Watertown is located just west of Boston. It’s a town with just over 32,000 people, 4.2 square miles, and some of the best local blogs in the state.
One of the best local blogs around is Lisa Williams’ h2otown. Williams has not just taken blogging to a new level, she’s taken journalism to a whole different level.
Williams started her blog a couple of years ago and since then it has grown beyond belief. She reports on everything Watertown. She even records the council meetings on her tv and then uploads them to the web to post on her blog – at least the interesting portions of it anyway.
Nothing is too big or too small for h2otown. Williams will even take reader comments and use those as an item – such as the woman who keeps seeing the albino squirrels on her street. There’s also the pictures of houses in town that go all out with the Halloween decorations.
Although some may not like it, the blog is citizen journalism at its core.
Just for comparison, there’s the Wicked Local Watertown blog. Wicked Local is operated by giant GateHouse Media. The Wicked Local blog tries its best to compete with h2otown, but its difficult writing to fill up a town newspaper each week AND keeping up with a blog at the same time. The posts on the Wicked Local blog are more recaps or short follow ups to stories that appeared in the local paper, which isn’t a bad thing, but there’s h2otown to compete with.
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Hi Michael, this is Chris Helms, editor of the Watertown TAB and moderator of the Wicked Local Watertown blog. Thanks for your comments. Our relationship with H2otown is very interesting and overwhelmingly positive. Yes, there's competition. But it's also a symbiosis. Lisa likes to talk about there being "news" and then everything else that happens in the place where you live. And "news" is just a slice of it.
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