IDG News Service — The morning I was scheduled to talk to the co-founder of a collection of popular neighborhood news blogs in Seattle, he had to put me off for almost an hour because he had been busy covering a fire.

In the early hours of that day, a fire had broken out just a few blocks from my house, almost completely burning four shops and damaging an adjacent community theater. Cory Bergman had already spent hours filming and writing about the massive fire and was trying to make his way to his regular job before talking to me.

It was a day in the life of Bergman, co-founder of Next Door Media. Next Door Media's five Seattle neighborhood blogs are at the forefront of a hyper local news boom in Seattle that has grown just as traditional media -- including the late Seattle Post Intelligencer -- has busted. The competitive local news scene here shows that there's an appetite for neighborhood news and that different models are emerging to deliver that news.

The nearby fire started at about 4 a.m. "We wake when we hear sirens," Bergman said. He and his wife, Kate, who co-founded the company and now works there full time, turned on the police scanner and heard something big was going on. They headed over to the site for a while until the writers for the blog covering the neighborhood with the fire turned up to take over.

This was big news, so the daily newspaper and TV stations also covered it. The daily paper posted a story online the morning of the fire and within three days followed up with a blog post about the theater and a short piece summarizing news from the PhinneyWood blog, with which it now has a partnership.

The PhinneyWood blog had 11 stories by three days later.

With pictures, words and videos, the stories detail clean-up efforts, offer facts about the police investigation, update readers on where the theater group is performing until the building is repaired, detail what happened to the rescued cats from the nearby cat adoption center and cover the "Greenwood Fire Wake," a get together open to anyone who wanted to talk about the fire (miraculously, no one human or feline was injured).

As if that coverage wasn't enough to keep me satisfied, I could also check out another new blog covering news in my neighborhood. The KOMO GreenwoodPhinney blog was started by Fisher, a large communications company that also operates 13 TV stations, including the local KOMO news, and eight radio stations. Three days after the fire, that blog had 10 stories, similarly filled with videos and photos, covering the fire and its aftermath.

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