If you’re reading this, consider yourself a pioneer. You’re looking at what I believe to be the first internet-only, hyperlocal news venture focused exclusively on Arlington County, Va. And you’re here before anybody has so much as linked to it.
This site is really an experiment. It’s first an experiment to see if people who live and/or work in Arlington — particularly younger people — care enough about what happens in their community to visit a site like this on a regular basis. If that experiment is successful, we will then see if we can provide enough advertising value to local businesses to pay our contributors and sustain our operations.
In the coming weeks, you can expect to find on this site the kind of stories you’d typically get from a local TV news broadcast: news, weather, traffic, and the occasional feature. You’ll also find restaurant reviews, community events, and other things to do around town. The pace of posting will start off slow at first, but will pick up as we add contributors and establish connections with newsmakers in the community.
This site is currently just two people, an editor and a restaurant reviewer. And the restaurant reviewer only agreed to participate if her friend (the editor) paid for the meals. So that’s where we right now, and why I’m deeming this a “beta” version of what I hope will one day be a web site that not only delivers compelling, original content, but also fosters a greater sense of community in the place we’ve chosen to call home.
In order for that vision to succeed, however, we need you to help out. Contact us and tell us how we can improve. Go to the comments section and tell us when we’ve screwed up. Let us know about anything that might make a good story. If you want, you can even write the story, maybe even become a regular contributor. This site is not about the person who’s running it (the use of the word “I” will be strongly discouraged from here on out), it’s about the community of people who will be writing it, recording it, reading it, watching it, and commenting on it.
Wish us (all 210,000 of us) luck.