Dan Trittschuh
	“I can’t tell you the last time I picked up the Dispatch”: Walker Evans runs Columbus Underground as a for-profit business

A civic divide is growing in Columbus. For the past decade or so, ordinary people have become less inclined to call their political representatives or drive all the way down to City Hall to personally lobby government officials.

But a community of tech-savvy, affluent white kids say they’re picking up the slack. Columbus’s bloggers believe they’re furthering democracy, improving the economy and advancing humanity—all without missing Grey’s Anatomy.

Ranked as the No. 8 most active blogging community in the nation, an estimated 10 percent of Columbus inhabitants regularly pounded the keyboard in 2007, offering up online commentary themselves or consuming somebody else’s, according to Nielson Media Research.

If you’re among the remaining 90 percent, all this probably seems like a colossal waste of time.

In fact, according to the bloggers themselves, they’re saving the city.

“The need for two-way or conversational media is more vital than ever,” said Jeff Johnson of the Urban Infill blog.

Johnson compared his medium with what he called the “doomsday” style of the mainstream media. Traditional outlets simply report troublesome news, he said. Bloggers, on the other hand, “have a propensity for uncovering solutions,” he said.

When bloggers get together, “We create ideas. We create a vibration that this city is thirsting for.”

Walker Evans, the longest-running and best-read Columbus blogger, described his vocation in similarly grandiose terms.

“I don’t feel like I’m the only one who is feeling the effects of a city-wide awareness,” he said.

Six and half years earlier, long before online diaries were trendy, Evans began ColumbusUnderground.com as a mere side project. Nowadays, the community message board hauls in about 200,000 visitors a month. His personal companion blog, an offshoot of CU called the Walker Evans Effect, draws in a couple hundred visitors a day. Web traffic is high enough that, unlike other local bloggers, Evans is able to run Columbus Underground as a for-profit business.

Walker is one of a growing segment in Columbus that moves much, much faster than you. Unsatisfied with newspapers, radio and television news broadcasts that merely deliver information, bloggers want their news with a little room for personal commentary. And they want it now.

“I can’t tell you the last time I picked up the Dispatch,” said Evans. “I mean, they are still relevant, and they serve a purpose, and I don’t see them going away anytime soon. But you can really only get that breakneck speed of interactivity online.”

The time-honored tradition of reading an article, penning a letter to the editor and waiting for a newspaper to print the dang thing is an alien one to online types.

“It’s all so slow,” Evans said in a blog post written last month. A back-and-forth exchange between readers may take a week, or it might even take two weeks, Evans said. And by that time, “everyone has already moved on.”

Indeed, two weeks could be a death sentence for struggling local businesses that are depending on bloggers such as Ashley Routson, who calls herself the Columbus Beer Wench.

A knowledge planner for Young Isaac Inc. branding and marketing company, Routson critiques local watering holes on her beer blog, and offers commentary “on issues I’m really opinionated about,” on her personal blog, Hazy Stars.

“It’s not like everyone is holding these diaries and bitching about things,” Routson said. “They’re actually speaking their opinion and getting heard.”

The healthy number of Columbus food blogs “has a huge influence on the general public, especially when it comes to restaurant recommendations,” said Routson, who boasts between 40 and 90 readers per day.

“This is a crucial time to generate local awareness because we’re in a recession, and local businesses are at risk of dying.”

Snicker if you will at these laptop crusaders and their visions of grandeur. But they’re not the only ones taking themselves seriously.

WOSU is organizing monthly blogger meetings called Columbus Social Media Café. Billed as the group who will “make Columbus better,” some 40 or 50 bloggers, tapped by Walker himself, have been engaging in forced social interaction since November with the goals of educating, organizing and engaging Columbus’s diverse population.

You might think WOSU is simply humoring Walker and his ilk. But to hear the station’s director of communications tell it, it sounds more like WOSU is hoping some of the bloggers’ magic will somehow rub off on them.

“We want to remain relevant in the community,” WOSU spokeswoman Susan Meyer said no less than three times. “Media is changing. We have to deal with the fact that someday, people aren’t going to tune in to PBS at 8 o’clock to watch Nature.”

“Social media really is—it probably is—the future. We know we have to be there.”

It was this desperation for survival that probably kept Meyer focused through the half-hour long presentation by a local photo blogger calling herself Wonder Wombat at last week’s Café meeting.

Projecting a photo of herself peeking out of a clothes dryer, Wombat explained an effort called Project 365 in which participants seek to post one photo of themselves every day for a full year. In addition to admiring their own collection, photo bloggers can rate their friends’ pictures, and then share it all through online social networks. Users can subscribe to any of these posts, making it entirely plausible to see the photo of your buddy wearing a T-shirt that says “I taught your boyfriend that thing you like,” the instant that it’s taken.

“These are the kind of people who will make Columbus great as we move forward,” said Mike Brown, spokesman for Mayor Mike Coleman.

To be fair, Brown wasn’t specifically referring to Wonder Wombat or her photography project. Still, he spoke reverently about her fellow bloggers.

“This audience is important to the mayor, and he is paying attention,” he said.

Although “I’ve never heard the mayor say ‘I read this on a blog,’” Brown said, he himself reads Columbus Underground and arguably the second-most popular online news aggregate, Columbus RetroMetro, every day. Other popular local blogs, including columbusING and Xing Columbus, a transportation blog, are “hit or miss,” he said.

Nevertheless, the mayor is eager to capture the hearts and minds of the demographic that lean toward blogging, Brown said.

“Many of them are young, creative professionals. He loves the energy.”

One reason Coleman might love the energy is that bloggers have embraced his pet proposal: streetcars. The online community has been more supportive than the public at large for the mayor’s plan, which is now stalled, to run a streetcar line between Downtown and campus.

Many bloggers have put “My blog supports Columbus Streetcars” icons on their websites. RetroMetro’s Paul Bonneville has launched Columbus-streetcars.com, the “unofficial citizen support site for the Columbus Streetcars.”

Although the jury remains out on that effort, bloggers can already claim victory on other fronts.

Routson and The270 blogger Alvin Borromeo were credited for landing Startup Weekend, a 54-hour event designed to create an internet company from concept to launch. Both bloggers scared up 347 online votes, enough to bring the event to Columbus on the weekend of July 18-20. TechColumbus, a local business incubator, will host.

“I’ve never seen a city rise so fast in a mere matter of hours,” said StartUp Weekend’s Raymond Angel on the company’s website. “The obvious drive and talent of those in the area means that this weekend will most certainly be a successful one.”

“I think it’s a testament to what local bloggers can do,” Rouston said.

Evans said Columbus Underground was the birthplace of the efforts to rebrand Columbus as The Indie Arts Capital of the World. He also said the site’s message board conversations saved Via Colori, the street painting festival, from cancellation.

This sense of accomplishment can work to the benefit of Columbus on a global level, too, bloggers say.

“We’re a solid Midwestern city,” said Johnson. “We’re not boisterous, we don’t brag, we’re very humble, and sometimes that’s to our own detriment. We need to speak up.”

Whatever else you say about the bloggers, they’re doing their part to shed Columbus of its unhelpful humility.

Johnson said he and his fellow bloggers are engaged in no less than “sharing the ideas that are making Columbus one of the best places to live, work and raise a family.”

“It’s a richness,” Johnson added, “that goes beyond what money can buy.”