What “engagement” means to Tracy Record and West Seattle Blog

Lately, I’ve been immersed In a sea of motivated, passionate, scrappy people making a go of it in community news, trying a bunch of techniques and wondering what will work. It was therefore a yank into another world — an equally hard-working but more grounded world — to spend an hour on the phone with Tracy Record, editor and co-publisher of West Seattle Blog. Don’t get me wrong — Tracy’s passion for her work drives her to work long and hard. But my sense from talking to her is that she’s been at this long enough that she knows what works and does it.

Tracy didn’t set out to create a community news site. She kept an anonymous neighborhood blog as a hobby, then found herself providing crucial information in the middle of a weather emergency. That event spurred more page views, news tips, word-of-mouth referrals and search traffic. “I wrote about things I saw and was wondering about, in a casual, informal way. They were things people ended up googling about,” Tracy says. And they were things no one else was writing about. So in 2007, she quit her job and dedicated her full-time self to WSB, along with her husband and partner, Patrick Sand, who handles sales, does a lot of community relations work and helps with news coverage.

Read the rest of this entry »