Local news blogging pioneer Brittney Gilbert has announced she is taking a gig at KPIX in San Francisco. Just a couple of months after leaving WKRN in Nashville amid controversy over a post she made at Nashville is Talking, Brittney finds herself in a similar lead-blogger role, this time in San Francisco. Here is some of Brittney’s announcement, from her blog Sparkwood & 21:
I’ll be working from within the newsroom Monday through Friday combing through all the blogs updated daily in the Bay Area, highlighting posts I find funny or provocative or insightful or informative. There will also be an automatic aggregator. Many of you may be familiar with the concept. If you are wondering why I said I wasn’t cut out for moderating a community blog site, only to take this job 8 weeks later, you likely aren’t the only one… luckily, I learned from my very public mistakes made at NiT, and I’ve taken them to heart. This new venture will be less about me. I’m not that interesting anyway. What I mean to say, though, is that I will put less of myself “out there†and concentrate more on building a vibrant blogging community in what is already one of the most wired places on earth.
Brittney was the first (as near as we can tell) blogger to be hired by a local newsroom for the purposes of blogging. We’re happy to see more stations opening up to the aggregator model, which is starting to take off now after a couple of years of preaching. Congrats to Brittney on the new gig.