Glaser takes a closer look at cit-j sites

Mark Glaser at PBS' Media Shift has a piece reviewing how some local citizen-journalism sites are doing. He is kind enough to include some of my comments on Hartsville Today.

If you read between the lines of his and other pieces these days, the sense I come away with is that such sites have slowly but concretely ingrained themsleves into the fabric of a significant number of communities. The mad rush to set up cookie-cutter sites the likes of Backfence and YourHub has subsided, and there seems to be more of a realization that these sites are niche players -- valuable ones -- but niche players nonetheless that need their own identity and their own space to grow in their own way. (YourHub, for instance, apparently has been dropped by the Anderson, S.C., paper, which was one of the Scripps papers that earlier was promoting the add-on.)

All this is a good thing.