‘Cable news for your neighborhood’

BackFence’s Mark Potts on citizen journalism efforts such as BackFence.com:

It’s like cable news for your neighborhood. One thing that’s changed is the nature of the daily papers as the metro areas have gotten bigger. When the areas were smaller, the papers were a little more focused. You could get a lot of coverage. But now, for the [Washington] Post, as great a newspaper as it is, it’s got just too much ground to cover… You just can’t cover a metropolitan area of 4 or 5 million people with any kind of efficiency. Because of their cost structure, to truly cover these areas the way they need to be covered with their kind of journalism, the math doesn’t even work.