NYC Sentinel

The Midtown homepage for Neighborhoodr. Photo: Alexander Hotz

By Alexander Hotz

A black and white picture of the Guggenheim Museum’s exterior. A revised schedule for Second Avenue’s subway construction. A glowing review of Mad River, a popular bar at 82nd and Third.

The aforementioned items have little in common, but each can be found in the Upper East Side section of Neighborhoodr, a New York City blog network. Neighborhoodr (www.neighborhoodr.com) is a new collection of hyper-local blogs that relies on reader-generated content.

“You go there to see what’s happening in real time in certain neighborhoods,” explained Anthony DeRosa, one of Neighborhoodr’s co-founders. “We liked the idea of neighborhood Web sites but we wanted to do it in a different way by having the community sort of run the Web site.”

Hyper-local websites are nothing new to the Internet. Patch, The Examiner, Everyblock, Outside.in and Placeblogger are just a few sites that cater to local communities around the United States. In New York City, these sorts of sites also compete with a wide array of popular blogs such as New York Vegan, Bushwick BK and Clinton Hill Blog.

The sites’ content is almost always generated by their staff, similar to the way that material is provided by a community newspaper. Users may have the option to post their comments after an online article, but their participation ends there. Neighborhoodr is reinventing that “top down model,” DeRosa said.

At its essence, Neighborhoodr is a wiki — a Web site that can be edited and read by any number of people. Uploading content to the site is easy. Visitors simply select one of New York City’s 60 neighborhoods from a main page before uploading pictures, videos, links or text relevant to that area. No registration or creation of a username is required. Content can even be uploaded via email or iPhone.

The Neighborhoodr mainpage. Photo: Alexander Hotz

But unlike a traditional wiki such as Wikipedia, Neighborhoodr’s entries are tied together like blog posts rather than separated on individual pages. The result is a communal stream of consciousness that often manifests itself as an unpredictable hodgepodge of information.

A recent series of posts on the Midtown site included a picture of a street musician dressed as the Star Wars character Boba Fett; a Twitter post declaring that Michelle Obama had been spotted at Gramercy Tavern; and an ad for a “Save the Deli” event. Random or relevant, you decide.

Although much of Neighborhoodr’s content may seem arbitrary today, the long-term goal for DeRosa and co-founder Richard Blakeley is to create a Web site tied to the pulse of its community.

“In its present configuration, metro journalism–the New York Daily News, let’s say–can’t steadily inform us about our neighborhoods,” said New York University journalism professor and new-media guru Jay Rosen in an email.  “And weekly newspapers are mainly about the ads and listings. So that leaves a gap.”

According to Rosen, Neighborhoodr isn’t a substitute for journalism but it could be a source for up-to-the-minute information. “I want to know about every step in Washington Square Park’s renovation,” Rosen continued. “I am starved for good information about that.  If Neighborhoodr could meet such a need–a big ‘if’–that would be significant.”

While Neighborhoodr is largely user-driven, volunteer community moderators such as Sergio Hernandez monitor the site to prevent spamming and keep the content interesting.

“There’s definitely an editorial element to what we do, because we sort of pick and choose what we post or re-post or link to,” wrote Hernandez, the West Village and Midtown moderator, in an email. “But it’s not like we’re in there re-writing articles or flipping through our AP Stylebooks or anything like that.”

Neighborhoodr is barely a month old, so even the most popular neighborhoods receive only a couple hundred readers. To get the ball rolling, community moderators are tracking down content they hope will come to epitomize their sites.

“For me, at least, the tone differs according to which neighborhood I’m working on,” said Cassandra Seale, another community moderator who monitors the Lower East Side and Bedford-Stuyvesant pages. “For the Lower East Side someone may want to submit a cool photograph of graffiti they found at some cross street, while in Bed-Stuy someone may submit a YouTube video of Biggie Smalls.”

Neighborhoodr is run off of the micro-blogging platform Tumblr. About a month ago, after being pushed by Blakeley, Tumblr changed its format so that even non-members could quickly and easily post on a Tumblr page. Blakeley recognized the power of the crowds after he created This Is Why You’re Fat (www.thisiswhyyourefat.com), a popular satirical Website that relies on user-generated content. This Is Why You’re Fat has become an online sensation, attracting thousands of readers and even spawning a book deal.

Whether Neighborhoodr will reach that level of success remains to be seen. But thanks to Tumblr’s generous offer of free hosting, Blakeley and DeRosa are more concerned with building up a user base than finding funding. The site currently has no overhead other than the founders’ and community managers’ time. Even the cost of the servers is absorbed by Tumblr.

“I think a lot of neighborhoods in this city just aren’t covered very well to begin with,” said Hernandez. “The possibilities for a scalable news model like this are really endless.”