedford + Bowery, and, as the new name suggests, will take the L train to cover Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick, as well as the East Village and the Lower East Side. So basically, they will cover the intersection of New York mag readers and NYU students.
“The Times decided it didn’t want to do these locals anymore and told us a while ago that they were going to withdraw from our arrangement, which they of course have a total right to do,” NYU professor Jay Rosen, who helped launch the blog in 2010, told Nieman Lab. “And we had to ask ourselves if we wanted to publish it ourselves, or declare victory and fold, or look for another partner.”
And what a partner they found!
“We’ll still be covering street-level stories that wouldn’t be reported otherwise but, in the New York magazine tradition, we’ll also be taking more of a big-picture look at trends and tectonic shifts across all of these neighborhoods and beyond — something I think students who are concentrating in magazine writing will appreciate,” Daniel Maurer, The Local’s editor and cofounder of NY Mag’s Grub Street, said in an email to Nieman Labs.
After all, probably the most useful skill that aspiring magazine writers can learn is how to take something that their friends in Brooklyn do and turn it into a trend piece.
