Bill Densmore of the Media Giraffe Project dropped me a note about this.

What motivates people to launch a local online news community — a “placeblog” and what are their challenges, their successes, the opportunities, vision and passion which accompany this work?

With all of the talk about community, it’s worthwhile to hear from practitioners. It’s on the Internet Archive if you’d like to download it. The video is licenced under Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States by the “The Media Giraffe Project’s
Journalism That Matters initiative”. More of the work from the Giraffe Project can be found at Journalism that Matters.