Yesterday was the official launching of the New York Times’ new hyperlocal blogging experiment called “new Local blogger Andy Newman said, “There’s a growing consensus in the media world that one way that newspapers can sustain themselves is to foster what is known as participatory journalism or citizen journalism. The Times wants to see if it can find a sustainable way to do this. Your backyard is the petri dish where we will try to grow it.” 

The first neighborhood to kickstart The Local is the Fort Greene/Clinton Hill area in Brooklyn, and the posts from the first day include a quotation-less story about a woman in a bakery and a video of adorable little children sledding. While cute, to anyone that is not directly involved, these are hardly anything worth linking about, and are actually kind of boring. But maybe that’s the point – the stories are so very hyperlocal that they truly are only interesting to the people living through them. We’ll have to see, however, if they are compelling enough for those area people to want to take part of the action themselves.

A Times official told Brownstoner that “Each site will be helmed by a writer/editor from the paper…but will draw upon contributors from the neighborhood as well as some free labor from the CUNY journalism program.” We know that CUNY has Jeff Jarvis, but there are certainly enough desperate, crying NYU journalism kids that would be clawing each other’s faces to do their share of slave work for the Times as well. Hire us?