A Little Love from the Downtown News

Saturday, January 01, 2005, at 07:06AM

By Eric Richardson

The January 3rd issue of the Downtown News is now up, and one paragraph mentions this blog as one of Five Sites to Bookmark in 2005. Here's their blurb on my site:

Downtowning With Eric: Eric Richardson, a USC Communications major and a representative on the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council, is a fresh voice in a crowded field of urban bloggers. Richardson articulates views on the media, urban planning and local politics (blog.ericrichardson.com). But the bulk of his details focus simply on what it's like living Downtown.

Good stuff... I wrote a lot more in answer to the questions they asked me, so I'll stick that in the body in case you're interested.

I feel fine about quoting what I wrote, but I'll paraphrase the questions I was given press-release style:

On the history of the blog...

http://blog.ericrichardson.com/?sortdir=asc

That'll give you everything right from the beginning. Doh, I totally missed that the blog just had its six-year anniversary.

As you can see I started posting in late November, 1998. I had first put up a website sometime in 1996 or so (I don't have any real records from back then), but really the only content I had was whatever I felt like rantings about (the blog's been called rantings the whole time). I guess growing up I did sort of the same thing, putting together little newspapers called "The Voice" on a Commodore using Printshop or something like that. I used to have a shortwave radio and I'd listen to the news and then summarize that. Then occasionally I'd do actual reporting: In 1993, when congress was looking at reinstituting the Fairness Doctrine I remember I called a couple local (South Carolina, at this point) radio stations and interviewed people there for a story I wrote about it.

I need to look for some of those old things when I'm home over the holidays... I know my mom still has them. I should scan them and put 'em online.

One of the things I initially thought I would be doing on the web is taking "The Voice" online. That didn't really happen, but I guess the blog just sort of flowed out of it.

On what I think my blog adds to Downtown:

One of the things I noticed when I started looking for a place downtown was that I didn't find anyone writing about day to day life (with the exception of jim winstead). There may have been people blogging from downtown, but I didn't find them talking at all about their lives here. I don't think that I've had the opportunity to really do all that I'd like to help remedy this (I think downtown's ripe for a community site where people can do in a more structured logical format a lot of the Q&A type stuff that happens on newdowntown), but I've tried to at least just give a perspective of downtown from my life as a resident here. I'm just a kid living in a big city who likes old buildings and likes to explore. I want to reflect that in what I write.

Getting involved in DLANC has started me writing a lot more about the political and issues sides of downtown, but I think that's good to have too.