By: Chuck Miller
What's Up in the Neighborhood

What’s Up in the Neighborhood, July 18 2020

So before I go through this recap of the wonderful bloggers and photographers and storytellers that are part of my blog’s blogroll, I want to explain to my new blog readers how this Saturday recap came into existence.

About seven years ago, when I was blogging for the Albany Times Union, the TU had this nasty habit of promoting their staff bloggers and barely giving a sniff of praise to the independent bloggers that also populated their blogfarm. There used to be a print blurb in the newspaper that focused on one blog or another, and on occasion if a community blogger wrote something worth reading, they’d get some showcasing in that section of the newspaper.

But that “Best of our Blogs” feature disappeared, and was replaced with a daily “Best of Kristi Gustafson Barlette’s Blog,” where it was all Kristi, all the time.  The community bloggers were ignored.  I wasn’t having that.  So if the TU wouldn’t promote the community bloggers, I would do it.  So I set aside one day from my blog – I called it “Ten for Thursday,” with a focus on ten community blog links.  Eventually my stand on supporting the community bloggers was recognized, and the TU put the “Best of our Blogs” feature back in the print edition … for a while.  Then it disappeared again.  Then my “Ten for Thursday” came back.

I left the TU in 2017, but I kept the blog feature going.  Now it was a “7 and 7” feature, where I would showcase seven community and independent (non-staff) blogs, along with seven blogs that were NOT part of the TU blogfarm.  I also moved the blog recap to Saturday, just because “7” and “Saturday” start with the same letter.  At one point, one of the community bloggers, David Kalish, repurposed (with my permission) my “7 and 7” feature for his own TU blog page.  Because, still, the TU didn’t give two beans about their community bloggers.  Not when they were suspending them for writing their truths about the #MeToo movement.  Ugh.

Later that year, the wonderful community website All Over Albany closed their doors.  They had a Wednesday “What’s Up in the Neighborhood” feature, and I did not want those wonderful blogs to lose an avenue of promotion.  Therefore, I changed my “7 and 7” feature to “What’s Up in the Neighborhood,” and imported many of the history and food and travel and lifestyle blogs from their blogroll to mine.  And over the years, I’ve added other blogs from here and there that I know you would enjoy visiting.

Oh, and the TU?  They moved their staff bloggers to a paywall setup, with the argument that “their work is too good to give away for free.”  I got news for you.  TU community bloggers like David Kalish and Rob Hoffman and Lawrence White still deserve your support.  Don’t let the pop-up advertisements and intrusive TU clickbait crapola deter you from visiting their pages.

Okay, enough about how this weekly feature evolved.

How about we enjoy the weekly feature?

BLOGS FOR TASTE

BLOGS FOR TRAVEL

BLOGS FOR THE IMAGE

BLOGS FOR HISTORY

BLOGS FOR LIFESTYLE

BLOGS FOR THE SCREEN

BLOGS FOR THE WORD

BLOGS FOR CONSCIENCE

Have a great weekend, everybody!