Nearly eight years ago UrbanCincy came to life. The original purpose was to shine a more positive light on the things happening in our city. Over time that vision has been refined as conditions have changed locally.
Instead of focusing squarely on Downtown and Over-the-Rhine, UrbanCincy now covers urbanist news city-wide and has branched out into surrounding urban communities like Hamilton and Middletown.
Over these years many blogs have come and gone, and the local media landscape has continued to evolve. What I believe has made UrbanCincy successful over the years is our great team of contributors that have incredible knowledge about the topics on which they report.
As commented by CityBeat staff in the 2014 Best of Cincinnati awards, “UrbanCincy proved a great resource for local news in the past year, with storytelling charts and in-depth reporting shining light on issues that otherwise go ignored in local media. Its transit and infrastructure experts write with depth on issues difficult for non-beat writers to regularly cover. The best part is UrbanCincy provides all its content for free on its slick website, showing once again that good reporting doesn’t need paywalls.”
By the way, you can go in and vote for us now in this year’s Best of Cincinnati awards. We are nominated for Best Blog, Best Twitter Feed and Best Website in the Public Eye section.
This focus and expertise has firmly aligned UrbanCincy with the mission of Streetsblog. Naturally, we have been a member of the Streetsblog Network for many years and has championed the organization and worked toward its growth. That is why we are so proud to celebrate the launch of Streetsblog Ohio.
This has been something we at UrbanCincy have been coordinating with Streetsblog Network over the past several years. In addition to the new Ohio site, Streetsblog also launched regional sites in Texas, St. Louis and the Southeast last Friday.
“These sites run on a different model than our other city-based Streetsblogs with full-time staff,” explained Ben Fried, Editor-in-Chief at Streetsblog. “Each Streetsblog affiliate syndicates material from several blogs in its region and runs a daily dose of headlines to satisfy the universal craving for morning news.”
Of course, we at UrbanCincy are not doing this alone. While we are producing the daily news roundup for Ohio, we are joined by five other sites – GreenCityBlueLake, Rustwire, Columbus Underground, Transit Columbus and Notes from the Underground – in sourcing content for Streetsblog Ohio.
This is an innovative new approach to news production in the 21st century and we are proud to say that Cincinnati is not just passively involved, but is an active leader in the movement.
“For readers, we hope these sites will unearth stories that might have been overlooked before,” Fried noted. “So much good stuff comes over the wire of the Streetsblog Network, which now collects feeds from more than 400 member blogs, we just can’t highlight all of it. The new format should bring more of this reporting and commentary to the surface for our audience.”
We are excited about the future as our eighth anniversary this approaches this May. UrbanCincy continues to develop new partnerships and will be unveiling several more exciting changes in the months to come. Thanks for reading.