Walking the streets

Yesterday I stayed off the Internet as part of the anti-SOPA/PIPA protest and walked the streets of Rutland. I really should have brought a camera with me because what I saw was good art: the photographs would have mixed natural beauty, artificial beauty, ugliness, the shadows of the past and the hopes for the future. While walking Rutland and, in particular the Gut (the neighborhood that forms the southwestern part of the city. It's very old, with most of the construction dating back to the nineteenth century and was a mix of industries served by the railroad and the homes of people who worked in those industries), which has always been very working class, but became particularly run down in the second half of the 20th century. Now, my family has never lived down there, but I did go to school on Meadow Street, I had friends from the area and I'm sure my Dad knows plenty of people who live and work there, but the emotions I experienced while walking those streets really brought to life the central quandry of hyperlocal journalism: being too close to your sources.

The good journalist strives to be objective, to write about issues using the empirical data and letting interviewees spin it, but a hyperlocal journalist lives with, next to and around the sources and is personally affected by what he or she reports on. I suppose it's true of a lot of journalism, but the hyperlocalist isn't insulated the way someone who works for a newspaper is. I can't ask my editor if I'm being too biased in an article because I am my editor.