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ChineseIf It Looks Like A Blog, Reads Like A Blog, Quacks Like A Blog…
What’s black, white, and red all over? The Source.
Today Metro announced the launch of its blog, er, “online news and features service” dubbed The Source. Helmed by ex-LA Times transportation reporter Steve Hymon and local transit blogger Fred Camino, The Source will be Metro’s foray into 21st century communications with daily postings on policy and funding issues, transit lifestyle stories, and updates on infrastructure projects presented in a candid and conversational manner uncommon for governmental agencies.
Wait… Fred Camino?
That’s right, yours truly has joined Mr. Hymon in the belly of the beast in an attempt to tear things up from the inside out. Just kidding. But I, along with Steve, have been hired on a part-time contract basis to write for The Source and hopefully bring an outside perspective and a sense of credibility to their grand experiment.
Steve, with his “years of professional journalism experience”, will act as editor and cover hard news stuff like policy, funding, Zev, and Measure R. I don’t even know what most of those words mean, which is why I’ll be using my “Blogger Sense™” to focus on transit lifestyle issues, much like I tried to do on MetroRiderLA. You can read my introductory post right here to find out what my plan is for The Source.
Why did I decide to do this? Well, for one I really enjoy blogging about the “Los Angeles Transit Oriented Lifestyle” and that fact that someone wanted to throw me some change to do it was pretty tempting. Of course, that change is taxpayer change which means I’m now your humble servant. But also, I really believe this is something Metro has needed for quite a while, and I thought I was the right person for the job with my experience running MetroRiderLA and building what I’d consider a fairly vibrant online community that somehow continued to thrive even after daily posting dropped off significantly.
My hope is that with Metro’s resources I can further the vision I had with this site to a potentially larger audience, and ideally make the concept of a transit oriented lifestyle in Los Angeles a more popular idea. I can already tell you that this will be more challenging than I initially thought, Metro is a huge bureaucracy and I’m a do-it-yourself type of guy. Having to go through convoluted channels to do stuff that would take me 2 seconds to do here is a bit daunting. In the end, I hope it’s worth it to spread this vision and maybe even knock some sense into Metro.
What will happen to MetroRiderLA? Well, obviously I haven’t been posting much anyway, and that’s likely not going to change, but Wad has said he’s sticking around and going to continue to post his wonderfully well written and astute stories, observations, and ride reports on the same irregular basis you guys have grown accustomed to. I’ll be staying behind the scenes, trying to keep the blog working technically, knocking away spam and hackers, and making sure the software is up-to-date. So keep MetroRider on your RSS feed, it’s not going anywhere it hasn’t been before.
Some people have noted the lack of comments on The Source. This was actually Steve’s idea and you can read his reasoning in his introductory post on The Source. Basically, comments can be a real time drain, especially with the potential legal issues Metro must consider, so we’ve decided to not accept them, for the time being at least. I might personally disagree, I think comments are what makes a blog, but I do understand the reasoning and like I said, I have little understanding of the workings of a large bureaucratic organization. Plus, when I see a 71 comment thread with 70 of the comments coming from two people arguing about personal rapid transit on a Streetsblog LA post that has nothing to do with PRT, I begin to really understand why The Source has decided to forgo comments.
So please, bookmark and subscribe to The Source, spread the word, and give Steve and I all the feedback you can, we really want to make this into something that is a great asset for Los Angeles.
Discussion
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
I forgot to mention in the post, I believe, ahem, the blog was, ahem, released a bit, ahem, too early and has a few, ahem, technical problems, like the fact that it takes, ahem, 20 seconds to load. Please bear with us. FML.
I’ll say. It shows undefined, server errors, slow load times left and right. Could it be the boom in traffic?
Glad to see the Steve Hymon is back into transit writing… I’ve missed him from the Times.
Unfortunate about the lack of comments. I was looking forward to trolling it
In any case, I hope you understand when some of us (or maybe just myself, who knows) display skepticism about what’s reported on the official Metro blog. With time, I hope that Hymon and yourself display your usual integrity and The Source becomes another great source of transportation news.
But so far it looks good, like the unflattering report on TAP. I can tell that initially this blog just isn’t a bunch of marketing bullshit.
Oh, skepticism is completely understandable, hell I’m skeptical myself.
But the fact is, Steve and I are there to try and keep the blog candid and transparent, which despite some of their initial reservations (most of the staff involved are old school PR types) this is what Metro wants with the blog. We know if it’s not credible, no one will read it and thus it serves no purpose. And while there are no comments, thesource@metro.net goes directly to Steve and I… you can send us comments, shit talk, suggest stories, things you think we are doing right/wrong, call us shills, etc. And like I said, the Metro folk are really trusting us on this, so if we tell them “our readers want this, and we think they are right” then it’s likely they’ll listen.
Congratulations, Fred!
Metro made a wonderful choice. I hope they will allow you to bring your wit and humor to your posts.
I’m so glad you are blogging again. It’s also great to see Steve back as well.
Congrats, Fred! I figured they would hire either you or Steve, but I didn’t think they would invest the resources for both of you. While I’m happy to see you back, this means I have to raise my game so that you all aren’t constantly scooping me.
PS – Who’s the Platinum Playboy now?
after reading that comment, I’m waiting for somebody to announce that they prefer paper news to these newfangled electronic ones XD
anyways, if you’re worried about somebody “hijacking” a thread, you need to put up some “gates” and allow moderated posts.
I initially recommended moderated comments, but I guess they felt they didn’t have the resources to find someone to do the moderating work.
[...] >> In case you missed it Metro’s now got a blog called The Source, written by Steve Hymon, previously writer of Bottleneck Blog for the L.A. Times, and Fred Camino of MetroRider LA, who blogged about his decision to join Metro’s blog team here. [...]