Monday, December 04, 2006

Website of the Day.

Visit the Mount Hope Monitor [West Bronx News Network].

Quixotic? It is downright Kafkaesque.

But then again, most people don't get Kafka.

New York Magazine: Five Reasons Why the Mount Hope ‘Monitor’ Is Our New Favorite Local Paper

1. It's the first community newspaper (okay, technically an online newspaper) to spring up in what is generally considered the worst neighborhood in the Bronx.

2. Its sole reporter and photographer, 26-year-old James Fergusson, is a Brit writing about garbage pickup and crime stats in a ponderously genteel style ("drugs remain … a lead weight around the proverbial neck of this 130,000 strong community").

The Times describes him as "wide-eyed by the bustle of the Bronx, New York, U.S.A." (Can you be wide-eyed by something?) Did we mention he coaches children's soccer?

3. Its current scoop is an interview with a cop boasting that his precinct is "far and away the [city's] leader" in executing search warrants (107 this year and counting).

4. An online-only publication, it's admirably quixotic inasmuch as most of its subjects and intended readers have no access to it: Says the Times, "no one knows for certain how many [local residents] own computers and have access to the Internet."

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