New Blog Offers Hyattsville Coverage

Hyattsville residents can add another website to their list of local news outlets. Over the Memorial Day weekend, The Hyattsville Wire began posting content on a Wordpress-based blog template.

The Hyattsville Wire is run by Congressional Quarterly Roll Call Features Editor and Adjunct Lecturer at Georgetown University Ryan Teague Beckwith and local public relations consultant Alison Beckwith.

As demonstrated by the credentials, the publication has some experience behind it. When promoted to features editor, Ryan's boss Editor Scott Montgomery praised his efforts to raise the profile of the fledgling Congress.org. 

"In his two years with CQ Roll Call, Ryan…turned our shapeless ideas for Congress.org into a clear editorial identity that has delivered very well on the expectations of its audience," wrote Montgomery in April 2011, according to FishbowlDC. 

In a post on her consultancy's website, Alison described The Hyattsville Wire as a "neighborhood source for information and community news about the city and the surrounding area with a focus on the Route 1 corridor."

The site went live less than 24 hours after Alison purchased the domain name, according to WHOIS registry data. 

In the three short days in which The Hyattsville Wire has gone live, it has been host to more than a dozen short and medium length posts. 

So far, there's been something of a historical bent to the posts. For instance, Ryan Beckwith writes of his surprise to learn that Charles Armentrout Way was not named after some obscure founding father, but rather named after Hyattsville's mayor from 1967 to 1975. Or another post about Hyattsville's radical Victorian Era single tax proposal.

There's also some eye-spy journalism going on, too. Many of the posts take the form of remembrances of things seen while walking, such as a half-painted house, curious rock formations, wind powered home signage , or this wacky tub lawn decoration.

The entry of The Hyattsville Wire onto the local media scene raises the number of Hyattsville-focused editorial publications to three. In addition to Hyattsville Patch and the Wire, the city is also served by The Hyattsville Life and Times, a non-profit monthly print tabloid mailed to city residents. 

This is also not the first time an independent community news blog has been tried in Hyattsville. Some local news mavens may remember Hyattsville Now, which briefly covered local happenings in 2010. Long since vanished from the internet, Hyattsville Now only lives on in Archive.org's Wayback Machine snapshots and a ghostly Facebook page.