As much as I have issues with a lot of traditional media, it is possibly underrated how often "hyperlocal news" blogs can be very NIMBY. In the Central NJ area, I can easily think of 'Planet Princeton', 'The Montgomery News', and 'New Brunswick Today' as having a strong NIMBY bias...
this is an interesting (and very true) observation
A slight counterpoint is that it was the 'Greater Greater Washington' blog (@ggwash) that first turned me on to urbanism and YIMBYism in the late aughts... Unforunately, more recently, I have found that most local blogs are more NIMBY than YIMBY!
there's a grand canyon between urbanist blogs and "busybody" outlets
Local business are how they pay for the paper and local business in the US are NIMBYs for some reason I don't think it's a conspiracy or anything I just think the quirky human interest stories that also make them money usually end up being NIMBY
In Santa Monica, we have like 6 different competing local “newspapers” with one of them being explicitly YIMBY
Wow. Six 'newspapers' in a community of 90,000 people really makes you wonder about the 'death of local media'...
It's amazing what a city with a bunch of wealthy, retired, nosey people can accomplish
Yes. In Princeton we have the 'Town Topics', 'Princeton Packet', 'Princeton Echo', all still putting out print publications, in 2025, for a town of 30,000 people.
Is that not a newspaper ratio 50% higher than Santa Monica?
These outlets don't have any editorial board, and they often openly reflect the political leanings of their founder. As traditional local newspapers disappear, hyperlocal blogs are filling the information gap, but often with heavily biased NIMBY drek.
not to mention whatever goes on on platforms like nextdoor...
I'm not sure what the answer is here, but it would be great if somebody was actively sponsoring some local news sources who are putting out a more positive, YIMBY message. At 'Walkable Princeton dot com', we have been accused of being 'shills' for 13 years now, but we have never taken a nickel!
Localism is captured by hyper preferential busy bodies. It’s completely antithetical to democracy and representative government.
I think Greater Greater Washington in DC has been very influential in DC in the past 20 years, it's probably a good model!
My local billionaire, Matthew Prince of Cloudfare, bought the local paper, the Park Record (Park City, UT). Then he bought a really important piece of real estate on Main St and the paper has taken a pro-development, if not downright YIMBY, stance on building in our core
Hahaha!
The sprawl in Park City is horrible