It’s interesting to watch how my hometown of Seattle has become an intense battleground in the local web wars. For starters, just look at these breaking news alerts:
Just minutes apart — as is very typical now — sent from three of the stations in town. One station, KING5.com, is where I work. Another station, KIROTV.com, is where my web-savvy friend Todd Mokhtari recently signed on as news director. And the third, KOMOTV.com, has hired Terry Heaton as their online consultant (KOMO’s parent company just bought PegasusNews). Last night, Terry threw one of his hallmark blogger meetups, and he writes, “We’ve a bunch of other cool things planned with bloggers in the Seattle community, and I’m looking forward to becoming a regular fixture there.” Hmmm, Heaton moving into my backyard? I invite the challenge, and as many of you know, I launched the Seattle blog aggregator Citizen Rain several months ago. I also have a bunch more cool stuff in the pipeline.
Oh, and I shouldn’t forget to mention Q13Fox.com and NWCN.com as well.
And TV sites are just a part of the local web wars. Our two newspapers, SeattleTimes.com and SeattlePI.com are both stepping up aggressively, and both sites are very solid. The PI hosts dozens upon dozens of “reader blogs,” and it just launched The Big Blog. Then there’s Crosscut.com, a relatively new regional news site that combines aggregation with some original reporting. There’s SeattleWeekly.com and TheStranger.com — the latter of which has one of the most popular blogs in town, Slog. And let’s not forget Seattlest and Seattle Metroblogging, two “national chain” blogs that have built solid audiences of their own.
So keep an eye on Seattle, folks. Like many other markets, it’s going to get interesting.